Large-scale enterprise content management deployments are often some of the organizations' biggest investments. Large enterprises create a tremendous amount of content, from documents to videos to data. However, the sheer amount of information often dwarfs the agency’s ability to keep pace.
Over the last three decades, ECM systems such as Laserfiche have served the market fulfilling the fundamental proposition that content produced by an organization has business, compliance, or legal value. For IT, compliance, and legal departments alike, content can help drive transformation and the practice of managing this content ultimately needs to be enterprise-wide, no matter what system it lies in.
Selecting the right Laserfiche partner will depend on a number of considerations including, tech expertise, budget, integration, migration and development skills, systems, security, and data security requirements. Conceivably the most important decision is your solution provider’s knowledge of the overall ECM landscape and understanding of your specific market. We’ve covered this topic in the past, here. Since the stakes of picking the right partner (WFH, cloud, integrations, migrations, etc.) have risen, we thought we’d provide a few more:
Can you support the three delivery models: Cloud, On-Premises, and Hybrid?
While most ECM systems have a cloud-based offering, many industries that have strong compliance mandates are not willing or able to host sensitive content in a public cloud. In these instances, the organization may either require hosting on-prem or split into a hybrid implementation. Your service provider will need to have skills in all three areas. Also-be sure to check the service level agreement to be sure your Laserfiche partner can enforce its guarantees.
How easily can you integrate Laserfiche with other line-of-business systems?
Enterprise applications no longer operate in a vacuum. Laserfiche often plays the role of integrative middleware in an enterprise. Interestingly, one could argue that the value of Laserfiche increases, with each integration and customization as applications and repositories, can interact with it. For instance for loan processing, Laserfiche would need to capture content such as applications, inspections, and other forms from a number of systems. Accordingly, the Laserfiche partner you select needs to have in-depth experience with SDKs and an understanding of the various types of APIs employed. Plus you’ll need a team with solid project management skills to configure and integrate diverse systems. Be sure to get client references for integrations and ask to speak with both IT and the business side.
Well, I hope these questions were helpful. We’ve had enough interest in partner evaluation methods that we’ll keep writing about it. Stay tuned!
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