News & Resources

1st Quarter 2007

Technology Watch
Improving Your Productivity
Brian Osgood, Senior VP of Technology

While proper office workflows and a well-trained staff are two keys to a productive recording office, records management systems provide a third cornerstone of efficiency and cost savings. Several key components of a records management system can help maximize productivity and save money for your recording office.

Support for automated indexing is an important consideration for today's records management system. All automated indexing modules use OCR, or optical character recognition, to enable a records management system to "read" a scanned document and create a computerized, text-based version of the document. The system can then apply search rules to the OCR data to find pertinent indexing information, such as consideration amounts, document dates, grantor/grantee names, and legal descriptions. The indexing module can then assist in the indexing process or even complete some of the indexing steps automatically, resulting in major indexing cost savings.

Another important consideration for a records management system is support for open source software. Open source, a standard denoting applications that are available to be modified and developed by a large programming community, is extremely powerful and much less expensive than platforms like Microsoft Windows and databases like Oracle and SQL Server. If you are interested in saving money without sacrificing power, look for a vendor that makes open source applications like Linux and MySQL available with its records management systems.

Interconnected County offices are an important way to keep costs low and allow departments to share information. A crucial technology to look for in a records management system is the ability to interface with other County computer systems. With today's technology standardizations, County offices with different systems should be able to communicate with each other seamlessly. Web services that use application programming interfaces (API) to transmit standardized XML data between the two or more systems are the preferred mode of communication and should be supported by a vendor with current coding practices.

RecordFusion is proud to offer all of these leading-edge technologies to our County partners. Our proprietary OCR/ICR module comes standard with our CountyFusion records management system, and we include numerous ways to use OCR data to improve indexing efficiency. Second, we can quickly develop Web services to enable your office to communicate with other County departments; data in CountyFusion can easily be exported to other County systems. Last, we built CountyFusion from the ground up to support open source applications. While we can run Windows and Oracle perfectly well, we recommend using Linux and MySQL with CountyFusion. Why pay extra when you don't have to?

With RecordFusion, our tools will maximize your productivity and keep your costs low. We look forward to winning your business.