Arena Enables the Paperless Office

Monday, June 16, 2008 5:47 PM by nairdo

I dig the latest version of Arena ChMS and the new Document Types feature is great.  In a nutshell it allows you to attach documents (pdf, images, .doc, etc.) to a person, tag or group.  It's the feature that enables you to move to a paperless office and it's super easy to setup.

Last click to watch demoweek a super admin, Kim came to me and said something like, 'I want to throw out this huge book of completed paper forms before I drop it on my foot and break my toe.'  I said "let's do it."  We quickly setup a new Document Type and a Person Attribute to hold the document. Now she just scans the document, attaches it to the person's record and then shreds the original.

In Kim's case she was maintaining the paper copies of our driving insurance form -- some paperwork that our insurance company gives us when someone has permission to drive the church vans.  The document is slightly sensitive so we also locked it down so that only few people have access to edit or view it.

We've lined up several more documents we'll be moving to Arena including our:

  • 4 page application to serve (currently a fillable PDF)click to watch
  • applicant background check (pdf)
  • applicant's reference response documents (typically emailed .doc or paper)
  • and several other paper forms people are physically signing

With Arena you can literally set these up in just a few minutes.  Watch this video to see how it is done.

Comments

  1. Steve Pruitt Says:
    Nick, great ideas and I love the videos. How about posting these videos in the community? They may help others as well. Thanks for producing these and all you do for Arena. Steve
  2. Jeremy Hoff Says:
    Nick, thanks. Nice videos! Here's an idea - an inline scanner (i.e. TWAIN) interface to capture PDF/JPEG/etc. directly into a Document field in Arena.
  3. Austin Spooner Says:
    Nick- what are you guys using for document scanners?
  4. nairdo Says:

    We're using an older Canon 7200 with their "eCopy" but Phil thinks all their new models have eCopy built in.  Some admins (who handle sensitive documents) also have a small Dell Photo 966 in their offices.

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