The Shelby county commission was spending a tremendous amount of time handling requests to provide historical information about the business that the commission had addressed. The information dated back as far as 15 years and it was a completely manual process to find the data requested by the public. The information was contained in files and stored as Agendas, Minute Meetings and Resolutions. This provides the historical record of when an item was planned to be addressed, when the item was handled by the commission and what the resolution was that came about from the meeting.
CIMSinc customized a Document Management application to act as a repository for this information. All of the documents were then captured and indexed according to the key words/fields that would make it easy to identify, by the users of the system. As a front end to this database CIMSinc developed a WEB interface, so that all of the information could be made available and searchable by the public and any county staff. This system is also used internally by the different departments in the commission to handle requests that cannot be processed through the WEB.
Since all of the historical information is in printed form and contains signatures, CIMS inc developed the process to scan in all of the agendas, minutes and resolutions from the county commission meetings. All of these documents were then indexed and passed into the Document Management database.
Fifteen years of information is now online and accessible through the web. This application is used by the public and is available for use by the staff of the county commission. This application has empowered the public to find the information they need to conduct business and since the staff at the county commission no longer has to manually search through documents to satisfy these requests, it has freed them up to handle other pressing business.
CIMSinc used the Ascent Capture software from Kofax to handle the scanning and indexing of all the historical documents. The OnBase Document Management system from Hyland Software was used as the core repository database and is used to mange all of the data once it is entered into the system. The custom WEB front end, that gives the public access to all of the information, was developed by CIMSinc using .ASP technology.