Oregon department saves time with document management
The State of Oregon's Employment Department has nearly 1,300 employees in 47 field offices throughout the state. They are among the 100,000 visitors during April and May who accessed unemployment insurance forms, job listings, and other information from the government agency's Web site, which has seen 6 million hits so far this year. It used to take up to thirty days to publish information ranging from service manuals to Unemployment Insurance forms to the agency's intranet; using IntraNet Solutions' Intra.doc Web-based document management system, it now takes thirty minutes.
"Our previous procedures involved an increasing workload of document preparation for the Webmaster," said Bill Rickman, the Internet Administrator/Webmaster for the Oregon Employment Department. Employees would E-mail word documents to the Webmaster, who would convert them to Adobe Acrobat PDF files and build HTML pages; the process took weeks and months to complete. Users now submit documents directly into a central repository, and the contents of the document are automatically indexed and published to the agency's intranet. Contributors can update and maintain revisions of their own documents, instead of "waiting for the Webmaster to process and add their material to the intranet."
The system saves time "because staff get what they want, when they want it, and the information is current," added Rickman. For example, the agency's tax division recently published a field procedures manual online using the Intra.doc system in half an hour, after "several months" of exchanging files with the Webmaster.
Future plans call for the online addition of job listings, employer seminars, news releases, brochures and program information, applications for Unemployment Insurance (UI), Employment Service, and Alien Labor Certification, and UI reporting for geographical areas.
The software runs on a Windows NT 4.0 server with Microsoft Internet Information Server 3.0, using Windows 3.11, Netscape 3.0, and Adobe Acrobat Reader