Long Beach, CA (Laserfiche)—March 15, 2010—Laserfiche today announced its support for Sunshine Week (March 14-20), a national initiative to spark dialogue on the importance of open government and freedom of information. Led by the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), one of the goals of Sunshine Week is to increase online access to public information.

According to Andy Alexander, ombudsman for the Washington Post and co-chair of ASNE’s Freedom of Information committee, “ASNE believes that online citizen access to government records is the next battleground in the fight for public information. Greater online access to public information will build credibility in government institutions and will also make them more efficient by reducing the effort it takes to process citizens’ freedom of information requests.”

Many local, county and state governments have leveraged Laserfiche WebLink to provide citizens with a secure Web portal to a variety of public records. For example, Elkhart County, IN, recently integrated WebLink with ESRI ArcGIS to build “What’s in My Back Yard” (WIMBY), a public-facing tool that provides information on community threats such as sexual offenders’ residences and former meth lab sites.

John Hulewicz, environmental health supervisor in the Elkhart County health department, explained that the long-term goal of WIMBY is to provide citizens with easy access to publicly-available information on the health and quality of life factors that affect the communities in which they live. “Through WIMBY, Laserfiche provides our citizens with access to the information they need to make a difference in the community,” Hulewicz said.

“Laserfiche is pleased to join the ASNE in advocating for greater online access to public information,” said Nien-Ling Wacker, Laserfiche president and CEO. “Laserfiche customers like Elkhart County are leading the way to government transparency, and we will continue to support them in every way we can.”

Click here for more information about Laserfiche solutions for federal, state and local governments.

Laserfiche creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 28,000 organizations worldwide—including thousands of federal, state and local government agencies—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche® product suite is built upon Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.