Second Opinions

A College Grapples with 'Judicial' Records

A mid-Atlantic private college asks: Our Student Life Office deals with judicial issues (among other, more happy aspects of student life) and we need the capacity to optically archive and electronically retrieve physical documents.

We have a student body of 3000 with modest plans for expansion. While these are not high numbers, our quality of service could be greatly enhanced through a technology upgrade. Our plan is to obtain scanning, archiving and retrieval capacities, and then migrate to a system with OCR, a searchable database, workflow management at the end of two years. Our long-term goal: migration to an all- electronic document system.

An upgradable, turnkey system would be ideal, as the system will be operated by office professionals, not I.T. staff.

We run Win95, using Novell-delivered applications and GroupWise. We plan to upgrade to Win2000/NT and Office 2000. The school's system runs on Colleague, which will be kept.