How Assumption Univ Escaped ImageNow to Modernize Document Management

When Jason Cahoon became CIO of Assumption University, a Catholic liberal arts college of about 2,000 students in Massachusetts, he found few fans for the school’s document management system, ImageNow.

Years of data lived in ImageNow. But the tool dictated how people worked, not the other way around.

"We were conforming our processes to meet what this tool could do," Jason explained. When a department asked for a new feature, his team had to evaluate what the software allowed, then work backward.

A Manual, Email-Heavy Reality

For University Registrar and FERPA officer Heather Pecoraro, that meant approvals bounced around by email and students scanned in their own documents. There was no workflow. Searching inboxes for student records was, in her words, "a nightmare," and she wasn't confident about data security.

To make matters worse, her office had also inherited a vault of paper files, including decades-old checks with bank routing numbers.

Web developer Christopher Murray, who has been at Assumption for 14 years, could manage accounts and cabinets but had no ImageNow workflow expertise. "We were really kind of stuck," he said.

The Decision

Jason polled his network of CIOs about what they used. The answers: couldn't recommend their current tool, were looking to move to Etrieve, the document management and process automation platform from Softdocs, or were already using Etrieve.

Because Assumption could not put data at risk, they trusted Softdocs' track record of ImageNow migrations.

A Migration that “Never Happens"

The team met with each office and walked through every document type, deciding whether to keep it, rename it, or retire it. The migration itself was quiet. After a few weeks of silence, Softdocs reported that it was done. "I thought... that never happens," Christopher said.

What Changed With Etrieve From Softdocs

• Workflows that fit the campus. A course withdrawal now goes from the registrar's website into a queue, gets routed to the right people, and, if there are no objections after 24 hours, is processed and filed to the student record automatically.
• Pre-populated forms. Integration with Colleague fills in a student's name, email, and ID, so staff no longer guess which John Smith submitted a form.
• Visibility for students. Forms don't vanish. Students and staff can see where each one sits and where the bottleneck is.
• Automatic retention. Retention had been manual and done "when there's time." Now document types can be set to expire on schedule.
• Audit-ready history. Every view, print, and annotation is logged, which helps when auditors arrive.
• Simple email import. Staff forward a document with two lines, a student ID and a document type, and it files itself.