What's in Store for Archiving?

By Emtex Ltd.

Companies typically archive business documents based on how they plan to use the documents after they have been retrieved. The business will make a choice between archiving just information or the actual document. Either way, the increasingly complex undertaking of enterprise message management demands sophisticated solutions including the development of a strategic archival management system.

Archiving Document Data Is Common but Problematic
Large host-based systems are often unable to view proprietary output formats effectively. This has driven a trend to archive document information purely as data from the business application rather than the originating printable output.

In situations where viewing was possible through an architecture such as IBM's AFPDS, it often proved to be a limited capability since there was a lack of viewing stations capable of viewing documents with graphical content.

The dilemma this posed for organisations in the financial sector was that simply archiving the document information was insufficient proof of the originating document. Therefore, the need to archive the originating document applications and associated document resources (logos, signatures, forms, etc.), as well as the data, became necessary.

Archival of Original Documents Meets Legal Requirements
Documents are initially archived for a period of time in such a way that they can be quickly and effectively retrieved. Simultaneously or subsequently, the same documents migrate to a more permanent archival medium. Permanent archiving creates concerns for those involved in decisions governing legal archival. The use of microfilm or microfiche systems is being abandoned in business and there is a shift from using masters and duplicates to simply using COM recorder technology for masters only. Distributed retrieval systems are now used to view or generate document duplicates.

Archiving of Original Documents
As viewing capabilities for archival systems has improved, and as graphics-capable PC's have become more available to most organisations, a dramatic shift in the use of up to-date retrieval systems is taking place. However, the availability of hardware and viewing software has raised even more concerns on how best to archive customer information.

Customer Relationship Archiving
The overall objective of archiving in the past has been to aid customer service by making customer information, needed for dealing with customers, more accessible, as well as to help support general business workflow.
Nevertheless, companies continue to have difficulty in defining clear goals and strategies for governing document archival and retrieval. What has become important, however, is the concept of the "customer folder" or customer relationship-based systems
Both workflow and imaging systems, as part of the general business workflow, do archive scanned inbound customer documents, as well as customer-related application data, and sometimes a version of the outbound customer document.

High-Volume, High-Speed Production
In cases where high~speed document production is involved, often as a result of these workflow and imaging systems handling ever-increasing numbers of customers and related documents, it has become important to integrate the host based documents with those already generated locally.

An Archival Delivery Management System
Complex production data streams and conflicting business issues surrounding archival, both those that are being led by outbound customer systems and workflow-based customer systems, demand an effective archive delivery solution. The ability to offer an archive delivery management system that uses an intelligent transform process can address and bridge the needs of all these document-related archival issues.

Any-To-Any Transformation
Where systems already use an archival format, such as Adobe PDF or IBM AFPDS, then an archive delivery management system can simply, and at full production speeds, deliver a seamless transform to the required output format to archival systems as well as microfiche production systems.

In-Built Indexing
An archive delivery management system that transforms through rendering to an intelligent format can also provide document content-sensitive processing, such as indexing or routing, which would be performed automatically. This enables the re-use of legacy document applications with no need to change host applications.

Intelligent Resource Management
An archive delivery management system requires integrated document resource management so that when transformation into the output format has been completed, all the resources are in-line with the documents. This removes the need to provide multiple libraries of native document resources throughout an organisation's server population simply to retrieve and view an archived document.

Conclusion
The need to leverage the information contained on document output created from both existing and legacy business applications is of paramount importance. An archival delivery management system can be stand-alone or form part of the functionality of an enterprise print management system. The delivery of documents into corporate archival systems must be considered as part of an overall component in a corporate document strategy.