There are whole industries rising today dedicated to the premise that when you upgrade your ECM system, you must also convert all your corporate documents, if stored in legacy formats, to a new, more modern format. These recommendations are made partially because the old format may not be readable or can’t be manipulated by your new ECM system and partially because you are told the new document formats are better.
In principle, that makes sense. All of us worry about obsolescence. Additionally many of the legacy formats were
modified versions of TIFF or IBM’s ImagePlus (MO:DCA and AFP) format that could
not be opened by standard software. So
when your new vendor recommends you convert to the current standards of
unmodified TIFF and PDF, it’s because they are pretty much universally accepted
and trusted. If you had to take bets on
what would survive the next 50 to 100 years, other than .txt files, TIFF and
PDF would head the list.
So what’s the catch? None,
if your document repository is small. But if you have terabytes of stored data, like many companies do today,
it’s not a simple matter. For those
situations, the process is most likely expensive, time consuming and disruptive
to your business processes. And for
many companies, the reason those documents are in the repository is because
they’re not needed often or at all. So
how much sense does it make to spend large sums of money to analyze, convert,
verify and store data that may never be needed again.
Is there another way? Sure. Get a system that can read
your archived data directly. The nice thing about software systems is that they
don’t wear out. The hardware may break but the software will continue to run as
before. So, if the system can read your legacy data now, it will do so forever
(or at least until that vendor discontinues support and you can’t get hardware
with that OS any longer). You gain
several advantages:
a) You
save on conversion costs
b) You
save the time and effort – this translates to big savings on top of the
conversion cost savings. Some companies
that migrate large amounts of data have 10 year planning horizons.
c) You
can utilize your old system, even after migration, to access that data. There are many times that functions from the
old systems aren’t carried over to the new. Significant economies could be achieved through continued use of the old
system if some members of your staff don’t require the new system’s features.
d) Migration
to the new system is far easier and quicker if you don’t have to wait on data
conversion
e) You’re
not as dependent on the new vendor. Worst case, you can fall back to the old system because the data is
still accessible and usable.
Snowbound is in the enviable position of providing products
to both sides of the fence here. We read
the old stuff or we can convert it to the new. Take your pick.
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