Many of our customers are now being driven by Sarbanes-Oxley regulations as well as a variety of other internal and external guidelines to archive their documents, memos, slide presentations, emails and even Instant Messages. With these documents stored safely away, a company can provide regulators and customers with proof of what was communicated to their customers.
For example, if a financial planner used a Powerpoint presentation to recommend a safely diversified stock portfolio to a client but the client remembers that he was told simply to buy Vonage, that’s an opportunity for a lawsuit. Since lawsuits can take years to come to court, it is imperative that companies store their marketing and sales literature for long periods of time, and that when the time comes to present the material, there’s an application that can read it. Additionally if it relates to a court battle or some other hotly disputed issue, it is important to be able to prove that the document was not altered while stored.
We all know, however, that companies sometimes generate new versions of their applications that become incompatible with old documents and can’t be read. (Did you know that today NASA can’t decipher the magnetic tapes on which the plans for the Saturn moon rocket are stored? There are no tape drives that read those tapes and no software that will decipher the data if you could read it.) Some of the customers who come to us for archiving requirements need to be able to guarantee they can read archived documents for 100 years or more.
Though it might seem reasonable to presume you’ll archive the application that created the document along it, that’s not a sure thing. Applications depend on operating systems and hardware architecture. Will there be an Intel Pentium type chip 50 years from now that will support today’s applications? Will there be an OS that runs on those future chips that will run that application? The current thinking is that for proper archiving, you will need to convert all your documents to a standard format that has greater likelihood or surviving the test of time.
Though there are no fully accepted standards for document archiving, there are several strong possibilities. TIFF is the strongest contender because it has been around the longest time, no vendor considers it their format, and it is hard to edit. A new variant of PDF intended for archival use is another contender, but because Adobe owns this format, many companies remain concerned.
So if you want to archive today, what’s the best bet? We think it’s to use powerful conversion programs that can read and convert your PDF documents, Word documents, HTML pages, emails, Spreadsheets, Powerpoints, MO:DCA docs, CAD drawings and JPEGs to TIFF. Then in the future, one TIFF reader will allow you to deal with all your archived material. Just make sure that the conversion software is accurate and comprehensive enough to deal with all your archiving needs.
I’m sure many of you have alternate or differing opinions. Be sure to leave your comments here.
-Simon
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