What To Do with Those Legacy Documents and Images?

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.