PDF increasingly format of choice for document archiving 18 January, 2009 By Vanessa Ho

PromoPipeline Exclusive Channel Promotions Find Out How You Can Make Money Today! ENROLL FREE! >> Factory Direct Should Not be Cheaper William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Cloud Ecosystem II: A Candid Conversation with Oracle Beth Vanni - Amazon Consulting Cloud Ecosystem: A Candid Conversation with Rackspace Hosting Beth Vanni - Amazon Consulting Channel Manager Compensation William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Financial Expertise William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels

According to Betsy Fanning, director of standards at AIIM, the rapid acceptance of the PDF standard is partly due to the development of PDF/A as a dedicated archive format. PDF/A files need to be entirely self-contained, with no links to external fonts or hyperlinks. For scanned images, PDF provides a wrapper for a number of alternative compressed formats.

"PDF/A became an ISO standard in 2005, and we have seen a further boost this past year with the release of PDF itself as an open ISO standard," stated Fanning. "PDF/A is a good option for archiving electronic documents and is far better than archiving native files from any specific application."

She added that PDF is also attractive because it is a format that can be read on virtually any operating system and there are a number of free tools available to create and read PDFs. A quick search on the Internet revealed that there are about one billion documents on the web that contain the .PDF extension.

"That is why in the next five years, PDF will become the predominate long-term storage format for documents," said Fanning. "We are working more in an electronic document environment with more documents digitally born that need to be managed in a digital format."

Not surprisingly, the AIIM research also noted that paper remained king when it came to long-term storage, with 100 per cent of organizations using paper for archiving of documents. But when asked to predict the situation in five years time, use of paper for long-term storage dropped to 77 per cent, whereas PDF rose to 93 per cent.

Fanning added that paper is still a popular format for archiving because it is familiar to people and convenient.

"A drawback to electronic documents is you need something to view it like a computer, a monitor, a network and storage," she observed.

However, electronic documents are becoming more preferable especially if companies look at the cost of maintaining documents in a paper format such as the cost of locating a document for discovery purposes, observed Fanning.

The new AIIM Market IQ report, entitled "Content Creation and Delivery - The On-Ramps and Off-Ramps of ECM," interviewed 198 individual AIIM members and also noted that storage on microfilm or fiche is still used by 43 per cent of organizations, as it is still viewed as a reliable format but this is expected to drop to 28 per cent over the next five years. At the other end of the media spectrum, 34 per cent of organizations are archiving digital video, rising to a projected 47 per cent in five years. Digital audio archiving will rise from 30 per cent to 37 per cent.

"Motion and audio are central parts of a multimedia document and organizations will be creating more multimedia documents as we move forward," noted Fanning.

She added the use of these within business communications and business in general is being driven by their use on the Internet. The use of these is increasing which means that organizations will need to determine how to archive them but preserving rich media documents (documents containing audio and video) is a complex concept.