AIIM Golden Gate Chapter Headlines

January 2006 - 1

Welcome Happy New Year from the Golden Gate Chapter!

Welcome to this issue of Headlines – a quarterly newsletter for AIIM Golden Gate Chapter members.

This issue of Headlines is devoted to the subject of document conversion – whether the documents are film, paper, or electronic such as MS Word. As many of you already know, document conversion can be a time and resource intensive project and without proper planning things can quickly go awry.

Is seems that document imaging and document management is being reconsidered by many companies that may have initially thought it too expensive or not yet capable of satisfying their needs. And there is also an increase in the number of companies that are trying to satisfy compliance regulations and the need for records management.

When thinking about implementing a document management system, think about all the file cabinets, boxes, and warehouses full of paper and filmed documents; all of the electronic documents stored on personal drives, shared drives, networked drives, and all of the various media now used to store our files. The question is: What do I convert and how do I do that?

This issue is designed to get you thinking about the conversion process and maybe even answer some questions - but it only a starting place. Also, we are sponsoring a presentation on January 25, see Calendar below, about document conversion strategies and technologies, which may help you to plan your conversion project.

Document Conversion Strategies

Introduction One of the most important considerations for an enterprise content management (ECM) project is whether to convert existing documents or not. If we consider a hypothetical situation in which an ECM system (paper files and electronic files) goes live on a Monday morning, how will the business users of the system use the system?

There are many choices that can be made, but below are the most common options when considering a backfile conversion project:

1. Convert and pre-load all documents in the back file into the system prior to going live.

2. Convert only the most recent “documents” that are being used (convert all “live” documents up to 1 year) and then convert documents only as they are requested. All other existing documents remain in their original format, unless requested.

3. Don’t convert anything and bring into the system only new items beginning on a “day forward” basis. Convert any documents requested “on-demand.”

4. Some variation of the above: convert in-house documents up to 6 months old for the initial system release and outsource the remaining documents.

Considerations: Determining which files to convert is an exercise in their usage and how much money is allocated to the project. If budget and time are not a consideration, converting everything may be the way to go. Many companies, however, realize that converting everything is not feasible because some documents are seldom accessed or may be nearing the end of their retention period. It may not make financial sense to convert a series of documents only to delete them within a year. Permanent retention documents should be converted as they may be part of the business continuity plan.

It is important to have the new document management system loaded with documents when it becomes operational. A good conversion strategy will ensure that the needed documents are available.

As part of the document conversion project, consider whether to implement records management procedures and if so, additional indexing information may be required to match the documents with your file or retention plan. If records management is the principal reason for undertaking this project, make sure it is adequately described in your RFP or RFQ.

Table of Contents Welcome ........................................................................1 Document Conversion Strategies ..................................1 Document Conversion Formats ......................................3 The Question...................................................................4 Did You Know?..............................................................4 GG Chapter News ..........................................................4 Committees.....................................................................4 Calendar..........................................................................5

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Issues to Consider Not only do you have to consider one of the options above, but one of the following must be decided upon – if you are going to do a conversion:

1. Do the conversion in-house with your own system and people resources.

2. Hire an outsourcing company to do the backfile conversion for you. If so, will the conversion be done on your premises or be done off-site?

3. Some combination of the two above.

Given the above decisions to be made – whether to convert and how to convert – you will also need to consider the following before any work can be done:

1. How to properly name and index the documents being converted.

2. Whether to OCR (optical character recognition) image files instead of indexing them or in addition to indexing them.

3. If the conversion is subcontracted, how to get the data to the subcontractor?

4. If the conversion is subcontracted, how to get the electronic data back to your company and loaded onto your new system ?

5. Whether the conversion is subcontracted or not, what to do with the paper and/or film files after they have been scanned?

And not to let you off too easily, you may also consider the following:

1. If subcontracting, how many of the “original” paper or film documents do you release to the vendor? Think disaster recovery here.

2. What happens when you need one of the documents that is being converted? How do you get it back and how quickly? Make sure you cover all the possible contingencies in your contract if you use a conversion company.

3. Some companies will scan your documents locally but send the digitized image off-shore for indexing, QC, and other operations. This may or may not be a consideration to review with your management.

Make sure you understand that an ECM conversion project may involve film (roll film, microfiche, or aperture cards), paper documents, electronic documents (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, CAD system drawings, etc.), as well as converting existing document images from one system/format to another system/format.

While film is somewhat easier to work with, from a conversion point of view, it is still a physical media and can be subject to loss or damage. Film that has not been stored properly may have problems and the images may not be acceptable. You may also have paper that is not in acceptable condition and will require special prep work prior to scanning.

Before getting started and sending all your paper, film, and electronic data to the conversion specialist, also think about how you are going to ensure the documents are actually:

1. Scanned or converted to an acceptable image that is as readable as the original. Image quality control is of primary importance, especially if the original documents are being destroyed after the scanning project is complete. Also consider that looking at a document on a computer screen is different from looking at a piece of paper.

2. The quality measurement has to be agreed upon prior to any scanning or conversion. This should involve test runs, samples, and corrections until you feel the quality is acceptable.

3. If the vendor is scanning 50,000 pages a day and putting them up on your system, how will you quality review 50,000 pages? Watch those bottlenecks!

4. Image quality is not the only QC area – if an image is mis-indexed, it is essentially lost forever. Indexing must be part of the QC process and is as important as the image quality itself.

5. Remember that paper and film may not be the only documents being converted – if you are converting a 1,000,000 Microsoft Word files, correctly indexing is mandatory.

Finally, prior to starting, should you purge/delete files before sending them to be converted or should you convert first and purge later? It would seem obvious that you would purge/delete first – after all, why spend a

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time and money to convert a document and then delete it? Well, in some cases it may be faster to actually delete images after they have been scanned and this may provide a lower overall project cost. It may not be physically possible to assemble all of the boxes containing paper documents and manually go through them. On the other hand, if you have a good records management system and know that you are behind on deleting files, the RM system could be used to ensure that all files ready to be destroyed are, and are not sent over to the conversion house.

Electronic Document Conversions Document conversion can also include your existing electronic documents such as Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint; it may include Adobe PDF documents; and it may include engineering drawing documents. The conversion can have several facets – you may simply be loading/converting existing documents into a document management system (DMS) or you may be loading documents into a DMS and converting them from MS Word to PDF/A or even to TIFF (Tagged Image File Format – which is an electronic conversion of MS Word documents to a bit-mapped image format just as if you had scanned them).

As part of the conversion, you may also be trying to process the electronic documents into a records management system (RMS) that can either be part of the DMS or a separate system by itself.

While it may seem a simple process to “load” MS Word files into an ECM, it is quite complex and requires a fair amount of planning and isolating the metadata to be used in the conversion process. You may also consider how to treat duplicate files that are spread across drives and such things as files on personal drives or all of the files that are stored on CDs and DVDs.

Summary This short article only touches on some of the considerations but is in no way a complete checklist. Prior to undertaking any conversion project, identify several conversion companies in you local geographic area (see The Question below)and meet with them at their facility, explain your project, and try to get any planning materials that they have for review. It is absolutely essential that you have a firm project plan prior to sending thousands of pages a month to a

conversion vendor. If a major hiccup occurs while your project is in full swing, it may have a serious impact on your business operations.

On a brighter note, conversion is often a clean, fast, and painless way to get thousands to millions of documents off the shelf, out of Iron Mountain, and into your new ECM system. Outsourcing can be very affordable and may be less costly overall than you could provide internally.

Document Conversion Formats The other, and perhaps more complex question is - if you start down this path of converting physical or electronic documents for archival storage, what format do you convert the documents to?

Will these documents be readable in 5 years, 20 years, or 100 years? How many of us today can load and read our old Wang disks? And if you could read the disk, do you have the Wang software to allow you to access the file? There are potentially two (or more) separate issues: (1) will software programs be available to read the data when needed at some future date and (2) will hardware change such that I no longer have the correct physical drive to load the archived data? Could you read a 5 ¼ “ diskette today?

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If scanning, is TIFF going to be a readable format in 50 years? If storing Microsoft documents is Word going to be readable in 50 years? If I go to PDF, is PDF going to be readable in 50 years? Or the new PDF/A (Archive)

As of today, there is no “good” answer to these questions. Adobe is working on PDF/A or, PDF Archive to become an international standard but, Microsoft is also working on this issue and has released “Metro,” which Microsoft hopes will compete with Adobe’s PDF format. Some companies are exploring other options with data formats that they hope will become “standards” for the archive and display of documents, images, photographs and all other stored digital media.

Some companies have considered archiving a full copy of the application software with each type document stored and have included the physical drive in their plans. CDs and DVDs have not be physically around for 50 or 100 years to prove that they will be readable and

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there is some evidence that CDs and DVDs may not hold up over the years. Although magnetic tape has been used for a number of years, it is subject to breaking and may loose data after 15 years, which means that tapes need to be refreshed periodically.

What will become the final standard (if there will be one) is not yet known. In the meantime, stick with the standards in the industry – which includes PAPER or FILM based media, TIFF for scanned documents and PDF for electronic documents. Many companies with long-term archival needs continue to use microfilm as the accepted method for storing documents as it may be viewed without computer-based equipment.

The Question I have a document conversion project but have no idea where to start and how to find companies in the Bay Area. Can you help?

There are a number of local companies that provide conversion services in the San Francisco Bay Area. Below is a list of companies that we could find but it may not be a complete list. In addition, you may ask the vendor that is supplying your document management system as they may have a list of conversion companies that they work with or recommend.

ATI Milpitas, CA www.ati-imaging.com

BMI Imaging Services Sunnyvale, CA www.bmiimaging.com

DataBank IMX Hayward, CA www.databankimx.com

Fort Docs Santa Rosa, CA www.ftdocs.com

Lason, Inc. San Francisco www.lason.com

Peelle Technologies Campbell, CA www.peelletech.com

Record Preservation & Management Co Oakland, CA www.rpmco.biz

Soft File Sacramento, CA www.softfile.com

Did You Know?

The following facts are “thumbnail” estimates: 1 scanned page (8 1/2 by 11 inches, A4) = 50 KiloBytes (KByte) (on average, black & white, ITU G4 compressed)

1 file cabinet (4 drawer) (10,000 pages on average) = 500 MegaBytes (MByte) = 1 CD (Compact Disc)

1 box (in inches: 15 1/2 long x 12 wide x 10 deep) (400 x 300 x 250 mm) (2,500 pages) = 1 file drawer = 125 MBytes

1 linear inch = 100 pages = 5 MBytes

42 linear feet = 50,000 pages = 2.5 Gigabytes

1 roll of 16 mm microfilm (100 ft) @ 24X reduction = 2,500 letter size images = 1 box = 1 file cabinet drawer = 125 MBytes

Special Note: 1 two-side physical page is 2 images.

Golden Gate Chapter News The Chapter is always looking for help and ideas for programs and educational events. If you have a good document management or records management case study and would like to share it, give us a call.

Committees The AIIM Golden Gate Chapter is looking for a Program Manager to help us develop and organize new programs, events, and presentations. If interested, please contact Bud Porter-Roth at budpr@erms.com.

Want to set the direction on where the ECM and DM industry will go? Then join one of the many committees that is hosted run by AIIM.

For more information, go to: http://www.aiim.org/standards.asp

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January 2006 - 5

Calendar January 25th, 2006 AIIM Golden Gate Chapter Document Conversion Technologies The AIIM Golden Gate Chapter is hosting a double feature on January 25, 2006. The topic is document conversion strategies and technologies. This includes both paper documents and electronic documents. We will have two speakers: The first speaker will talk about document conversion strategies - how to organize your conversion effort, what to convert, and how move forward with the conversion effort. The second speaker will talk about conversion formats for documents including PDF-A, XML, TIFF, and other choices you may have.

Lunch will be provided.

There is a Registration Form included with this newsletter. Please complete for each person who will attend so that we have accurate lunch and attendance counts.

The meeting will be held in San Francisco at 425 Market Street, Room 20240 on the 20th floor from 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM. This is an IBM facility and you will have to check-in with security and will need a photo ID card.

Several vendors that specialize in document conversions will be present with information and literature.

SPECIAL: Paying Members may bring one guest FREE

---------------------------------------------------------- If there is a topic you would like to see addressed in a future newsletter, please contact one of the board members:

President Bud Porter-Roth 415-381-6217 budpr@erms.com

Vice President Chris Cowger 510-494-7315 cowger@sciosinc.com

Treasurer Tom Hughes 925-376-7365 TomEHughes@aol.com

Secretary Laurel McAdams 510-477-3490 lmcadams@imagemax.com

Membership Chair Paul Brighton 707-745-8658 pbright654@earthlink.net

Programs Chair Open (Please inquire about this position)

AIIM/ARMA CHAPTER LIASON Chris Cowger 510-494-7315 cowger@sciosinc.com

You may also navigate to our chapter web page:

http://www.aiim.org/chapters/goldengate.asp?ID=26297

© 2006 AIIM Golden Gate Chapter All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems without the written permission.