AIIM Standards Watch

PDF/A Seminar in Chicago

How are you going to preserve your electronic information so that you can be sure that the documents will be able to be displayed and read in a reliable format? If by chance you do not know the answer to this question and you are going to be in the Chicago area on Tuesday, September 15, you may want to attend this seminar to find out if PDF/A is right for your organization.

PDF/Archive(PDF/A) is a sustainable file format that is device independent so you don't have to use the same computer, software or operating system to read a PDF/A file as was used to create the file. Each PDF/A file is also self-contained and self-documenting which means that it has all the fonts used to create the document and the metadata identified to describe the document. This means that your document will be displayed just as you intended for it to be displayed when you created it.

Want to know more about PDF/A and how your organization can use it to preserve its electronic documents? AIIM and the PDF/A Competence Center are providing a half day seminar on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at McCormick Place in Chicago. Join us to learn more about how PDF/A can help you to preserve your electronic documents.

To register to attend this valuable half day seminar, visit http://www.aiim.org/standards/article.aspx?ID=37092 . If you have any questions, please feel free to contact, Betsy Fanning.

PDF Healthcare Demonstrations

The PDF Healthcare demonstrations at HIMSS 2009 in Chicago will be held at 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. at the Hyatt Hotel (McCormick Place) Coffee Shop "public area" today, Monday, April 6. Join the PDF Healthcare committee to learn about the "State-of-the-art Secure Records Exchange".

Standards Demos

Well, if you were at AIIM Info360 last week, you had the opportunity to see an implementation of the proposed OASIS standard CMIS. Thomas Pole and Laurence Hart on behalf of the AIIM iECM committee, in two short months, were able to develop a search federator that utilized CMIS. The demonstration at Philadelphia allowed users to search for articles in past issues of Infonomics and AIIM E-DOC Magazines that were contained in repositories made available by Alfresco, EMC and Nuxeo. Each of these repositories were physically located in either the United Kingdom, France or in a Google cloud. Pretty cool, right?! This demonstration showed that the standard works and the benefit it has to those of us who need to find information. If you were not able to be in Philadelphia to see the demonstration at the vendor booths, you should still be able to perform queries on the demo site at http://www.aiim.iecm.org.

If you happen to be in Chicago attending HIMSS 2009 today, stop by the Hyatt Coffee Shop where two informal demonstration sessions of PDF Healthcare will be provided. During these sessions, Stasia Kahn, MD, of the Fox Prairie Medical Group and Vice President of the Northern Illinois Physicians for Connectivity will demonstrate the secure exchange of patient health information from a physician's Electronic Health Record in NextGen to a patient's Personal Health Record in HealthString. Tom Lang, MD, a practicing Emergency Department physician and Chief Medical Officer of MACH 2 Solutions in collaboration with SpringCM and DimensionalInsight will demonstrate the secure exchange of health information for patient transfer from Emergency Room to a referral hospital. John Odden, a consultant with Coto Partners in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard, PatCare and Sterling-Wright will demonstrate how clinicians, with only a 3G phone, memory stick and printer can securely exchange patient health information. Cris Ross with Minute Clinic will demonstrate the secure exchange of patient healt information between the nation's MinuteClinic providers and its patients. PDF Healthcare is helping to address one of the Obama Administration goals with regard to electronic healthcare information.

If you want to know more about PDF Healthcare, please visit http://www.aiim.org/pdfh or if you are in Chicago, stop by the Hyatt Coffee Shop at 5 p.m. or 6:30 p.m.

If you want to know more about AIIM's Standards Program, please visit http://www.aiim.org/standards.

Standards Week 2009

While the title of this post may sound more like 'Bike Week 2009' and I am sure you would rather be in Daytona Beach, Florida than in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, we are holding a number of standards meetings next week. If you are in the Philadelphia area, you should visit info360 (AIIM International Exposition and Conference) at the Pennyslvania Convention Center - Tuesday, March 31 through Thursday, April 2. The following are the standards committees that will be meeting at that time:

• PDF Reference (US Committee) - March 31, 2009 - 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. - Room 102A
• C24, Document Imaging - March 31, 2009 - 9 a.m. - noon - Room 102B
• C10/DIQP, Micrographics and Digital Image Quality & Preservation Joint Meeting - March 31, 2009 - 1:30 p.m. - 5 p.m. - Room 102B
• iECM, Interoperable ECM - March 31, 2009 - 2:00 p.m - 4:00 p.m. - Room 103C
• PDF/Universal Access - April 1, 2009 - 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. - Room 102A
• C27, Document Management and Implementation Guidelines Joint Meeting - April 1, 2009 - 1:30 p.m. - 5 p.m. - Rom 102B
• StratML - April 2, 2009 - 9 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. - Room 102B
• PDF/Engineering Conference Call - April 2, 2009 - 1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.

As you can see, there is something for everyone. Come join us in one of these meetings! Looking forward to seeing you next week!

It's Final - PDF is Now an ISO Standard

It's final! The PDF specification that billions of documents are based upon is now an ISO standard. The Portable Document Format (PDF), undeniably one of the most commonly used formats for electronic documents, is now accessible as an ISO International Standard - ISO 32000-1. This move follows a decision by Adobe Systems Incorporated, original developer and copyright owner of the format, to relinquish control to ISO, who is now in charge of publishing the specifications for the current version (1.7) and for updating and developing future versions. While this is an ISO standard, AIIM had a key role in the process of bringing the once Adobe controlled specification to ISO. AIIM, on behalf of ANSI, holds the secretariat for the ISO committee that is responsible for the development of ISO 32000-1. This version of the standard is an exact replica of the existing PDF 1.7.

While the committee's initial work has been completed in getting the standard through the approval and pubication process, the committee's work is far from over. The focus for the committee will now be to identify new features and functions that may be added to the PDF file and included in the standard. To follow the activities of the US committee for this standard, please visit http://www.aiim.org/Standards/article.aspx?ID=33223. For more information on this standard, please feel free to contact Betsy Fanning at bfanning@aiim.org.

StratML

In December, we announced the initiation of the StratML project. The committee has held a couple of meetings to work on the schema elements needed for transforming organizational strategic plans into the StratML format. The current focus of the committee is on the validation of the StratML elements. You can review at:

· The names and definitions of the elements in the StratML core outlined in Appendix C of the document available at: StratML Summary and Results White Paper

· The names and definitions of the elements in the StratML performance plans and report framework available at: StratML Performance Plans

Standards Week 2008

AIIM's Standards Week 2008 is now a piece of history. We had 7 committees hold meetings last week while we were in Boston for the AIIM Exposition and Conference. It was great to see so many friends.

Now for an overview of some of the activities of the week...

The US TAG (Technical Advisory Group) to ISO TC 171 held a meeting during which they reviewed the progress against commitments that had been made during the last ISO meeting in London. Significant progress is being made on all the tasks so that during the next meeting to be held in Beijing we will have very good discussions.

Implementation Guidelines - This committee began work on the next version of the popular ARP-1 document and discussed methods of getting additional adoption of the document and listed standards by the states.

iECM - The committee has many projects it is trying to work on. The focus of the committee will be on metadata. Given that there are many metadata projects being worked on by numerous groups, the committee discussed how to bring the work together to ensure that we do not have opposing efforts.

Evidentiary Support - This committee has been dormant for a while but is being revived to focus on record authenticity issues. It is being lead by Bob Williams, Cohasset and Paul Doyle, Proofspace and Sedona Group. They will be looking into producing some white papers and best practices as well as sharing evidentiary support information through blogs.

DIQP - The DIQP (Digital Image Quality and Preservation) committe heard presentations from Charles Dollar and Rick Laxman on preservation issues. Charles spoke on his ongoing research in the area and Rick shared what the Church's Family History Division is doing to preserve and provide access to their very old records.

C27 (Document Management) - In addition to discussions on various projects, this committee discussed the use of blu-ray disks for document imaging. As a result of the discussion, AIIM will be having a letter sent to OSTA, Optical Storage Technology Association, requesting that they focus on promoting the standardization of blu-ray disks.

PDF/UA (Universal Access) - The committee made good progress on their document and is planning to have it available before the meetings in Beijing which means they have a very aggressive committee meeting schedule to follow. They have made significant progress and feel it is now time to get other prespectives included in the standard.

While PDF Healthcare did not meet in Boston during Standards Week, they did hold their normally scheduled bi-weekly conference call.

We hope to see you at a Standards meeting soon!

PDF Reference as Standard

In December, we announced that the PDF Reference as an ISO standard (ISO 32000) was approved with one negative. After a meeting in January, the international working group was able to resolve the negative comment so that the negative vote was changed from Negative to Affirmative with Comment. This change means that the standard is fully approved and will be published soon.

After dealing with the comments, the working group began discussions on the next version of the standard by identifying features that should be included in the next version of the standard. The following are some of the ideas the committee is discussing for future versions of ISO 32000:

3D, CAD, Engineering

• Incorporate the 3D algorithm, PRC into Part 1
  
• Improved measurement, 3D, focus on CAD
  
• Non-Scaling lines and patterns
  
• GIS features
  

Document Features

• Extensions to portable collections (packages)
  
• Hyperlinks on objects and not an area
  
• Use of native Unicode in PDF page content streams
  
• Root-level dictionary of all used resources
  
• Clarification of resourced inheritance when rendering
  
• Associate annotations (especially comments) directly with page content
  
• Improved file provenance and "audit trails"
  
• Per-page metadata
  

Accessiblity

• MathML Integration
  
• New Tag Types
  

Color

• Enable N-Colorant ICC profiles as source profiles
  
• Output intent enhancement
  
• Black Point Compensation
  
• Add processing instruction for color conversion
  
• Support for DeviceLink profiles
  
• Specify exactly how color has to be rendered on an output device
  
• No more uncalibrated color in a PDF
  
• Extend color model for better support of spot colors and overprints between spot colors (and with process colors)
  

Architecture

• Remove or improve cross-referencing via XRef table
  
• Move to an XML coded file
  
• Multiple levels of data
  
• Support for Newspaper XML document instances and related style-sheets

If you would like to contribute thoughts on the above items or have features you would like to recommend be included in a future version of ISO 32000, Document management – Portable Document Format (PDF), please feel free to send your questions and/or recommendations to bfanning@aiim.org. If you would like to participate in this effort of revising the PDF file format, please let us know that as well by sending an email to bfanning@aiim.org.

PDF/Archive Training

AIIM announces the availability of training on PDF/Archive. The PDF/A training provides you with a solid understanding of PDF/A and the standard ISO 19005-1, Document management – File format for the long-term preservation of electronic document – Part 1: Use of PDF 1.4 (PDF/A-1). The course will cover the technologies and best practices that help you to implement PDF/A in your organization so that you can preserve your electronic documents.

Some of the specific topics that will be covered include:

• Preservation
• Preservation Problem
• Overview of ERM
• Overview of file formats
• PDF/A Introduction
• Digital Signatures in preservation
• Overview of conformance levels and restricted features
• Color
• Metadata for preservation
• Workflow and migration for long-term preservation
• Conformance levels and issues
• Creating PDF/A documents from digitally born documents
• Scanning to PDF/A (converting images to PDF/A)
• Validating PDF/A files
• Implementation best practices
• Selecting PDF/A products
• Relevance of other PDF standards to PDF/A
• Legal and compliance implications of PDF/A

The training is available as private classes that can be tailored to your organization's specific needs. Additionally, we will be offering public training classes in several locations. Please watch the AIIM web site for a location near you and for the introduction of the web-based version of this training.

If you would like to have more information on this training, please contact Betsy Fanning at bfanning@aiim.org.

Standards Watch Blog

The Standards Watch Blog is back!

The AIIM Standards department has been busy with a number of meetings and documents. Over the next couple of weeks, we want to catch you up on the items we have been working on and let you know about some exciting projects that are coming up.

Last week, we held several committee meetings in Boston during the 2008 AIIM Exposition and Conference. Highlights from the meetings will be posted later this week.

As a preview, we have started the StratML effort, begun work on the next version of PDF/A and PDF standards, and PDF/Engineering is in the final stage prior to being published and made available to the public. The Implementation Guidelines committee that creates the AIIM ARP-1 document which many of you have downloaded is beginning work on the next version of this document. Watch this blog for more details on these and other standards projects.