AIIM Standards Watch

PDF Reference 1.7 A Step Closer to ISO Standard

The ISO ballot to approve the PDF Reference 1.7 as an ISO standard closed yesterday. Of the 14 member countries voting, 13 have voted in favor of the standard and 1 has voted negative. Discussions of the comments will be the focus of an international meeting in the end of January in Orlando, FL. We expect one additional ballot final approval ballot to be conducted prior to the standard being published.

While this draft is nearing publication, there is much work to be done as we add new features and enhancements to the standard. If you would like to be a part of this effort, please contact Betsy Fanning at bfanning@aiim.org.

AIIM Recommended Practice for Selecting EDMS

Have you just been assigned your organization's EDMS (Electronic Document Management System) project? Don't know quite where to start with the project? AIIM has some guidance that will help you to initiate and manage your project to successfully implment an EDMS. AIIM ARP1-2007, Recoomended Practice - Analysis, Selection, and Implementation of Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS). This is a FREE download.

This guide presents a set of procedures and activities that should be considered and/or performed during all aspects of analyzing, selecting, and implementing electronic document management systems. A list of relevant national and international standards and reports is provided to help you quickly identify and locate required information for your project. These documents will help you determine your requirements and draft your RFP or RFI.

PDF/Archive to meet in Berlin

Nine members of the US committee for PDF/Archive are on their way to an international working group meeting with colleagues from Japan, Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom and others. The committee will be discussing the next version of PDF/Archive which brings this important standard current to the PDF Reference 1.7 adding many capabilities to the archive file.

Prior to this meeting a working draft was circulated for comment which provided a number of comments for the committee to review and discuss at the meeting in Berlin. Parts 1 and 2 of the PDF/Archive standard deal with static documents, i.e., document content that does not change. Also at this meeting, the committee will begin discussions on Part 3 which will enable the archiving of dynamic documents, i.e., forms with drop down information.

The goal of this meeting is to gain approval from the meeting attendees to issue a committee ballot to gain the consensus of all the member countries.

Best Practices for Email Management

Managing email is such an enormous task and one that can use as much help as possible. Understanding this need, AIIM recently initiated a community of practice (CoP) to develop best practices for email management. This group is limited to end users. The CoP is identifying topics for consideration to be included or covered by one or multiple best practices. If you have any topics that you would like the group to include in their discussions, please feel free to sent them to me at bfanning@aiim.org.

Best Practices Community of Practice

It was not all that long ago that in order to communicate with someone, we had to take out a piece of paper and either type or hand-write a note then put it in an envelope and send it to the intended recipient. Now, we sit in front of a computer, type a note and click 'Send' and within moments our note is in the hands of the recipient. This convenience can be considered both a convenience and a curse. We are now able to communicate in an almost real-time manner - a good thing. However, the amount of email received has increased to unbelieveable levels which means our organizations must now try to manage the email beast.

AIIM is launching a pilot Best Practices Community of Practice (CoP) that will work on providing real-life assistance on how to manage email in our organizations. The first CoP is limited in invitees and attendees to allow us to accurately assess the success of the effort. The intent of the CoP is to bring together subject experts on a given topic, provide some baseline knowledge, and using wikis and conference calls fairly rapidly draft a 25-50 page best practice to help end users.

Our first topic is email management. There are many facets to this topic. The CoP will determine the part of email management that it will deal with and then begin to work on a best practice draft. When the draft is completed it will go through a review process prior to being published and will be made available free of charge to AIIM Professional members. Watch the AIIM web site for this guide at the end of the year.

US PDF Reference Committee

The US PDF Reference Committee held its first meeting in Washington, DC on July 16-17. For a first meeting, it was well attended with representatives from various government agencies, PDF developers, and end user organizations that are major users of PDF. Even though the attendance at the meeting was good, there were several notable vendors who were absent from the meeting.

It is important to note that with Adobe's release of the PDF specification to the industry, the industry now has the opportunity to specify the direction of the next version of PDF. So, if you ever wanted PDF to do something that it could not do, now is the time to share that information.

The committee reviewed the proposed ISO version of the PDF Reference 1.7 and began to identify features to be proposed to be included in the next version of the standard. The ISO version of PDF Reference 1.7 was reformatted to fit to the ISO template for ISO standards. This involved making non-technical changes to the writing style to conform with ISO format and to further ensure that the standard was vendor neutral and aligned with existing files and implementations.

The committee will be holding a conference call meeting on August 8 and in September to continue its discussions of comments that will form the US position on the ISO/DIS ballot for the standard. Those interested in participating on the US committee (you must have a home address in the US) are welcome to contact Betsy Fanning at bfanning@aiim.org for more information.

PDF Reference 1.7 - ISO Draft Standard

In late January 2007, Adobe Systems announced their intent to release the full Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.7 specification to ANSI and AIIM for the purpose of publishing it as an ISO standard. The specification is in the ISO fast-track process which means that the standard is submitted for vote as an enquiry draft or DIS which is a 5 month ballot. It qualifies for the fast-track process in that it is an established specification that has been submitted to ISO by the ANSI or the US which is a qualified P-member of ISO. The DIS ballot opened July 2 and will close December 2, 2007.

The US is forming a committee to represent the US interests at international meetings with regard to this standard. The first meeting of the committee will take place on Monday and Tuesday, July 16 and 17 in Silver Spring, Maryland. All interested parties are welcome to attend the meeting. For information on the agenda and the location of the meeting please visit http://www.aiim.org/standards.asp?ID=33223. Here you will find the agenda and the ability to download the draft standard as well as a change sheet that details the changes made to the document in the process of formatting it in the ISO format.

If you plan to attend the meeting, please let Ebony Dowtin at edowtin@aiim.org know that you will be attending the meeting or if you would like to be added to the listserv for this group.

A second meeting for the US committee is tentatively being scheduled for November 2007 in San Jose, California. The first International meeting will take place in January 2008 in the United States, most likely the Orlando, Florida area.

ISO TC 171 Meetings London

The US was well represented at the recent ISO TC 171 meetings held in London the last week of June. In addtion to the US, there were representatives from Canada, China, France, Japan, South Africa, and United Kigndom.

ISO TC 171 focuses on Document Management Applications with an even more specific focus of quality, applications, legality and vocabulary. The Technical Committee is organized into three sub-committees with several active working groups. During the week of meetings, each sub-committee held a meeting and six of the working groups held technical meetings.

The meetings were a success from all accounts but primarily in the fact that the committee was able to transact a lot of business and place plans into place that will ensure that much work will be completed in between meetings.

In spite of the drizzle and chilly temperatures and news events, the delegates had a wonderful time in London. Several delegates were lucky enough to even see the Queen. The delegates were treated to a tour of the Houses of Parliament which was a welcome change from the intense technical discussions of the week.

The US delegation always welcomes new participants to the delegation. If you are domiciled in the United States or its territories and wish to participate in the International standards work, please contact either Betsy Fanning at bfanning@aiim.org or Ebony Dowtin at edowtin@aiim.org.

The next meeting for ISO TC 171 is to be hosted in China in October 2008.

Digital Signature Service Standard Announced

With our increased reliance on electronic documents to transact business, the need for digital signatures has increased specifically as it relates to security in eCommerce transactions. OASIS, the Organization for Structured Information Standards (www.oasis-open.org ), announced yesterday the approval of Digital Signature Services (DSS) standard. This standard provides a secure way for organizations to authenticate documents in an electronic environment.

DSS, is an XML-based interface to allow web services based applications to use digital signatures. According to the scope of the standard, it describes two XML-based protocols that define XML-request/response protocols for signing and verifying XML documents. It also defines an XML timestamp format and an XML signature property for use with the protocols.

Other digital signature efforts are underway by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force – www.ietf.org ) and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium – www.w3c.org ).

State of Standards

As a part of the AIIM 2006 State of the Industry survey, survey respondents were asked several questions about standards. The results of the survey show that consensus standards development processes like those promoted by ANSI (American National Standards Institute), ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and the many other organizations continue to be important largely because they are fairly well-understood. Surprisingly, of the end user respondents of this survey only 19% were familiar with the W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) and 10% were familiar with OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) both of which are fairly well known among the IT community. [Note: W3C is developing web based standards and OASIS is largely responsible for standards in the area of XML, HTML, SOA, etc.] This tells us that there is a growing understanding of XML, .NET and web services standards that ultimately supports the new importance that SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and interoperability play in end user plans to improve their businesses which supports AIIM's efforts in iECM. (More posts to come regarding iECM in the near future.)