Guest Column: Setting The Standard For Electronic Document Archival

By Mark McKinney, President, LuraTech Inc.

Proposed laws for electronic document archival are creating quite a furor in a number of states and municipalities around the country. Not only would these laws fundamentally change the ways that government agencies and businesses approach scanning and storing documents, but some believe that they will ultimately result in an unfunded mandate that could cost organizations thousands of dollars to implement in order to comply with the law.

But such a transition doesn't need to be costly or complicated, if the right strategy is employed. Currently throughout Europe and Asia, and increasingly at U.S. federal government and state government agencies, the PDF/A standard is being successfully adopted for long-term archival of scanned and electronic documents in implementations that meet government requirements while giving organizations the flexibility to manage their own document archives and the ability to achieve significant cost savings for storage and bandwidth over the long term.