Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 15, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The three IT specialists DocuWare, PoINT Storage & Systems GmbH, and Primera Technology are now providing companies with a complete solution for the fully automated, convenient archiving of important business documents and their backup on optical media. “German businesses face a major challenge due to various legal requirements demanding long-term data retention and electronic legal transactions. This can no longer be managed without largely automated document management,” said Primera Managing Director Andreas Hoffmann, describing the current situation at many companies. As an example, he cited the German Fiscal Code (AO), under which every email classified as a business or commercial letter must be retained for at least six years. To conserve storage space in systems, it therefore makes sense to back up files externally on optical media. In the Primera Managing Director’s view, there will be no long-term alternative to Blu-ray Disc (BD) because of the new standard’s enormous storage capacity and long service life.
As part of the complete solution, DocuWare supplies the document-management system (DMS), which ensures audit-compliant electronic archiving. It supports all kinds of paper documents as well as electronic formats, including Office, CAD, and spool files and emails. “The performance and acceptance of a DMS depend to a large extent on how quickly and easily documents of very different types and origins can be brought into the system,” explained DocuWare board member Jürgen Biffar. DocuWare AG sees the core of its solution as the automatic consolidation of unstructured information from all business applications and processes into a central document pool. Documents are available at the click of a mouse, sorted by customer, project, and other organizational criteria. DocuWare REQUEST allows documents to be stored independently of the system on any storage medium, complete with convenient search and display functions, full-text capabilities, and viewers for third-party formats. A BD with a capacity of 50 GB, for example, can hold around one million scanned pages—approximately 2,000 file folders. The mobile document pool can be accessed anywhere at any time without using a DocuWare client.
An interface connects the DMS to PoINT’s burning software, which controls the robot in Primera’s duplication systems. A particular advantage of the new network-based version is its Event-Controlled Recording (ECR) function, which can start the burning process fully automatically using predefined parameters. “For example, execution of a job can depend on a specific time, time intervals, the size of a file folder, or even the appearance of a particular file,” said Marco Vögele, Manager Sales & Marketing at PoINT. Individual components can also be combined. For example, the burning process can always begin at 5 p.m. if the data volume exceeds 200 MB at that time.
The connected Primera Technology duplication system handles data duplication. Depending on the device model, up to 100 optical discs can be burned in a single operation without any manual intermediate step, equivalent to 2.5 terabytes of data when single-layer Blu-ray Discs are used. “We know from various studies that German businesses will soon produce more data than can be stored on a hard drive,” Hoffmann said. External hard drives are still frequently used today and later locked in a safe. “Using optical media is considerably more efficient and space-saving.” Primera’s duplication systems also include a printer that labels the blank discs immediately after burning to prevent mix-ups. This process also requires no human intervention, because the robotic arm in the device automatically moves the optical media into the printing tray.
