It is not rare to meet EDM software (Electronic Document Management) used to realize the long term preservation of data even if fundamentally, EDM and preservation diverge totally on the objectives to achieve:
| EDM | Preservation |
|---|---|
| – Allows the management of the active documents (or alive). – Features mainly turned around the capture, documents circulation and sharing of these documents. – Used by fairly large populations (end users). – Full text search often acclaimed. |
– Allows the conservation of fixed (or cold) documents. – Helps to ensure the stability of the documents through time (readability, integrity, evidence value, conversion, migration). – Frequently intended for users concerned by the long term preservation: archivist, Records Manager or Businesses. – Search mainly from Metadatas. . |
The confusions in the objectives are attributable:
- To the people focused on the user workstation which are not sensitized to the subtleties of preservation
- To the people focused on the infrastructure which think they can delegate long-term conservation to the storage
Arcsys does not aim at replacing EDM products but proposes the interfacing with these products via the use of Connectors bringing the following features :
- Compliance with the European law of Evidence value which the EDM products lack most of the time
- Long-term sustainability of documents (management of integrity, surveillance of readibility, migrations and automatic conversions, management and optimization of storage)
- Exchange of documents between the EDM software and Arcsys in a totally transparent way for end users and business applications
- Having a non-proprietary document structure, perfectly exportable and reversible
- Improvement of the performances of EDM software by delegating to Arcsys the management of the fixed documents