An Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) is a computer system or suite of programs designed to store and track electronic documents and other media.

In order to function effectively all organizations require some sort of formalized system by which to store, organize, retrieve and process electronic documents. While some enterprises continue to rely on paper-based document management systems, it is almost always easier and more reliable to use EDMS.

There are variety of formats available for digitization, the important being Tiff, JPEG, PDF, PDF/A. These are used for varying purposes and have their own credibility and value in that stream. The format for long term archiving which could give the same look and feel of the original document is only PDF/A which is an ISO19005:1-2005 standard developed on the insistence of US courts by AIIM (Association of Information and Image Management).

General

If I have PDF/A, do I no longer need paper copies ?

This is a primary goal of PDF/A. Digital documents should remain in electronic format, giving the user a wide range of additional features, e.g. like full-text searching instead of manually looking through paper dossiers or file cards.

• Traditional archiving methods such as paper and microfilm guarantee reproducibility but are outdated for modern technology. PDF popularity (over TIFF) grew for a variety of reasons. The proprietary nature of PDF, however did not guarantee reproducibility over years. Hence the need for a standard was felt in the early 2000.

The extended family of open PDF standards extend to cover long term storage and retention requirements of many other different data type, apart from the scanned paper documents covered under PDF/A. These are..