To some people, standards are boring, tiresome and just plain not needed. While at the same time, others fully embrace the use of standards. Standards do take time to develop. Like fine wine, standards do improve with age! Standards are needed to help organizations to be able to implement bests of breed applications into their workflows rather than staying with the offerings of one vendor. The standards also reduce risks the organization may have when implementing technologies because they are developed by subject experts who collaborate to document the best way to implement or utilize a technology or improve a process. When you use a standard, you can be certain it has been tested which will provide a high level of reliability in its use.
The 3D PDF Consortium launched its ECM Standards Group. There will be a number working groups, each of which will have several ad hoc groups that will address specific defined projects to help the working group complete its work. The initial working groups are as follows:
- Trustworthy Storage Technologies and Practices Working Group will be developing guidance for planning, designing and implementing trustworthy storage technologies.
- Trustworthy Document Management Integrity and Assessment Technologies and Practices Working Group that will develop content to help organizations assess the compliance of their electronically stored information (ESI)
- Information Conversion and Migration Working Group will be focused on the conversion of hardcopy information into electronic information, conversion of digital content and archival storage of information.
- Strategy Markup Language Working Group will continue developing standards to promote the sharing of information in electronic format.
These working groups are in addition to the PDF work, which includes PDF/Archive, PDF/Engineering, Product Representation Compact (PRC), PDF/Universal Access and PDF 2.0.
There is a little bit here for every organization. This is only the beginning as well. Additional working groups may be added as the needs are identified. All meetings of the working groups are virtual. If you are interested in participating in the ECM Standards Group, please feel free to contact me at betsy.fanning@3dpdfconsortium.org.
On another note, the United States has an opportunity to participate in the development of Office Open XML extension standards and the standards defining EPUB (used for e-books). The National Information Standards Organization (NISO, http://www.niso.org) has taken over the U.S. committee to the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1), committee for document description and processing. NISO is looking for subject matter experts to participate on the US committee. (NOTE: You will need to join NISO to participate.)
***This article was written by Betsy Fanning, CIP, Director of Standards at 3D PDF CONSORTIUM INC. She can be reached on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/betsyfanning/.***