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The City of Hamburg—the second largest city in Germany—has deployed a new, electronic information workflow management system named HIM (Hamburg Information Management) to replace the city's existing paper-based document routing process. The goal of the new system is to accelerate business processes and achieve greater transparency in the enterprise. To handle the conversion of all documents into a uniform PDF/A format, the Hamburg Department of Finance licensed the Hyper.Net® PDF/A Compliance Automator from Coextant Systems.

A distinguishing feature of Hamburg's approach is the use of a single format to store the main content of each e-record managed by the system. This is currently the TIF format. Through the use of the Hyper.Net® PDF/A Compliance Automator, the Hyper.Net® Workload Manager and Hyper.Net Web Services, the city has been able to ensure the long-term readability of content by eliminating the use of proprietary file formats going forward. For this reason, documents in the HIM workflow are now converted after each modification into PDF renditions that are attached back into the corresponding e-record. When a workflow process has been completed, all documents associated with the workflow and the workflow's audit trail itself are date stamped and comverted into a single compound PDF/A file and transferred to the e-record storage area on the tamper-proof EMC Centera information archive.

Throughout the various Hamburg departments and agencies, the HIM workflow—implemented on the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 platform—support mores than 10,000 regular users and automates approximately 4,5 million workflow tasks and the conversion of over 40 million pages per year (and correspondingly more when accounting for documents that are subsequently modified).