Digital archiving - archive documents quickly and audit-proof

How document archiving works today

As we all know, man is a hunter-gatherer. But what does that have to do with archiving? Quite simply, if you collect, you also archive. After all, archiving means organizing and storing collectible objects, whether they are stamps, coins, antiques or documents.
Companies also collect a lot, primarily business-relevant information and documents. And that's quite a large amount!

Benefits of digital archiving for companies

Audit-proof archiving

Comply with retention periods

Quick search of documents

Digital archive + DMS in one product

What is electronic or digital archiving?

When it comes to archiving, it is always important to capture documents in the company, sort them and finally store them so securely that nothing is lost and everything can be found again quickly. Nowadays, this task is performed by modern archiving software for a wide range of documents. In terms of access speed, digital archiving of documents is about as superior to the paper archive as a racehorse is to a snail. Apart from speed, however, there are a number of other aspects.

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Digital archiving requirements for companies

What an electronic archive must be able to do

There are a number of requirements that a digital archive has to meet.

Apart from speed, the security of the archived data must of course also be taken into account. Nothing should be lost. Storage must be audit-proof.

Revision security means that archived information, provided it is relevant to the business, must be protected at all times against

unauthorized access and
changeability.

This is a legal requirement which, among other things, has been laid down in a legally binding manner in the "Principles for the proper keeping and storage of books, records and documents in electronic form" (GoBD). With regard to the protection of personal data, the regulations set out in the EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) must also be observed.

Against this background, however, other criteria must be taken into account. For example, archived invoices, which are of course relevant to business, must be stored in companies within a legally defined retention period. Generally, all business-relevant documents, including e-mails, are subject to a certain retention period.
With the windream high-performance archive, you can therefore determine how long a document has to be kept and when it can be deleted by means of the integrated lifecycle management. This ensures that no document is destroyed before its retention period has expired.

And - last but not least - the requirement for a high-performance archive is also that the archived documents must be "searchable". "Searchable" means that documents can be retrieved at any time.

What else distinguishes a classic file archive from a digital archive system?
In the file archive, you are searching, in the digital archive, you are finding! With an electronic software like the windream high-performance archive, archived information can be retrieved almost in real-time.

However, this is not only due to the fact that the digital system is faster. Because the methods that can be used for retrieval are manifold, too. For accessing archived data, the windream Enterprise Content Management system provides you with a whole range of different search options. And if you want to use certain retrieval options repeatedly, you can save complex search parameters and search terms permanently and store them on the desktop, for example. Then, a double click on the icon is sufficient to execute a search routine again - as often as you like.

Digital archiving - dataglobal Bochum GmbH

More efficiency in the office

With digital archiving of your documents, your company will work much more effectively in the future than before. This saves time and money and gives you an enormous competitive advantage over companies that still have to get their files out of the basement. It is a matter of course that all legal requirements are fully complied with when documents are managed and archived centrally. This applies to the management of e-mails just as it does to all other sensitive company data.

What could you archive

Of course, you cannot archive real objects like stamps or coins in an electronic archive. But of course images of them, for example photos. And that brings us to the core of this matter, because the following applies: In principle, you can store any information or document in the archive, as long as it is in the form of digital data, for example:

Incoming mail such as commercial and business letters, fax messages, e-mails,
important documents such as contracts, invoices, delivery bills, purchase orders, books and records, financial statements,
scanned documents from legacy databases,
digital photos, movies and audio files,
complex CAD design drawings,
documents with all common file and graphic formats, e.g. pdf, docx, xlsx, ppt, jpeg, png, psd and many more as well as
Data from third-party applications, e.g. from. ERP and CRM systems

Digital archiving in the context of digital document and enterprise content management

Nowadays, digital archiving with a modern high-performance archive is no longer an isolated software application, but is increasingly perceived in the context of DMS and ECM. In other words, in today's modern IT world, an electronic archive almost always works in cooperation with a DMS / ECM system. Why is this so? Because ECM and document management systems extend pure archiving with numerous additional functions that go far beyond it.

From archive to enterprise content management

Life cycle management of documents

Select processing periods - Define retention periods

In general, an "archive" contains archived information that can no longer be changed or that may even no longer be changed due to legal requirements. In contrast, document management systems (DMS) and ECM-systems, of course, also allow saving documents which can be edited further afterwards.

Also in this case, the life-cycle management in windream controls how long documents captured in the windream ECM-system can be edited and when they are automatically transferred to the archive and thus become unchangeable (revision-safe). Provided that you are authorized to do so on the basis of the windream rights concept, you as a user can create these rules individually in the windream lifecycle management and apply them to documents.

In general, it becomes clear that digitization in the field of archiving software is much more than "just" a systematic capture and presentation of company-relevant documents on the electronic level.
A digital archive does much more. The range of services includes:

a lifecycle management for the archived documents,
a rights concept that regulates who can access which archived information and who cannot,
the fulfillment of audit security, which ensures that information is not accidentally deleted from the archive, and
the numerous retrieval options in the digital archive, which ensure that all electronically available documents and any archived information are available again almost at the click of a mouse.

An independent legal opinion has confirmed that the windream high-performance archive fulfills these requirements, which are also regulated by law.

To the legal opinion

Legal opinion windream archiving system - Revision security of the windream archive when using changeable and unchangeable media

windream 7 Business Edition is GeBüV- and VAT-compliant

windream fulfills the requirements of the pharmaceutical industry's quality standards

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Document archiving and management as basis of workflows

In addition to the classic archiving of any documents, there are also software solutions that can be used to map typical use cases elegantly and digitally. This ranges from incoming mail to special cases of file archiving. The entire process can be controlled digitally from A to Z via a workflow modeled with windream BPM.