Requirements to manage and deploy millions of documents with built-in workflow processes, versioning and rights management are no longer limited only to the largest businesses. The issue of compliance alone, with its mandates for auditable processes and long-term digital storage of content, has made such requirements commonplace, so in the article we will explore the successful path to PDF/A compliance with SharePoint.

Until recently, organizations have deployed SharePoint as a workgroup productivity platform, with solutions ranging from document authoring teamsites and discussion forums to task lists, calendar management, and blogs. It was only a matter of time before SharePoint would begin to be seen as a very powerful hub for not only managing, but also for deploying documents to the workforce and to other applications in every required format for use in every required context. One of the most important of these contexts is PDF/A compliance.

Achieving an intelligent, sustainable, PDF/A compliance solution for SharePoint, however, requires more than plugging in a simple document converter. Successful compliance solutions must be able to:

• generate avalid PDF/A file including a bookmark navigator, watermarks, and stamped, computed metadatafrom any given document in any format, including PDF.
• use definable rules to automatically collect, collate and merge an unlimited number of documents into a single PDF/A document for the purpose of creatingstructured, electronic recordsthat capture all documents associated with any business workflow.  To this end, the solution must be able to convert any document format to PDF, merge an unlimited number of PDFs into a single, compound PDF, stamp any required watermarks and metadata into the compound PDF, produce a uniform bookmark navigator and aprintable table of contents,applysequential page numberingand convert the compound PDF into a single, valid PDF/A file.
• providedependable, reliable support for all of today’s most common formats,including all Microsoft Office and OpenOffice formats past and future, formats like InfoPath and Visio, and also complex formats like emails with attachments, zip files, Web pages, PDFs, image files, etc.
• provide support forspecialized formats like AutoCADby snapping in any third-party converter.
• allowcustom transformationsto be added to any stage of the overall process, enabling the business to implement individual requirements such as document variable substitution using values retrieved from other systems.
• provide for the transport and storage of all output formats-along witha complete battery of search- and application-relevant metadata-to all desired locations, for example to archiving systems, databases, file systems and SharePoint libraries.
• support extremely fast mass processingbacked up by enterprise scalability and reliability functions like load balancing and failover, specialized handling of document security, and more.

Because the organization’s content is rarely stored in a single place, the solution’s feature set must also beavailable outside of SharePoint, making it possible to process external requests and save the results in SharePoint and vice versa.  The most graceful solution would make PDF/A compliance services available to the entire enterprise either viaa standard web interface(REST/SOAP)or configurable SharePoint events. The service must in this case supportparameterizedconfiguration and control on a per-request basisto allow for processing differences based on document type, source storage location, business-unit-specific handling needs and delivery locations.

Turnkey solutions that provide all of the above power have already been successfully deployed and proven in the manufacturing and financial services sectors, as well as in public authorities, to address requirements in the areas of archiving, security report generation, policy and procedure publication, meeting document preparation and other needs.

“Good compliance solutions for SharePoint offer exceptional features like the automated conversion of document sets into structurally organized files based on the PDF/A standard.”

Coextant are already signed up as Silver Exhibitors for the European SharePoint Conference 2013.

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