Document longevity

One of the biggest risks in document scanning is doing it wrong. A document that is scanned improperly, stored improperly, and with the original paper destroyed, it could be a very serious situation for an individual or organization. Sometimes it's just too hard to anticipate or know what settings to use. For example, while your scanning today may be for the purpose of regular consumption via search and retrieval, tomorrow it could be required and printed for a law suite.

Fortunately, technologies are advancing such that scanning the “Golden Document” is practical and possible. The “Golden Document” is a document scanned with all the best settings for quality; not taking into consideration file storage or performance, the two biggest drivers to reduction in scan quality. The settings for the “Golden Document” are a resolution of 300 DPI, a color bit-depth, and a fill format of uncompressed TIFF. If the “Golden Document” is the optimum, one must make the rationalization of why to ever deviate from it.

With advances in document scanners, compression, and file formats, the need for rationalization becomes less and less. Document scanners can now scan a color image at nearly the speed of a black and white. For this reason, there is little reason to use black-and-white or gray-scale scans. A color document gives you the ability to convert, re-purpose, and print. Scanning at 300 DPI is a setting that should never be compromised. Now that you have the golden scan, you have created a rather large file. Ideally you could compress this file to a more regularly consumed format and not lose quality. Compression technology advances substantially every year. The ideal file format for storage, quality, etc. is arguably PDF searchable. This format has the functionality of a regularly consumed document and the configuration for sustainability. Alternatively, some may choose to create both a PDF plus a word document for the additional ability to re-purpose.

While you may not be scanning the “Golden Document” today, now is a time to revisit why and ways to get there.

Compression: Save space, AND MONEY

Yes compression saves valuable hard-drive space, but as the technology world becomes more and more hosted, it's also just as important for saving money. Previously I have explored various types of compression, general, and file type specific. I have also explored various drivers for compression, archive, and space saving on regularly consumed files. But what I have not talked about in detail is how compression is becoming more and more popular for saving money from hosted storage services.

Hosted software products are being created at a faster rate than installed. Many of these hosted solutions are content driven such as content management, eDiscovery, accounts payable, off-site storage etc. and they are all rooted in storing data. It is the preferred business model for the companies producing these solutions to charge per mega-byte of usage or combination of mega-byte usage and a monthly service charge. For this reason, it's important to consider how much storage is being used up. Not only because of cost control, but also to make sure the system is being utilized on useful data and not garbage.

Often organizations purchase an allotment of storage that they pay for monthly; their goal is to not exceed their storage limit and have to upgrade to the next level. Often with the content management services and in particular documents, they can be uploaded but are never utilized within the system and are purely space wasters.

For these reasons, compression is a great tool to reduce the size of the files on your hosted service. The type of compression used for hosted services would need to be file specific. Hosted applications understand specific file formats and how to consume them; compression formats such as zip would not be useful for that reason. Instead, compression for particular formats such as PDF compression must be used. In this way, you are still working with a compatible and consumable PDF, but at a much smaller size. The driver for the compression must be compression for regular consumption. There are hosted archival systems, but in this case I'm discussing hosted products where the data contained in them are used on a frequent to semi-frequent basis.

By compressing documents a company can store more data for less storage fee. As hosted software products become more common, you will see people seeking better and better ways to make their files smaller but maintain quality.