Documation Wrap-up: Document Management Trends for 2022

• General context
• Trends in document management
  • Cybersecurity
  • Hybrid cloud
  • Data management
  • Sustainable digitization
  • Digital identity
  • Collaborative work
• A day at Documation
  • Sustainable digitization
    • Our solutions: hyper-compression
    • Our solutions: universal scanning features
  • Digital signature
    • Our solutions
  • Electronic invoicing
    • Our solutions: ZUGFeRD and Factur-X generation
  • Data extraction
    • Our solutions: OCR
  • Collaborative work and the digital workplace
    • Our solutions: DocuVieware
  • Security
    • Our solutions: redaction
    • Our solutions: encryption
    • Our solutions: PDF/A conversion and validation
  • Digital Information Governance
• To sum up

2022 marks the second year of living with COVID.
For the past two years, businesses and organizations have learned to work remotely with tools and devices that weren’t necessarily set up for hybrid working. New processes and workflows appeared almost overnight, bringing challenges many learned the hard way.
Another aspect is the shortage of jobs, especially in IT, a trend that started well before COVID but that is accelerating dramatically over the past months.
How are companies and organizations in the document management industry are focusing their efforts in this context?

Archimag, the communication team organizing Documation and editors of the leading IT magazine in France, ran its annual survey to a large panel of French companies. This survey aims to follow the digitization trends in French companies and organizations. For 2022, six major trends emerged from the results. For each, we list the current challenges faced by respondents.

With remote and hybrid work on personal computers, connections are not always secure. Different topics to focus on are the rising of machine learning and AI to counter threats and employee empowerment and training. Editors need to provide security by design and different ways to protect data regarding software and solutions.

Risks in this domain mainly lie in vendor dependency and the need for a sovereign cloud that meets national data residency and data sovereignty requirements.
The adoption of hybrid cloud solutions is still low. However,  favoring a public and private mix and on-premises infrastructures that can mitigate security and legal issues.

In this domain, the main challenges are accumulating and growing data from multiple sources. Moreover, half of the data stored by a company is not listed and used (the so-called “dark data”), aggravating risks of non-compliance.
Solutions for companies are the implementation of Global Information Governance, compliant archiving, and standardized tools to manage the document flows from multiple sources.

Contrary to popular thinking, digitization processes are not necessarily sustainable. According to COP26, companies need to limit their carbon footprint. Evaluation criteria include clean energy, recycled materials, devices, optimized software, solutions, and websites.

States and businesses are working on even wider adoption of electronic signatures. A new version of the eIDAS regulation will mention recommendations for archiving signed documents.
The European Union is working on a digital wallet concept that will include a digital ID card and all the information necessary to identify a person or a business.
Read more about the Digital Identity project for all Europeans.

The digital workplace is now a reality for all businesses that must use tools that ensure real-time and secure collaborative workflows.

With the 2022 trends in mind, we’ve walked through the aisles of Documation and went to a few conferences. While we didn’t have time (and it was physically impossible) to attend all talks and workshops, we had a good overview of the solutions exhibited by vendors.
Below is a summary of the topics covered where ORPALIS can help.

You can check the program for a complete view of the three-day event.

It was not surprising to have wide coverage of this topic, with a keynote dedicated to the ways to set up sustainable digitization with the example of successful implementation in the city of La Rochelle.

With laws and regulations in the works, panelists mentioned ways to achieve more sustainable digitization processes:

• reduce energy consumption for data center cooling,
• reduce the consumption of servers,
• reuse devices instead of buying new ones.

At ORPALIS, we’ve been working for years on an innovative hyper-compression engine. As a result, we can achieve a 99% compression rate on some files while keeping the readability intact, if not enhanced.  

Try our hyper-compression engine with your documents:

You will find our hyper-compression engine in our end-user apps PDF Reducer and PaperScan, as well as in all our toolkits for developers.

Sustainable digitization and Green IT initiatives stress the need to stop the planned obsolescence of software and devices.
New operating systems or software major updates are often an opportunity for manufacturers to stop supporting an older range of devices, thus forcing the customer to buy a new product. From phones to scanners, you probably encountered this issue many times.

When we developed our PaperScan Scanning Software, we had in mind to offer a universal scanning solution for Windows OS (since Windows Vista!). While most scanning applications are dedicated to one scanner or one protocol, PaperScan can replace almost any scanning software on nearly every device, old or new.To achieve this goal, we developed a solution compatible with TWAIN and WIA drivers, which make most drivers in scanning devices (scanner, digital camera, or capture card).

Try our online scanning tool with your documents:

You will also find our scanning features in our developer tools.

Many digital signatures vendors and certifying authorities had a booth at Documation. They presented innovative solutions such as remote identity verification via smartphone and facial recognition and APIs to integrate into existing solutions.

Full electronic/digital signature features are available in our SDKs for Desktop, Web, and REST APIs:

• simple signature,
• advanced signature,
• qualified signature,
• multiple signatures support,
• timestamps,
• and more.

Try our Esign demo tool with your documents:

With electronic invoicing becoming mandatory in France in 2024, many vendors presented their solutions to generate and manage e-invoices.

ZUGgFERD and Factur-X are the two standards for electronic invoicing used in German-speaking countries and France. Our Document Imaging SDK GdPicture.NET allows developers to build solutions that generate ZUGgFERD and Factur-X invoices.

More and more companies are using Artificial Intelligence technologies in their products thanks to open and public databases that facilitate the creation of quality datasets.
Applied to document and data management, they are integrated into solutions for document data reconciliation, automatic translation, and personalized user experience.

OCR and other detection and recognition engines particularly benefit from AI, but it doesn’t mean that deep learning is replacing more traditional technologies in all cases. Depending on the context, an OCR or a barcode engine will be faster and consume fewer resources when it doesn’t rely on AI only.
The key is to build solutions that combine both approaches and automatically use the most efficient engine in a given context.

Try our OCR tool with your documents:

In our developer tools range of products, we also offer specific OCR features such as:

• Automatic Document Recognition (ADR), for automatic document classification and categorization tasks.
• Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR), to detect and decode the « CMC7 » and « E-13B » fonts from any structured document such as checks.
• Machine Readable Zone (MRZ), to extract and decode machine-readable characters on ID documents like passports and visas.
• Optical Mark Recognition (OMR), to detect the content of a checkbox, fill-in-area, or multiple-choice examination form.
• Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), to expand the machine vision capabilities of the OCR SDK.

In our end-users productivity apps, you will find OCR capabilities in PaperScan and ORPALIS PDF OCR.

Many companies were present at Documation to showcase their EDM and collaborative solutions. Highlighted features included connection to various electronic signature APIs and digital safe capabilities.

DocuVieware is our HTML5 Viewer and Document Management Kit that allows developers to build web applications with real-time collaboration features in a format-agnostic viewer.
Fully featured (with more than 3,000 functionalities!), it is the most comprehensive toolkit on the market.
With DocuVieware, you can capture, view, edit, annotate, redact, convert, process, compress, manage, and sign all your documents online.

Check our online demos or the viewer displayed above in the Digital Signatures chapter of this article.

Exhibitors and speakers showed how they enhance the security in workflows with features such as task historization, dynamic security features, and access rights management.
Archiving specialists for various industries were also present.

As PDF experts, we provide many tools to secure electronic documents.

The safest way to remove (and delete!) personal and sensitive data from electronic documents is redaction.

Try our PDF redaction tool with your documents:

We provide PDF redaction features in all our toolkits for developers.

Another useful tool to secure PDF documents is the use of one or several passwords to set the rights of the different types of users. Advanced permission features for printing, editing, copying, and enabling access to text for screen readers help to manage sensitive files.
The PDF specification, especially in its latest versions, uses sophisticated encryption techniques to secure files.

Try our password encryption tool with your documents:

PDF/A is the ISO standard for the long-term archiving of electronic documents (ISO 19005).
It ensures that documents converted to this format will be flawlessly readable on any operating system and device in the future. To achieve this goal, PDF/A excludes some actions allowed in regular PDFs, but that prevents a crystal clear rendering or access.
Converting files to PDF/A also helps to secure the content of documents as files in this format will open in read-only mode by default.

All our solutions provide PDF/A conversion features, for any version and conformance level.
If you’re interested in this format, you can read this page and our AvePDF blog, with our articles about PDF/A conversion and the latest PDF/A-4 version.

Try our PDF/A conversion tool with your documents:

Flawless archiving is critical for companies and organizations for legal reasons.
There are many PDF/A converters available on the market, which can produce variable results. PDF/A is a complex format, with many requirements and conformance levels that keep evolving with time. To ensure that all your PDF/A files are compliant with the ISO standard (ISO 19005), it is necessary to validate them.

ORPALIS offers a PDF/A validation engine in its SDKs.

Try our PDF/A validation tool with your documents:

You will find PDF/A conversion for all versions and conformance levels in all our products, and PDF/A validation in our toolkits for developers.

We will finish this article with the Documation keynote about Information Governance that discusses the future ISO standard that will be released soon.
As we wrote in our article about Global Information Governance Day, there are still many challenges that prevent the optimal use of an organization’s data.
The PDF format, with its conversion, collaborative, security, and archiving features, can help with these challenges. However, companies also need performant solutions that are both easy to use by anyone (so without the need to hire consultants and experts) and comprehensive enough to avoid flows coming from multiple sources.

It was nice to actually go to a conference in person again and talk to people!
Our solutions are in sync with what the market is looking for at the moment.

Maybe next time we’ll come back as exhibitors!

Cheers,

Elodie