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The Electronic Vault Advantage
Keep your document storage approach aligned with enterprise needs.
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Today’s companies are constantly searching for the best, and most cost-effective way to store business-critical documents. Twenty years ago, microfiche served as the industry standard. Today, many companies turn to portable document format, more commonly known as PDF, for long term document storage. But, while PDF may have become the default standard for electronic document storage, many companies that rely on this technology to manage regulatory compliance, business continuity, and customer satisfaction are at a distinct disadvantage.
Alternatively, an increasing number of companies are choosing to store their documents using electronic vaults — high-speed repositories that maintain print streams in their native format. There are six factors that set electronic vaults significantly ahead of PDF storage. These factors include:
Document Accuracy
Electronic vaults store documents in their original format. This is most important when it comes to applied colors, fonts, and language translations, in particular. The electronic vault technology offers native support for all major APA streams, output formats, and common data formats. Basically, the exact print streams used to generate the original documents are stored, with no alterations or chance for errors. This is important since documents archived for regulatory compliance must remain unchanged.
Document Quality
Print streams, once ingested into an electronic vault, are compressed. This compression substantially reduces the amount of storage space required. But, unlike PDF compression where resolution is sacrificed, files can be decompressed in the electronic vault and restored to their original high-resolution quality.
Flexibility
Many tools allow the manipulation of PDFs, but converting a PDF is a difficult undertaking. PDF does not recognize paragraphs, formats, headers, footers, indentations, broken words, or line breaks — making it nearly impossible to transform back to the original.
Electronic vaults support multiple print and file formats, while providing the flexibility to enhance, modify, combine, and engineer print streams. Shared repositories provide access to both documents and data sources to support any type of analysis, web presentment, customer care, or self-service application.
Speed
Although print stream to PDF conversion is easy, the transformation is slow and must take place during data ingestion. Conversely, documents can be quickly loaded into an electronic vault with virtually no disruption to operations. This gives both customer service representatives and customers access to documents within hours of production.
Access
Quick and efficient document archival and access is critical. Indexing a manageable number of PDFs is an option. But, as the numbers of PDFs grow and the index increases, performance degrades and response time slows. The benefit of electronic vaults is that they experience no performance degradation even as the repository increases. The more efficient ingestion process creates a much more scalable solution. The result — users quickly retrieve the exact page they want, regardless of file age, print stream page number, or document page count.
Long-Term Viability
Storage solutions for mission-critical documents must be able to maintain the files over the long haul. Since it is unknown what applications will be used in the future, it is important to store documents in their native format — something that storage in an electronic vault guarantees.
e2 Vault for Superior Electronic Document Storage
Electronic vaults offer many advantages over PDF storage, and the Group 1 Software e2 Vault solution offers additional performance improvements:
- Index architecture with B-tree database structure
- e2 rendering engine
- Customer-centric view
- e2 mobile vault
Overall, e2 Vault exceeds PDF storage and rates high for document storage in the areas of expense management, customer service, and compliance risk
Now that you've read the summary, Download the full white paper PDF.