High Fidelity Programmatic Access to Document Content

Transcription

1 High Fidelity Programmatic Access to Document Content Standardization and the industry Matevž Gačnik CTO, Gama System Microsoft Regional Director Microsoft MVP Solution Architecture

2 Company About Us Consultants in edms space Solution architects Devs Software development and consulting company Advanced document systems, intensive development 15 years Privately owned Own products, development investment Developing on strategic platforms (Microsoft, IBM)

3 Gama System Document Line Current Solutions Today Gama System Document Line edms, ECM: Gama System edocs earchive: Gama System earchive Based on Electronic Documents, not scans Completeness Innovative (Gama System earchive, innovation of Slovenia) Universal usage Modern technologies, modern demands Simplicity Integrability, portal technologies, SOA Legal validity Existing user knowledge

4 Basics Document Line: Two Products Document System: Gama System edocs Archiving System: Gama System earchive Design Modular platform, open system, integration points Standardized interfaces Modern technology Users work in Office apps Microsoft Word Microsoft Excel Microsoft PowerPoint, Support for Microsoft 2007 Office System Support for OpenXML format Default persistence format in Office 2007 installations

5 Current Legislature Document Content Slovenian / EU legislature ZVDAGA Positions electronic document as an original, if: It is signed by the author with a qualified dsig and cert It is stored and archived by a certified software solution Needs to maintain validity (dsig could be extended by time stamping or resigning) Needs to maintain readability (supports format change, reformatting) Is in a preferred document format If not, needs a certified, authentic format conversion method information value needs to be preserved You can destroy paper documents, no physical archives

6 Current Legal Issues Document Content Slovenian / EU legislature... Specifically - Common Technology Demands (CTD) CTD defines technology demands on document and archiving systems for electronic documents Based on MoReq v1.0/2.0, but formalized and regulated... says: Standard document formats for long term storage of electronic documents for textual and mixed document content should be stored in the following formats: ISO Latin-1 ISO , PDF/A ISO XML SGML ISO 8879, ODF ISO/IEC OpenXML is (currently) not a preferred format When CTD was approved, OpenXML was not an ISO standard

7 Current Legal Issues Impact and Drawbacks Currently If you want to archive document for long term storage, it must be in a preferred standard document format Actual meaning? PDF/A. Even though SGML is an ISO standard, one would probably fail in court to prove OOXML passes XMLism Not everything is XML in OOXML (think /word/media/*) We are pushing for OOXML to be included in the list Major drawbacks Office 2007 penetration in enterprise environment is not at a critical point Office <2007 document format is unparsable, can not be automated seriously Currently, majority of documents can not be stored long term in native format

8 OOXML and ISO Technical View Gains OpenXML is now an open standard Spec is freely available XML based, easily processed Converters available Able to store arbitrary document content Low impact for out-of-band editing only need efficient parsing methods Format is size efficient Not based on bitmap representation Fidelity is high, granularity high, parsable Major benefit in long term archiving systems

9 OOXML and ISO User View Gains High fidelity formats preserve user content Market share of editable content is preserved Fully capable format Preserves formatting and document layout Preserves usability of office software Supports signatures natively Format and tooling Users only work with one tool for storage and editing No need for additional tools (in terms of long term storage)

10 OOXML and ISO Legal and Business View Gains Long term archiving in OpenXML Digital documents will be stored in OpenXML Simpler implementation of storage in edms and archiving systems Generating software and e-archive use the same format No conversions necessary (for legal reasons) no need for authenticity of conversions Additional timestamps not needed no format change Cost benefits Users get what they submitted Archived document is a bitwise clone of the original document Content reuse

11 Programmatic Access Bookmark Prefill, Headers, Footers World needs fast, standards based, programmatic access to document content Past implementations are suboptimal To fill a bookmark programmatically, we need an instance of winword.exe, excel.exe, Server side suffers, not reliable Client suffers, performance wise Our tests confirm OOXML access XML parsing is 2000x faster Practically no memory footprint, working set drops from 30MB+ to 1MB per processing instance

12 Programmatic Access What We Do: Office Documents Document sections are locked User opens/reviews/approves a document Gama System edocs Document content is prefilled Bookmarks are updated/filled Headers are updated Footers are updated

13 Programmatic Access How We Do It: Office Documents Generator concept Our products have plugins, called document generators They generate / update documents & document content They run on document templates & instance documents OOXML generator Handles format specifics without tool instantiation and automation Reads / writes to: Document bookmarks Header, footer content Inserts arbitrary styled text content Inserts images (ie. handwritten signatures, logos) into bookmarks Allows bookmark positioning inside Office files

14 Programmatic Access How We Do It: Word Example Simplified Obtain needed bookmarks and values / images Document system knows which values need to be inserted Gets appropriate values from the system, Unzips.docx Check if bookmarks exists in OOXML Fill: Parses /word/_rels/document.xml.rels. Gets all document parts (headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes) Parses /word/document.xml, inserts all found bookmarks Parses /word/headern.xml Parses /word/footern.xml Replaces XML between <w:bookmarkstart w:id= # /> <w:bookmarkend id= # /> Zips.docx

15 Workflow Steps Each Step Needs Access to Content Users expect to only enter information once Lots of metadata per document Label, code, classification, authors, signers, reviewers, approvers, custom metadata (external document numbers, costs,, references), images Archiving step needs to be transparent no format change due to long term storage Creation (editor or scan) Editing Review Approval Archiving

16 Conclusion Formats and future 90%+ software needs recognition for long term storage Content prefill is still cumbersome, we need supported tooling Vendors are reacting, due to past/current stack limitations OOXML brings promises, but is also complex to parse and support think readability Industry should push for high-fidelity formats, not image representations

17 ? Matevž Gačnik Microsoft Regional Director Microsoft MVP Solutions Architect CTO Gama System d.o.o.