CD-R chiving to the rescue

Emedia Professional, June, 1998 by Mark Fritz

Unfortunately for IMR, though, Alchemy's unique method of incremental writing without wasting disc space is rendered moot by packet writing. By making CDs function like large hard drives, packet writing allows any archiving software tool to put material on CD file by file. Of course, there are still hundreds of millions of consumers using old drives that will only read ISO 9660 discs, so IMR still has a few years to enjoy its track by track advantage.

Then again, maybe the ability to write incrementally isn't that big a deal. Many tool vendors say it's not that difficult for office employees to save up material on a dedicated area of a magnetic storage system and dump it all at once. Some of the software in this category--including DocuWare's CD-MAKER--even keep track of how much material you've moved into the tool's "database" and will prompt you when you have enough to fill a CD.

KEEP ON TRUCKIN': MAKING A CASE FOR CD-RCHIVING

A good example of a company that has discovered the benefits of archiving with CD-R is Comprehensive Logistics, a division of Compass Trucking. Every day, Comprehensive contracts with 140 independent trucking companies to haul 2,000 loads of steel from a West Virginia steel mill. Every morning, the 2,000 jobs are announced to the 140 trucking companies, who are given 15 minutes to bid; the lowest bidders win the contracts. Besides contracts and faxes, each job also generates bills of lading, delivery receipts, and other assorted paper documents. Because government regulations required the company to keep its records for seven years, Comprehensive maintained a separate warehouse for the sole purpose of archival storage.

To find relief from all this paper, the company turned to Record Imaging, which uses ALOS' DocuWare as its primary tool. Record Imaging's McNicholas helped Comprehensive set up four fax servers and an imaging server running DocuWare, which converts the faxes to TIFF images. Using a split screen, employees at workstations can now call up an original order from the company's AS400 and compare it with the TIFF image of the delivery receipt that the trucker faxed in from the road. Everything is indexed and stored on large hard drives.

For Comprehensive, every day is a new job, so order-related documents are filed away as quickly as possible. To best service customer complaints, however, these past orders must remain accessible. Hence, the need for CD-R. Because Comprehensive doesn't need to access past orders on a daily basis, the company simply burns a CD as soon as 650MB of paper-based material have accumulated. Though employees must take a minute to find and load the CD-ROM containing the information they seek, the process is hardly time-consuming. Using DocuWare, an employee may search across many indexed CDs, yielding a message that directs him or her to the appropriate CD. According to McNicholas, Comprehensive is pleased with its new document management system and is saving more than $6,500 per month in warehouse and paper costs.