>>Can you give us a short case study?<<

Here is the gist of it:

We have a FileNet P8 solution, storing scanned images and other types of
documents in Content Manager.  Storage is on an HP SAN solution with
somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 million documents stored in the
system.  Documents are primarily standard office documents scanned
bitonal at 200 dpi.  We do have a smaller subset of engineering
documents that are either PDF's (reports) or DjVu files
(drawings/photographs.  Current storage is slightly above 2TB.  

Records belong to a dozen or so state agencies the share an enterprise
ECM solution.  Agencies currently using the system include: DOT, DHS,
Commerce, Insurance, Job Service, PERS, SOS, ITD, Tax, RIO and others.
In the near future we are planning to add a half dozen additional
agencies (ESPB, DFI, AG, DOH, Land, & Agriculture) to the system.  We
are also rolling out our FileNet system to the ND Court system and to
county recorders.  Existing customers are continuing to roll out
additional DM functionality within their units further increasing our
storage requirements.

Network to nearly all state offices is fiber with full 100 to the users
desktop.

Retention on documents ranges from 1 yr to 100 years or more.  We are
adding imaged documents to the system at the rate of about 5,000 -
10,000 per day.  Our primary means of adding imaged documents is via
Cardiff TeleForm.  We use it as an enterprise forms processing and
capture solution.  We also add documents directly from business
applications and from our eforms solutions (Cardiff LiquidOffice and
FileNet Forms Manager) We use a COLD parser to process and push system
generated documents.

We use FileNet's BPM and will be implementing Records Manager the first
quarter of 2007.

So far our ECM solution seems to be working very well.  

I am in the process of revising our state standards for electronic
records, including imaging.  As part of the effort I have been reviewing
other "standards" (real or imagined) promulgated by a variety of
parties.  Nearly all recommend scanning at 300 dpi as a "minimum".
However, I have been unable to find any definitive reasons for the
choice.  The vast majority of the 300 dpi recommendations appear to be
based on herd instinct rather than technological or practical
requirements.  The one obvious exception often referenced is when the
images are reasonably expected to be OCR'd.

My experience over the years is that scanning images at 300 dpi is an
unnecessary exercise.  While the resulting image is of higher quality,
things like grayscale viewing and printing have virtually eliminated the
benefits of scanning at a higher resolution.  In addition, I commonly
OCR business documents from laser printers.  For the most part,
recognition is not significantly better at the higher resolution.  Our
form processing solution uses 200 dpi as its base scanning resolution
and we process thousands of hand and machine printed forms every day
with minimal user interaction.

The bottom line is I am interested in knowing the answer to whether we
commonly require 300 dpi because everyone else does, or is there a
compelling technical, business, or legal reason for doing so.  If there
is, I have been unable to locate it.  So I am asking this group for
their insight and thoughts on the subject.

Bill R

Bill Roach, CRM
Enterprise EDMS Coordinator
State of North Dakota
ITD/Records Management
701-328-3589

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