Ann

Your question about the 'legitimacy' of paper records reminds me of the
many reasons (excuses, really) people give for wanting to keep their paper
records.  A lot will depend on the legal requirements in your jurisdiction
but here in Australia there are almost no reasons to keep an original paper
record, it's convenience only.  Except where legislation specifically
requires records to be kept in a particular form, the only legitimate
reason is where there is a signature or other marking on a document that
may be material to litigation; i.e., it's harder to prove a signature was
made from the digital version.

In my previous job with one of the biggest local government organisations
here, just about everyone used digital records, including scanned versions
of incoming paper.  It was, I would quote, used by the CEO to the garbo
(garbage collectors) and so you had little excuse not to use the EDRMS
(TRIM).  However, the development/planning people loved their paper,
despite being given digital copies of all plans by the developers.  They
loved it mostly because it was convenient to take a file with the plans on
it to a building site.  They, perhaps rightly, claimed that things like
laptops or tablets (unless they had 50" screens) just wouldn't work if they
had to make a note on a plan.

One of the suggestions that I made towards the end of my time was to use
'semi official' paper files.  I had seen this concept work in a previous
major insurance company here.  Essentially it meant having official-looking
files that contained printed copies of the digital records.  It was made
very clear to the users that these were temporary files to be used for the
convenience of taking documents off-site.  Anything that was printed had to
be placed in the EDRMS.

As for the legitimacy of the digital record, the local government
organisation I worked for was in court regularly.  One of the things the
lawyers loved about our EDRMS was the audit trail.  This came to their aid
again and again, not so much to prove the legitimacy but to underline the
security of our documents - we knew exactly who had seen it, edited it,
printed it, etc.  Users also got to love the audit trail too as they could
see if someone had viewed or edited their document (a really great tool if
you send a link to a document and ask someone to look at it!).

In your earlier email you mention using SharePoint 2010, which we use where
I work now (a large not-for-profit organisation).  SharePoint 2010's audit
trails aren't all that user friendly, but they still exist.

My suggestion would be to document and promote the benefits of using your
system, not the system.  Things like unique and persistent IDs, versioning,
approval workflows, audit trails are so much better than leaving the
document on a drive.

Andrew Warland
Sydney, Australia
My views entirely




On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 4:08 AM, Ann Mangiaracina
<[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Happy Friday Everyone!
>
> Does anyone have any experience with this - We had a QA Audit of our
> Engineering and Construction dept. regarding the security of our project
> records.
>
>
> It has been this dept's. position that the electronic files in the EDMS
> are for
> search and that the hard copy files are the records.   Can anyone share
> what
> type of  security measures they employ to control access to hard copy
> files?
>
> Also, what is required to consider the electronic files in the EDMS as the
> records?  The dept says that each page is not verified after it is scanned
> (some packets are 100's of pages) and therefore does not feel confortable
> using the electronic document as the official record.  We have permissions
> and
> security setup well in our edms so that is not an issue.  Any thoughts?
>  thank
> you, as always, for your input!!!!  You all are the best!!!
>
> have a great weekend!
>
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