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Convert your content into
future-proof PDF/A and TIFF
for long-term digital archiving.

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  • Do you need to store your documents for long term preservation?

    Digital sustainability is upon us; and the need to keep valuable content accessible and readable in the long term is only getting more crucial. Not only because of compliance and regulations; but also because organizations needs to ensure they keep valuable information in accessible file formats. 

  • The standards for digital archiving are complex.

    Your enterprise needs to comply with the complex standards for electronic document archiving. Whether these standards require compliant PDF/A or TIFF files, all your content needs to be converted according to specific ISO and other archiving standards. 

    You also need to keep retention periods in mind: patient data, financial information or any other information that should be maintained for a duration of time. 

  • How to ensure the authenticity of the preserved content?

    How do you create compliant content, suitable for long term archival? For example; when converting or changing a PDF in any way, electronic signatures become understandably invalid. After all, you have made a change to the file that was signed, no matter how small that change might be. 

     

    Embedding the original, signed content into the PDF/A compliant version of your files can be a solution. In other words, converting the document(s) to PDF/A, and including the untouched original signed PDF(s) as an attachment inside the PDF/A. However, it still happens manually today;  introducing risks in your compliant document archiving process.

  • Stop using desktop tools to manually convert content into PDF/A.

    PDF/A is an ISO standard, and used by many archiving platforms to ensure content is viewable today and in the future. PDF/A combines the strength of the PDF format together with required long-term archiving ISO standards. 

     

    Many organizations still use manual desktop tools to create and prepare PDF/A documents for archiving. This is time-consuming, expensive and introduces risk of non-compliance.

    Convert PDF, JPG, CSV, Excel, MS Word, XML, TIFF, RTF, HTML AutoCAD, TXT XML and many more with DocShifter
    Curious to see how? Test DocShifter with your files.

    Centralized and compliant PDF/A & TIFF conversion
    for your enterprise.

    DocShifter is the world’s fastest fully-automated any-to-PDF conversion software. Designed for high-volumes, DocShifter is able to connect to your existing systems, create searchable, high-quality, navigation-rich PDF/A or TIFF renditions from your documents and store these in the systems of your choice. With DocShifter, you can fully automate time-consuming manual PDF/A and TIFF conversion processes, reduce costs, strengthen control and compliance for your digital archive.

    Are you looking for a highly scalable, fully-automated any-to-PDF/A or TIFF converter? Give DocShifter a try; you will see why leading organizations rely on our PDF/A and TIFF conversion capabilities for their digital archives.

    Discover more on PDF/A, and the benefits of PDF/A file format here. 

    Support for different levels of PDF/A conformance

    PDF/A-1, PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-3 are the three PDF versions of the original ISO standard (ISO-19005 PDF/A). These, plus PDF/UA-1 and PDF/X are supported.

    Integrate with your existing systems

    Either through native connectors or Rest API, easily access your systems to pull documents, and create compliant PDF/A and TIFF renditions.

    Add conversion power when you need it the most

    Through auto-scaling, your PDF/A and TIFF conversion services run without disruption.

    Reduce risks and strengthen compliance

    Simple desktop tools to generate PDF/A or TIFF introduce risks and slow your conversion process down. With DocShifter, move your enterprise document to PDF/A and TIFF conversion to a secure, centralized platform.

    PDF/A and TIFF conversion without manual intervention

    DocShifter recognizes incoming files, converts them to high-quality PDF/A and TIFF files for digital archiving. Fully automatically.

    Flexible deployment

    Choose where you run your content transformation operations: on-site, in a private cloud, a hybrid cloud or a public cloud.

    Preservation of valuable content via format conversion.

    Convert text or word processing documents, spreadsheets or structured data, presentations, images, email messages and CAD files to PDF/A, TIFF, XML and many other longer-term preservation formats, such as the PDF/A standard.

    Automatically archive all your PDF files. For more information on what PDF/A is, and how PDF/A is used in your digital archive, please visit our blog post.

    Make digital sustainability a priority

    Do you need to make sure that your content (documents, image files, spreadsheets, e-mail and attachments, audio and video files) remain accessible and readable in many years from now?

    DocShifter can convert your valuable content into accessible and readable file formats; allowing you to stay on top of your crucial information.

    PDF/A: Typical Uses, Benefits and PDF/A in Digital Archiving

    Many of us in business and IT set up and maintain digital archives; and compliant digital archives require specific file formats designed for archiving. PDF/A is the most common one.

    But, what is PDF/A, and how is the PDF/A format used for digital archiving? Discover all the answers in our article.

    What is PDF-A, and how to use PDFA for your digital archive - PDF/A and TIFF conversion for digital archiving - document conversion software

    Preserve your text, graphics, images and other metadata with the PDF/A format.

    PDF/A-1 (ISO 19005-1:2005)

    PDF/A-1 is the format for clear visual long-term archiving. PDF/A-1 includes the ability to map text to Unicode and structures the document content to ease accessibility.

    PDF/A-1 is the correct choice if the content is intended for mobile devices and if the PDF/A file must comply with accessibility requirements for digital preservation.

    PDF/A-1a (Level A: Accessible) meets the full ISO standard compliance requirements, whereas PDF/A-1b (Level B: Basic) meets all the minimum requirements.

    PDF/A-2 (ISO 19005-2:2011)

    Unlike PDF/A-1, PDF/A-2 allows merging multiple files into one container PDF.

    PDF/A-2 also offers the possibility to process JPEG 2000 & JBIG2 (improved image compression) and very large page formats, supports embedding OpenType fonts and allows multiple layers.

    PDF/A-2 has 3 different types: PDF/A-2a (accessible), PDF/A-2u (unicode) and PDF/A-2b (basic).

    PDF/A-3 (ISO 19005-3:2015)

    The only difference between PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-3 is that PDF/A-3 allows any file type as an attachment. It is possible to add original data (XML, CAD) and source formats can be provided with the PDF/A-3 format.

    PDF/A-3 doesn’t make PDF/A-1 and PDF/A-2 obsolete, but the current standard format for digital document archiving is PDF/A-3.

    Another good use case of PDF/A-3 is archiving e-mail and attachments.

    Automatically convert your documents to ISO-standardized, compliant PDF/A or TIFF files

    01

    Connect your systems

    Connect DocShifter to all the systems where your content is stored. Either through native connectors, or using the Web Services API. For more information on the integrations, please visit our integrations page.

    02

    Convert to PDF/A, TIFF or other desired formats

    Convert your source content into PDF/A, TIFF or the desired output format(s) for digital document archiving. Centrally and consistently without any manual intervention.

    DocShifter supports more than 300 file formats.

    03

    Enrich the PDF output

    Do your PDF documents need enrichment? Watermarks, header and footers, tables of contents, merging and splitting documents, OCR, bookmarks, hyperlinks, security and much more can be applied.

    Enrich the output fully automatically and conditionally with DocShifter.

    04

    Send the renditions to desired locations

    The converted output is then stored directly in the desired DMS, RIM system, EIM platform, folder or other systems via web services.

    PDF/A enrichment features to accelerate your long-term archive content preparation.

    Make the text searchable in the output document

    Add and remove password protection to/from the output document

    Compress PDF files

    Select the PDF or PDF/A version

    Optimize the output for fast web view

    Adjust the zoom settings in the output document

    Automate the bookmarking of custom styles and more

    Manage hyperlinks

    Manage annotations and comments

    Automatically generate ToC (table of contents)

    Convert just the email message to PDF (and no attachments)

    Store renditions of both the attachments and original version

    Convert all attachments separately as individual output files

    Save copy of message as an .EML / .MSG file

    Create a zip file containing the message, attachments, all PDFs created and metadata file

    Store metadata in specific formats (e.g. XML)

    Create a merged PDF file with the email message and all attachments

    Store everything as PDF or PDF/A

    Define font for email text

    Error handling: processing can continue if one attachment has an issue

    Frequently Asked Questions on
    PDF/A and TIFF conversion

    Yes. DocShifter can be used to convert PDF documents to TIFF image format. 

    Tag Image File Format, or TIFF, is mostly used for storing graphic images and has .tiff or .tif as extension; and is becoming one of the main formats for digital document archiving.

    Yes, DocShifter can convert TIFF image files into searchable PDFs. 

    With DocShifter’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities, you can generate searchable PDF documents from multiple file formats; including TIFF. 

    PDF/A is PDF version, designed specifically for archiving. PDF/A follows ISO standard 19005, and it’s goal is to make sure that documents appear the same on every device in the long term. 

    PDF/A compliant means that your files meet the PDF/A requirements. Some of the most common PDF/A requirements are that the:

    • PDF/A file has all the content embedded (fonts, colors, images, text, etc.)
    • PDF/A file is not password protected (a.k.a encrypted)
    • PDF/A file does not contain JavaScript
    • PDF/A file does not have any hyperlinks or references to external content

    Different PDF/A conformance levels have different and additional requirements that must be met. 

    More information on PDF/A and its use in digital archiving can be found in our PDF/A blogpost.

    Digital archiving is the process of storing documents, content, data that an individual or a company wishes to preserve for a longer period of time. The information is kept digitally in specific archiving formats, such as TIFF and PDF-A. The goal of digital archiving is to have the valuable information easily accessible and readable in the long term. 

     

    Discover more on PDF/A and the benefits of the PDF/A file format in our blogpost. 

    The right file conversion software for digital archiving can bring many benefits: speed, automation & reducing manual work, cost reduction, enhanced compliance and many more.

    DocShifter automates the conversion of multiple input formats (Microsoft Office files such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc., image files, PDF, scanned images and many more) into the compliant archiving formats, such as PDF-A or TIFF.

     

    Companies use DocShifter to convert various file formats into archiving formats in a fast, automated way. The connectivity of DocShifter with multiple content repositories (OpenText Documentum, Microsoft SharePoint, Veeva Vault, e-mail services, Box, Alfresco, IBM FileNet and many more) make DocShifter an easy choice to become a centralized file conversion software for digital archiving projects. 

     

    If your archiving solution does not support document and content transformation, DocShifter can also become a part of your existing digital archiving solution.  

    The software and systems we use today, have the risk of becoming obsolete tomorrow. Think of the old versions of Microsoft Word or Microsoft text editor we used to use back in time.

    Digital archiving is aimed at ensuring the readability, integrity, authenticity and future-proofness of the today’s content.  To ensure that, the content must be in file formats that are specifically designed for these purposes. TIFF, different versions of PDF/A (PDF/A-1 or PDF/A-1b) and many more.

    File format conversion ensures that your valuable content can be converted into file formats that can be opened and read in the future.

    The most important high-level requirements for enterprise document archiving are:

    • Accessibility: The documents must be searchable and retrievable.
    • Security: There should be a mechanism to restrict document access.
    • Integrity: The documents must guarantee authenticity. In some cases, it is also asked to provide the ability to retain information on storage platforms where the unalterable content resides. 

    We designed a free guide to help you while selecting an enterprise file conversion platform. You can download the free guide here. 

    Yes. DocShifter can convert multiple file formats (PDF, PDF/A, DWG, DXF, DGN, JPG, BMP, TIF, PNG, WMF, EMF, GIF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, HTML, RTF, ODT, ODS, ODP, TXT, CSV and many more) into ISO-compliant PDF/A documents. 

    When converted into PDF/A with DocShifter, the PDF/A output will also pass VeraPDF validation. VeraPDF is an open source PDF/A validator supported by the PDF industry and led by the Open Preservation Foundation.

    DocShifter subscription pricing is server, volume and functionality based. 

    To find out more about pricing, please visit our Pricing page and request your estimate.

    DocShifter helps reduce costs in a number of ways:

     

    • Faster performance = less servers needed = lower infrastructure costs = lower licensing costs (e.g. one customer reduced from 10 servers of their legacy tools to 3 DocShifter servers for the same amount of work).
    • DocShifter does not require licenses for any Adobe technology, or the native applications used to create the content. No licenses are needed for Office or AutoCAD for example to be able to convert those file formats.
    • Since DocShifter is not tied to any DMS, RIM or other platform, installation and ongoing maintenance is much simpler. This reduces internal costs to maintain the tool and any external service fees required.
    • Free upgrades are included in subscription fees. 

    Compliant, fast, automated and scalable
    file format conversion for the regulated enterprise.

    See what our beloved customers have to say about us:

    "DocShifter is converting 36.000 documents per day, coming from all over our company (and external). We have no control over what is coming in. And still the failure rate is below 1%.

    And what really sets it apart from what we were doing before, DocShifter tells us what went wrong, so we can act upon the documents that did not convert".
    Operations Manager Large European Bank
    "DocShifter will save us over 750 hours of manual work per year. And we expect the time savings to increase as we continue to expand our use of DocShifter.

    This is significant for our clients who need the eCTD sequences to be published quickly, accurately and efficiently. "
    Jennie MayDirector, Regulatory Operations - PharmaLex
    "Very powerful tool for document conversion and generation. The DocShifter software goes further than our current needs, and from my point of view quite unique in the industry. Quick adaption due to user-friendly workflow creation functionalities. Possibility to create workflows in a user-friendly (non-IT) way. Possibilities for seamlessly integrations into existing solutions."
    Kris V.ITS Business Partner, Clinical Development
    "We are using DocShifter in conjunction with Documentum software. The rendition performance that is observed so far is more than 4000 documents per hour (on 1 single instance). The output provided is fully compliant to health authority specifications (FDA, EMA, PMDA, HC, SwissHealth, etc.) and is configurable for different countries. A true enterprise document conversion solution.”
    Piyush J. Solution Manager
    "We use DocShifter to prepare compliant, submission-ready PDF renditions for all regulatory content.

    The product is reliable, extremely fast and produces output that is compliant with multiple Health Authorities."
    Large US biotechnology companyRegulatory Information Systems Manager
    "We implemented DocShifter into production and have converted over 35.000 documents. Our failure rate has dropped from over 10% to well under 0.1%. We have seen an astronomical improvement in our document conversion processes thanks to how easy DocShifter was to implement and to use. In the course of 12 months, we are going to convert more than 100.000 documents with DocShifter. Fantastic document conversion solution!”
    Chris B. IT System Administrator - PeopleScout Technology
    "We have documentation in different languages, but when converting everything to PDF for submissions, things got complicated really fast. Our rendition engine couldn't cope with all those fonts, and we lost a lot of time fixing problems that weren't supposed to be there in the first place. We decided to make a switch to DocShifter. Scalability during our peak times, ability to deal with multiple fonts, automation (conversion of source documents to simultaneous submission-ready PDFs for multiple health authorities) and performance. These are just some of the things that make DocShifter such a powerful rendering engine."
    Jade O. Document Management Professional
    "We selected DocShifter for the incredible ease-of-use, the simple configuration and implementation, the high-quality ICH compliant output, and the huge number of formats supported. Performance is excellent, and we reduced the number of rendition servers by a factor of 3. All of this, plus the company’s responsiveness made it an easy choice."
    Regulatory Operations & Global Submissions SpecialistLarge pharmaceutical company
    "DocShifter powers the document conversion solution in Generis’ new CARA cloud offering. “We already support many joint customers who have advanced document conversion requirements met by the integration of DocShifter with CARA. We are now happy to be able to offer this on a pre-built package with New CARA on our cloud for such customers.”
    James KelleherCEO - Generis
    "As we are in the middle of a paradigm shift from analogue to digital in Japan, I have been looking for the right solution to support this for many years. In DocShifter we have found a company with solutions that have been selected by organizations of all sizes because of their responsiveness, cost-effectiveness, class-leading performance and unique capabilities that rise above the competition.”
    Kosuke OmodaPresident - eSA Japan
    "One of the things we love about DocShifter is the graphic interface to configure file transformation flows. The user interface is very simple to use and rare to find within other similar document conversion products. Wide selection of connectors to different solutions (EIM & DMS systems) make DocShifter a great choice for our company as well. We also are very happy with the customer support we receive: extremely friendly and prompt.”
    Nikita L.Information Management Consultant
    "With DocShifter, we are seeing better performance with even less resources, compared to our previous solution. The deployment is very easy, and the utilization of hardware/software resources are extremely efficient. Thanks to DocShifter's architecture and not needing Office applications, we were able to save a lot of money and resources by the switch.”
    Istvan V.Solution Architect
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    15 years of experience in automating, simplifying and speeding up document conversion.
    For all regulated industries. 

     

     

    Rated 5 stars on Gartner’s Capterra platform.

    DocShifter document conversion solution is rated 5 starts by our customers on Gartner's Capterra platform.

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