Paper was a mainstay of record keeping for millennia – but it takes up a lot of space, is hard to sort through quickly and is vulnerable to damage. In recent years, the reality of a wholly paperless office has come to pass, but digitisation can still be held back by budgetary and circumstantial limitations.

This report lays out three clear steps for a 90-day project of digitisation that will help your business to plan and execute the move to a paperless model while circumventing the most common roadblocks.

Download now to realise the benefits of going paperless and execute digitisation without any loss of information.

Provided by

A security researcher has warned that text in a document should only ever be redacted using black bars and photo editing software, and that using any other method could result in data being leaked.

Dan Petro, lead researcher at Bishop Fox, also warned that users should editing the text as an image instead of modifying a Word document to have a black background with black text, which can still be read.

Any other methods, including pixelating or blurring the letters, should also be avoided.

Petro raised the issue as part of a challenge by cyber security firm Jumpsec, which tasked the community to to un-redact a pixelated image.

Jumpsec had been investigating how effective a tool called Depix was at recovering censored text to a readable format. As part of that investigation, the researchers opened up a challenge to the wider community to see whether other researchers could de-obfuscate an image using their own tools or through Depix.

Explaining how pixelation usually works, Petro said that tools normally divide an image into a grid of a given block size. For each block, the tool will then set the redacted image's colour equal to the average colour of the original, in an attempt to "smear" the information of the image. However, while some information is lost in the process, it leaks plenty through, warned Petro.

This algorithm is also widely standardised, so the same result is created regardless of whether GiMP, Photoshop, or most other tools are used, he added.

To solve the challenge, Petro enlisted a tool he developed called Unredacter, which takes redacted pixelated text and reverses it back into its original form. To use it, he had to first convert the image to grayscale, as it appeared to contain some coloured letters. His tool renders the letters to a headless Chrome window, meaning no colourised artefacts appear.

Petro also had to lighten part of the image to help his tool process it. He was then able to find the correct font and size of the text, which was made easier due to the file being from MS Notepad - the app uses the default font of Consolas. Following trial and error, he found the font was 24px.

The Unredacter program was ultimately able to successfully deduce what the obfuscated text said, although he was asked to hide the solution until the challenge ended.

“The last thing you need after making a great technical document is to accidentally leak sensitive information because of an insecure redaction technique,” wrote Petro.

Documents leaked by the British Ministry of Defence 2011 famously used inadequate obfuscation to hide sensitive government information. A 22-page internal report on Parliament’s website contained blacked-out passages that when copied into a new document, could still be read. Instead of redacting the classified words, the background was simply changed to the same colours as the letters.

More recently, in 2019, lawyers for Paul Manafort, president Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, filed a response to special counsel Robert Mueller team's allegation that Manfort had lied to prosecutors. A sensitive passage was redacted on page 5 which, by copying and pasting it into a different document, was possible to read. It revealed new details about Manafot's relationship with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former associate with links to Russia.

Security researchers have revealed criminals’ new tactics to impersonate major brands to steal and harvest victims’ credentials.

Researchers at Avanan, a Check Point company, said hackers impersonate major brands to perform phishing attempts. One frequently seen attempt mimics legit communications from DocuSign.

When DocuSign sends an email, it offers recipients an “Alternative Signing Method.” DocuSign prompts the recipient to visit https://www.docusign.com and enter a security code the company generates. This site then offers users more than one option to access and electronically sign their documents.

In a recent campaign researchers are following, hackers send an email that impersonates DocuSign from a docusign.net address that appears to be on behalf of an administrator. In this email, the attackers request the user view and sign a document and offer an alternative signing method.

The link to the alternative method leads users to a fake website where they must enter their password. Hackers then steal the email address and password as part of a credential harvesting campaign.

Researchers revealed other commonly impersonated brands, which tend to be trusted and popular ones. The top three most impersonated brands are Microsoft, which is related to 45% of all brand phishing attempts globally, DHL (26%), and Amazon (11%).

Other research carried out by the company found that 51.9% of all impersonation emails attempted to impersonate a non-executive in the organization. Non-executives are targeted 77% more often than other members of an organization.

“There are a few reasons behind this. One, security admins might be spending a lot of time providing extra attention to the C-Suite and hackers have adjusted. Two, non-executives still hold sensitive information and have access to financial data. There is no need to go all the way up the food chain,” said Jeremy Fuchs, content manager at Avanan.

Fraudulent digital signature use has led some companies to increase security surrounding e-signatures. For example, ESign Genie announced its digital signature platform would support knowledge-based authentication by adding an extra layer of security through authenticating document recipients’ identities before issuing viewing or editing rights. Esign Genie’s feature improves the security of sensitive, private, or protected documents by mandating a Social Security number.

Box has launched a new e-signature function as a free addition to its platform that allows users to complete transactions entirely in the cloud.

The company said that 'Box Sign', which is available now, will also come with a robust set of application programming interfaces (APIs), which will allow businesses to modernise and manage all their agreements via the cloud.

With businesses transitioning into hybrid environments where employees are separated between the office and the home, Box hopes its new feature can help to streamline its customer experience by removing any need for physical documentation.

"Every day, more transactions are moving from paper-based manual workflows to the cloud, and we will only see this trend accelerate as companies shift to a hybrid work environment," said Diego Dugatkin, chief product officer at Box.

"With the addition of natively embedded e-signatures, Box customers will be able to manage the entire content lifecycle in the cloud, realising the value of their content - at no additional cost. From the moment a file is created to when it's shared, edited, published, approved, signed, classified, and retained, the entire content lifecycle can now happen in the Box Content Cloud."

The ability to sign off documents in the cloud has come from Box's $55 million acquisition of Dutch startup SignRequest, which was only announced in February of this year. The takeover was seen as a way for Box to muscle in on Dropbox's territory, with Box Sign touted as the first use case at the time of the deal.

The cloud service has reportedly come under some investor pressure for middling stock performance during the pandemic and there were even suggestions that the company's leadership were considering a sale and had held talks with potential buyers.

Box was thought to be well placed to grow during the pandemic and, while it has benefited from the shift to working from home over the last 12 months, its growth has been far lower than rival cloud businesses.

One of the most persistent goals in business IT over the past twenty years has been to reach the mythical nirvana of the 'paperless office' - a utopia in which paper-based workflows are ditched in favour of digitising documents and records. However, despite the continuing sophistication of scanning and digital document management technology, this goal remains elusive.

But why does paper still hold sway over elements of modern business? This week, we're looking at why the idea of a paperless office remains so attractive, the practical considerations holding it back, and the reasons why a truly paperless office is likely to remain a pipe dream.

Footnotes

• What is the paperless office?
• A complete guide to document management systems
• Regtech and the elimination of paper
• Health department blasted for 'track record of failed NHS digital projects'
• Pick the perfect colour printer
• In search of the perfect scanner
• Printers: It's not easy being green
• How NHS Bedfordshire is building a paperless hospital
• The IT Pro Podcast: Digitising dinosaurs
• Panel Profile: Natural History Museum CIO Alison Davis

Subscribe

• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Google Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Spotify
• Subscribe to the IT Pro newsletter
• Subscribe to IT Pro 20/20

Google has built an AI-powered app that lets users scan physical documents and automatically organise them into Google Drive.

"Stacks" can analyse bills, receipts and any paper documents you have laying around the house and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to scan and categorise before turning them into a PDF.

Users only have to take a photo of their document as the programme can automate the rest. It identifies important information within the document, such as a "due date" or "total amount due", and these bits of information can then be used to help store and search for the documents, with the app auto-generating names based on its content.

The idea comes from Christopher Pedregal, whose ed-tech startup Socratic was acquired by Google back in 2018. Socratic used Google's computer vision and language understanding to make learning tools for high school students. The project was developed by Google's in-house incubator, Area 120, and pulled in members of the tech giant's DocAI team - which has AI programmes for analysing documents.

The app is currently available on Android - free and without in-app purchases - and Google will wait to assess user feedback before launching a version on other platforms, such as iOS. Currently, the Android version can scan a range of different sized documents, such as utility bills, shopping receipts and even identification papers.

Stacks was not the only new AI-based tool Google is showed off on Wednesday as Google Maps has also added a slew of new features. The first is 'Live View', which uses augmented reality to help users navigate indoor spaces such as airports or shopping centres. It uses 'billions' of Street View images to provide live information for a user as they walk through a building, and graphics will mark out where toilets are or the path to the check-in desk.

Maps can also now offer up 'eco-friendly' routes for motorists that optimise fuel consumption based on factors like road incline and travel congestion. Currently, the map updates are available in the US only.

For years, organisations have dreamed of the paperless office. IT managers fantasise about doing away with the racks of filing cabinets and storage boxes containing hard copies of contracts, purchase orders, financial statements and other business ephemera. Truly eliminating paper from an organisation’s workloads can be a daunting – and often impossible – task, but the benefits of document digitisation in terms of productivity, security and collaboration are well established.

For healthcare organisations, these benefits can be even more pronounced; hospitals and doctors’ surgeries are notorious for their somewhat anachronistic reliance on physical forms and documents, and even the slightest efficiency gains can have life-saving results for patients. Sadly, the healthcare sector also tends to have more difficulty than most when it comes to transformation projects. Budgets have little wiggle room for new ventures, and any new system must meet stringent regulatory requirements.

In order to help address these difficulties and start working towards the utopian vision of a paperless facility, Bedfordshire Hospital NHS Trust has been working with Xerox to roll out a three-pronged system designed to cut down its paper usage and increase the level of digitisation throughout its campus.

The centrepiece of the project is MediViewer – an electronic document management system for handling patient records, which Xerox is managing on the Trust’s behalf. This is complemented by an on-campus scan centre to digitise paper documents, as well as a system providing electronic access to scanned data.

Like most healthcare organisations, the Trust’s main priority is providing clinicians with fast and accurate data to support the diagnosis and treatment of patients, and the inefficiency of analogue workflows was a key driver behind its desire to implement a more modern system, according to Josh Chandler, associate director of IT for the Trust.

“There are some inherent issues that exist when you have paper, which I think many healthcare providers have just grown accustomed to dealing with,” he says. “Generally, I find paper generates more paper. And so we need a way of digitising the historical records, but also creating a mechanism to stem the flow of the creation of more paper.”

Data security was also a key concern. Physical documents can be lost, tampered with or destroyed, which not only impedes the efficient delivery of care but also runs the risk of sensitive and highly protected medical data falling into the wrong hands. Digital medical records, he says, can be protected much more easily and comprehensively.

“I won't say it’s impossible, but it’s a lot harder to simply lose digital information,” he says; “certainly a lot harder than it is to lose a piece of paper within a medical record.”

A scanner quickly

One of the main factors in the hospital’s decision to go with Xerox for the delivery of the system was that the company was seen as a safe pair of hands, thanks to the fact that it had previously rolled out similar systems for other NHS organisations. One of these was Luton and Dunstable hospital, which Bedfordshire NHS Trust merged with in April last year, and Chandler’s team consulted with colleagues both there and at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust prior to making the decision.

Another advantage he cites was the fact that Xerox provided an end-to-end managed service, rather than a standalone software package, but Chandler is also quick to point out that the MediViewer software itself ticked all of the Trust’s main boxes as well.

“It provided us with all of the flexibility, from a technological point of view, that we wanted; provision of integration with other systems and adherence to standards that are relevant now. But also the dynamic nature of their development team worked for us with what we were aiming to achieve in the coming years. The functionality met our requirements, and ease of use was a key component of that.”

Since starting the rollout in September last year, the system has been deployed across six departments within the hospital, including paediatrics, gynaecology and diabetes. More than 16,500 patient records have been scanned, and Chandler says benefits are already being seen by Trust staff. The ability to access digital records from a wider variety of locations has allowed clinicians to conduct more remote consultations, making it easier to care for patients while mitigating the spread of COVID, and the system has also reduced logistical pressures within the hospital itself.

“Normally speaking, there was an area within the paediatric service with benching on the side,” Chandler explains, “and it was always completely taken up with patient notes that had been tracked in for that day's clinics. That's now all completely empty, because it's all accessible through a computer.”

Administrative staff throughout the Trust have also reported that not having to order, organise and physically transport vast reams of paper records and notes has given them more time to focus on other tasks. It’s even made their shifts less painful in a literal sense, as Chandler reveals.

“We had nurses carrying around reams and reams of notes,” he says, “and actually, that's not a benefit that we foresaw, but it's been mentioned by a few clinical staff; not having to carry around notes – and often heavy notes – has really helped them in their day-to-day.”

As with any new technology, the rollout of this system hasn’t been entirely without challenges; one particular bugbear that Chandler highlights is integrating MediViewer with some of the Trust’s legacy IT systems, which may not support newer standards. He was also keen, he said, to make the process of scanning existing records as efficient as possible, while also making sure that the results remained accessible for staff.

“That was one of the lessons learned that was shared with us from one of the previous trusts we had engaged with, because the indexing of their records was causing them significant problems,” he says. “They wanted to limit the amount of cost and time coming from the scanning process, but it meant that clinicians were often dealing with a huge, long PDF that they have to scroll through and they can't really search.”

In order to avoid this, the Trust is making use of optical character recognition (OCR) technology as part of the scanning process, to help with categorising pages into sections and index them in the system. This makes it easier for clinicians to navigate the system, and also prevents delays and bottlenecks at the scanning bureau – although Chandler jokes that “there's no technology on the market that can read the writing of a doctor; there's very few doctors that can read the handwriting of doctors!”

Pushing at an open door

In many digital transformation projects, user education and adoption can be as much of a challenge as technical integration, but according to Chandler, the Trust has been actively anticipating the rollout of the new system, with staff looking forward to going live with it.

“Often in organisations like our own, of the complexity and size that we are, that end user buy-in is sometimes very difficult to achieve,” he explains. “But actually, I think that Bedford as a site was in some ways behind the curve, and it really did give many of the clinicians an appetite for digitisation and the strategy that we were adopting.

“This has meant in most areas we've gone live with, we've been pushing against an open door, which has been great, but it would be remiss of me not to reflect that as a challenge that's experienced for most projects like this.”

The Trust is about a quarter of the way through rolling out MediViewer across its estate, he says, and expects it to be live across all key systems by the end of September, barring any major COVID-related disruptions. This will be followed by moving to an on-demand scanning model driven by the new scan centre, but after that, the Trust has further ambitions.

The next step in its plan is hooking MediViewer up to its electronic patient record systems, allowing it to capture more data that can be used to generate further insights and reporting. Chandler says he wants to get away from what he calls ‘flat’ data and integrate the hospital’s systems with data streams from across the wider healthcare community to help build a more holistic picture of regional trends.

In addition, he says he’s looking to expand clinicians’ ability to access the new system remotely, as well as examining how to integrate it with Luton and Dunstable’s systems to create a cross-site solution for the entire Trust.

“I think this forms a basis for much of the work that we're now going to be doing, simply by virtue of the fact that it presents all of that historical information that's held about patients in an electronic format that we can access quite fluidly from a range of locations,” he says, “and I think that for me, this was a key step in our digitalisation journey.”

There are few if any companies for whom documents don’t play an important role in the administration of the organisation. From invoices to legal documents and beyond, it’s imperative to keep everything in good order – and that’s where document management systems come in.

Gone are the days in which paperwork was filed away in the bulky filing cabinets that lined office walls. Indeed, ‘paperwork’ has become a misnomer, as the majority of organisations have abandoned paper and switched to more convenient – and environmentally friendly – digital documents. You have your pick of software suites that enable the capturing, storing, cataloguing and archiving of digital documents.

However, these systems are more than just digital versions of the old filing cabinets. Poorly organised files can slow down processes and reduce productivity, but a properly instituted document management system is capable of organising your information in a far more nuanced way. The speed at which your business can locate and access a particular file can play a key part in maintaining compliance with regulations such as GDPR.

Document management systems often include document and content acquisition, workflow tools, document storage, output systems, information retrieval systems, and security and auditing capabilities – as well as collaboration tools that are particularly valuable in the face of new remote-working trends.

Let's explore these functions in turn and the benefits they can bring to organisations.

Document capture

Document capture is the process of converting a physical document into a digital file, often using some form of desktop scanner. This is essential for archival tasks - such as keeping digital records of expense receipts, courier waybills or employee payslips - and modern scanners will often have features designed to make this easier, like automated document feeders.

Simply creating a digital image file is not enough for businesses, however. When a document contains text, optical character recognition (OCR) is used to extract it from the image and integrate into an organisation's information system. This allows users to search the contents of digitised documents for specific keywords, and allows document systems to automatically categorise documents based on their contents.

There are a number of common formats for digitised documents; image formats like JPEG and TIFF are often used for documents that don't contain a great deal of text, while PDF is favoured for more detailed documents. The PDF file format includes a number of features that make it well-suited to document digitisation; text within PDFs can be highlighted, copied and edited, the file can be protected with a password to restrict viewing, editing and printing privileges, and it accommodates basic tags and sophisticated XML-based metadata.

Workflow

Digital workflows are also commonly integrated into document management systems, providing pre-defined stages through which all documents must pass. This helps streamline their use within the business process and means users and managers know who should be working on what and which person it should be passed to next. Users can be notified about tasks that need to be completed, managers are notified when certain stages are completed, and alerts can be issued when one stage in the workflow is taking longer than expected.

This can be combined with various levels of automation to speed up common and repeatable business tasks, improving efficiency and productivity.

For example, if a purchase order for a certain product is submitted to the system, it can use OCR to detect the type of document this is, then send it to accounts to be logged. Once this has been done, it's then automatically sent to the logistics team to be packed up and shipped out. From there, it can be sent to customer relations as a completed order.

Document storage

Once you've digitised your documents, you need somewhere to store them. Document management systems should be able to store documents in a wide variety of file types, and should ideally include tools to manage where and for how long documents are kept.

For example, some systems may draw a distinction between documents that are being kept mainly for archival purposes and those that are being actively shared or worked on. Archival documents can be stored in high-latency 'cold' storage, while documents that are still active may need to be stored in a more accessible location.

Organisations can also use document management systems to control how long documents are kept for, and can use policy-based rules to automatically delete unnecessary files after a certain period. Security controls can be used to control who has access to certain documents to protect sensitive information, too.

Output systems

Document management is not all about getting documents into a system; you may need to get them out again in a format suitable for a recipient or end user. Output systems handle the extra processing, optimisation, distribution of the document. This can include integration with print systems, as well as file transfer mechanisms.

Information retrieval

Users may need to retrieve documents at a later date. Information retrieval is about making sure the right people can see the right documents at the right time. Indexing, retrieval and search enables users to find documents based on document identifiers, metadata and content.

Metadata is recorded alongside the document to help with retrieval. Such data may include the date the document was entered into the system and the identity of the user storing it, as well as what type of document it is. There may also be text extraction to generate keywords that can be used in text searches.

Collaboration tools

Users not only want to store documents; they will also want to work on them as well. Modern office suites like Microsoft Office 365 and G Suite include various elements of a document management system, but standalone systems will also generally integrate with a range of content creation tools. This makes importing documents into the system quick and easy.

Security and auditing

Securing documents is essential in all document management systems. They can include rights management tools that enable administrators to permit certain people or groups to access specific documents. Organisations can also construct an audit trail to trace who has accessed information, including who might have changed, downloaded, or distributed it.

If an organisation is audited for any reason, a document management system can help in retrieving the appropriate files quickly. It can make the cataloguing or information easy in the event of an audit, and can also be used to quickly roll back changes in the event of any mistakes.

Paper-based documents could easily be lost in floods or fire. Having a centralised document management system with files stored off-site or in the cloud makes disaster recovery easier for any affected organisation.

In the digital age, the idea of entire businesses being run on paper documents is near impossible to imagine, but forms and documents are still being used in many organisations.

Printed documents that have to be completed by hand can be costly, time-consuming and slow for companies. There is also an environmental impact to consider, with recent studies showing almost seven in ten sheets are eventually wasted.

The time it takes for employees to edit paper documents is a problem for businesses and makes it harder to respond to developments quickly. This can cause backlogs and clog up an operation.

With the risks involved in non-compliance as well as significant advances in document editing, management and workflow technology, it’s little wonder that many companies have long since started using alternatives.

PDFs have been around for decades, and there’s a reason for the format’s enduring popularity; it provides an efficient way to combine the best elements of digital technology to paper documents, thanks to things like enhanced security, OCR and advanced editing features.

Forms and documents are old school and can have serious implications for data processing and legal security. It's time to join the rest of the world and go digital.

The advantages of PDFs

Efficiency is one of the key advantages of using PDFs; it’s much easier to fill out a digital form via entering data or signatures into pre-assigned textboxes in a PDF than it is to print it out, complete it by hand, re-scan the completed form and then share it with the relevant party.

The resulting delay between data capture and data processing makes matters worse. Direct capture without disruption can easily overcome these issues - rather than printing out a form and getting it to the relevant department, employees can transmit a completed version directly, with the whole process being completely traceable.

According to IDC, putting in place digital-first document processes like this can boost revenue by 36%, while slashing costs by 30%. Analysts estimate that business and legal risks fall by a third when forms are electronically processed end-to-end. PDFs also offer the ability to make it impossible to edit documents beyond filling in certain sections. Other fully-editable document formats, such as Word docs, can have their formatting completely ruined by one misplaced keystroke.

Paper and printed documents can also entail legal problems. Certain aspects of data privacy make hard copy forms and printouts problematic. Without PDFs, it is very difficult to specify the authorised user group for a document. Anyone with physical access to the records, or who just happens to be standing by the printer when the document prints, has access to potentially sensitive data. Paper documents can be stolen or simply picked up with no way of tracking them down.

In comparison, electronically-produced and distributed PDF documents are considerably safer. Many providers have encryption and access options that mean unauthorised people can't read them. With access management, you can specify who can view, print or change files.

Companies that use PDF documents are also in the best position when it comes to providing proof of communication. Most email providers store a copy of all sent messages and attachments, so that it can be legally proved which document was sent to which address and when. With digital signatures and e-signatures becoming a prevalent method of authenticating digital documentation, users can also be more confident than ever before that regulations are being complied with.

Contrary to popular belief, digital signatures and e-signatures aren’t the same thing, but it’s easy to spot the difference. Digital signatures use encrypted code to authenticate a signer’s identity to sign documents electronically. E-signtures, on the other hand, refer to any electronic process that indicates acceptance of an agreement or a record.

They both replace traditional, inefficient signatures while facilitating digital business transactions, and are as legally binding as a hand-written signature. As a rule of thumb, e-signature processes are easier to implement than their more advanced, yet technically demanding, digital signature cousins.

When looking for a digital authentication solution it’s worth bearing in mind that different countries require different levels of signature verification. Some prefer digital signatures due to the advanced identity verification they provide, while others' legislation will be slightly looser.

You don’t need an overflowing bin beneath your desk to remind you that paper is disposable. Neither is it durable. By maintaining electronic files, you are ensuring that data remains backed up, be it on hard-drives, flash-drives, or stored safely in the cloud. While this could sound slightly labour-intensive, cloud-based systems can be scheduled to provide automatic backups, removing the need for staff to spend valuable work-hours maintaining these electronic files. PDFs can also be made searchable, making it much easier to find the specific information that you’re looking for when trawling through multiple large documents.

What to look for in a PDF tool

All of the major browsers now include in integrated viewer allowing PDF files to be opened and read, but if you want to actually create or edit PDFs yourself, there are a few options. Document creation suites like Word or Google Docs allow files to be saved as PDFs, but they don’t allow for the more in-depth customisation offered by dedicated tools.

PDF editors include the ability to do a huge range of things, including redact sensitive information, batch-convert files to or from PDF, password -protect confidential PDFs, and even create PDFs from scanned documents - complete with making any text searchable and editable through optical character recognition.

The list of potential features and functionality offered by PDF programmes is almost endless, but which ones you’ll need likely depends on the nature of your business and what you use PDFs for. If you’re looking to digitise a large amount of hard-copy documents, then batch-processing and high-quality OCR should be at the top of your wish-list. On the other hand, if your goal is to create PDF-based marketing assets like flyers, reports or brochures, then you’ll be more in need of in-depth layout, editing and collaboration tools.

Pricing is a factor too; some vendors offer their PDF editors via a subscription model, while others will let you purchase it outright. Your preference for CapEx versus OpEx will likely be a deciding factor in which one you find most attractive, but bear in mind that a one-off purchase may mean you don’t benefit from future feature updates.

Whatever your needs, there’s almost certainly going to be a PDF editor that’s right for you - and we’ve put six of them through their paces to help you find it.

PDFelement offers every PDF-editing tool you’ll ever need – and more. And when you consider that the cheapest subscription to Acrobat Pro is £181 inc VAT per year, it’s an absolute bargain. A Pro option ($129) adds OCR, but the Standard variant we tested is likely to be enough for most users.

PDFelement handled even the largest PDFs with ease. Basic functions such as inserting, splitting, replacing and extracting pages are controlled via a neat flatplan interface, and reordering pages is a simple drag-and-drop process.

The editing tools are amongst the best we’ve used: fonts are recognised straight away and you can tweak a text box’s content, colour, position and size by simply clicking on it. The watermark tool brings up a handy preview dialog, where you can specify its opacity and whether you’d like it above or behind the text.

Meanwhile, the Comment tab is a proofreader’s dream: you can highlight, underline and strikethrough text – as well as add boxes, callouts and sticky notes. If you’re part of a multi-person workflow or often work with sensitive information, there’s a range of stamps such as “Approved”, “Void” and “Confidential” to drag onto the page.

The Form tab lets you add forms with tick boxes, lists, images and data signatures, which is useful if you require customer or colleague feedback on a document. What would otherwise take ten minutes to create in Word takes a fraction of the time in PDFelement.

Then there’s privacy. The redact tool under the Protect tab allows you to black out text, with planned deletions appearing with a red border before you confirm them. You can also encrypt, password-protect and digitally sign a PDF, or permanently remove information.

You’re well covered in the compatibility department: conversion to TXT, RTF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files are PDF editor staples, but you can also transform your document into often overlooked formats such as EPUB and HTML. What’s more, the software provides time-saving buttons to share PDFs directly to Dropbox, Google Drive or, if you need specific eyes on your document, email.

In short, PDFelement is stuffed with convenient features, while doing the basics exceptionally well. And, in a world of subscriptions, the ability to buy it outright for a reasonable price only sweetens an already lip-smacking deal.

Able2Extract takes a pared-back approach that focuses on presenting the basics in a clean interface. The website describes it as “Your Swiss Army knife for PDF files”, which sounds laudable until you see that it costs $150 compared to $79 for Wondershare’s exceptional PDFelement software. Suddenly the knife seems sharper.

Sadly, its performance is blunt. The barebones Edit Document tab contains tools for editing or adding text, shapes and images, alongside redaction, Bates numbering, merge, insert, delete and resize functions. We found editing to be a fiddly job, with text boxes often taking a few clicks to jump to life. Oddly, you have to manually draw on redactions, highlights and strikethroughs by default, rather than them automatically sticking to a line of text.

The curiosities continue in the Custom Excel tab, which lets you add tables to PDFs and then convert them to an Excel file. In practice, it was laggy and frustrating to control. The Sign and Secure tab, meanwhile, is almost empty: you can add a digital signature, set passwords, toggle a tick-box list of permissions and that’s your lot.

The form-creation tool is a similar exercise in frustration, with various elements sticking to your mouse and generating old-fashioned dialog boxes that beep at you. It’s lucky that the undo button is huge and located at the left of the toolbar, because you’ll be needing it a lot.

Able2Extract’s saving grace is the Convert tab, which houses a generous selection of file types: CSV, HTML, AutoCAD, TXT, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, searchable PDF and Microsoft Office. You can also copy a whole PDF to your clipboard, take a screenshot and set batches of PDFs to convert. That “searchable PDF” option implements optical character recognition (OCR) on scans, but results from a dog-eared and yellowing page from a 1981 NME were poor: huge swathes were highlighted in blue when we wanted to pick out an individual sentence and the search function was patchy.

Able2Extract is easier to navigate than other PDF editors, with a minimalist interface, but that’s because the feature set is slim. That issue is compounded by that fact its performance – even while doing rudimentary edits – was poor and the tucked-away OCR tool was lacklustre compared to cheaper options.

And that’s the biggest blot on Able2Extract’s copybook: it’s almost double the price of PDFelement and over double that of Sejda PDF Desktop, both of which will provide swifter edits and more tools.

A small part of us quite wanted to see Adobe Acrobat Pro’s throne usurped by one of the other PDF editors, but it’s the de facto standard for a reason. This, if you can stomach the price, is a simply fabulous piece of software.

Although it took the longest to install, users are immediately given the tools they’re most like to use on a daily basis: the highlighting, sticky notes and export functions sit front and centre, either on the main or right-hand toolbar. That means there’s no navigating through icon-strewn tabs in search of, say, OCR or watermarks.

Editing PDFs is a joy, with text boxes responding immediately to clicks and images moving around the page without a stutter. You can even tweak the character spacing and scaling – a product of Adobe’s position as the go-to for publishing professionals.

You can create a PDF from pretty much every format you care to name, as well as from your scanner, a web page or content in your clipboard. Likewise, exporting to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, JPEG, TIFF, PNG, HTML, RTF, TXT and XML takes just a few clicks.

Dig a little deeper and Adobe’s suitability for business use becomes abundantly clear. For instance, the Tracker tool lets you manage your PDF workflow, while a “Send for Comments” button allows you to type in an email address and ping off a file to a colleague or client, who doesn’t need an Adobe account.

Acrobat Pro’s OCR is outstanding, although enhancing pages and recognising text occasionally took longer than we’d like. It cleverly creates an on-the-fly font constructed from existing characters on the page, which meant we could create realistic-looking replacement text. The downside is when the characters aren’t there, Adobe uses an often clunky default instead.

Privacy-wise, you can set a password, “Remove Hidden Information” – such as metadata, comments, hidden text and overlapping objects – and encrypt PDFs with either a certificate or password. You can even pretend you’re a Cold War spy by compiling a “Security envelope” containing multiple documents.

So, after the best part of three decades, Acrobat Pro still leads the way, but it’s no longer alone: Nitro Pro and PDFelement are both notable – and cheaper – alternatives.

Less, the old cliché tells us, is more. We wouldn’t usually argue that a piece of software should have fewer features, but we’ll make an exception for Foxit: the interface is cluttered, with a migraine-inducing selection of tools behind its 13 tabs. That would be forgiveable, but we suspect this was behind our biggest problem with Foxit: crashing. While PDFelement, Nitro and Sejda often took a few minutes to complete the most strenuous tasks on our test PC, Foxit would often throw up its hands and promptly shut down in protest.

It’s frustrating because what Foxit does well, it does brilliantly. The Edit tab gives you all of the Word-style tweaks, along with extras such as inserting audio or video, re-flowing text and adding an “Article Box” to separate content on a page. The text edit function was responsive, as were the tools for tweaking images – you can clip, crop, shade, boost the opacity and shear to your heart’s content.

The conversion tools are equally thorough. Not only can you transform a PDF into an RTF, TXT, XML, HTML, JPEG, PNG, TIF or BMP file – as well as the Microsoft options – but you can create PDFs from the scanner, a web page, the clipboard or by combining existing files. If you want to start from scratch, there’s also a prominent “Blank” button. The Convert tab is home to a Preflight tool that checks your PDF for issues in the manner of an antivirus scanner, but, you guessed it, this repeatedly caused Foxit to crash for us.

Foxit’s pièce de résistance, though, is its OCR tool. When we threw the troublesome page from a 1981 copy of NME at it, the results, without any exaggeration, were jaw-dropping. As you can see from the screenshot above, Foxit also corrected the angle of a scan of a hand-printed, 18th century-style poster, recoloured it to make it more readable and made the text editable – with no mistakes.

A list of the remaining features would fill another article twice over, but highlights include a tool that reads your PDF aloud, three page-measurement tools, batch printing, PDF optimisation, tracked review emails, OneNote compatibility and Bates numbering.

When Foxit wrote “Everything in Acrobat at a fraction of the price”, it wasn’t joking: it has everything for a £146 one-off payment, compared to Adobe’s £181 annual subscription. Some of the features – such as its OCR – are phenomenal and could be worth the admission price alone, but far too many important tools caused Foxit to crash, leading to a reluctant three stars out of five.

Nitro Pro lives up to its name: for power users who want explosive performance, a hoard of features and well-executed basics, it’s up there with the best.

Installation takes a while, but that’s down to the breadth of features. These are organised into tabs that carry more than a whiff of Microsoft Word, and the large, orange-accented icons mean it’s easy to find what you need. Nitro’s emphasis on customisability is immediately clear too: you can add your most-used, or “favourite”, features to the toolbar via the button.

Nitro breezed through editing both our text and image-heavy test PDFs. After you click on them, text boxes flash and then become fully editable, and Nitro’s font recognition rivals that of PDFelement. You can easily tweak images’ brightness, contrast, colour, resolution and arrangement (“send to back/front”) too.

Document editing, conducted via the Page Layout tab, isn’t as user-friendly as in PDFelement or Seijda, but the insert, rotate, delete, watermark, Bates numbering and bookmark functions are all present and correct. We especially liked the “Auto De-Skew” option, which levels askew images in scans without user input.

In the Review tab, Nitro offers the ability to scribble freehand on a PDF – although, unless you have a very steady mouse, you’ll need a stylus. A nifty tool also brings up an onscreen ruler for measuring page elements, which will appeal to designers and perfectionists alike. Rounding off the jam-packed tab are a function for comparing two pages side-by-side and OCR. In our challenging 1981 NME test, the OCR made the text copyable and searchable, but on-page edits were beyond it.

One negative is a comparative dearth of sharing options: you can attach a PDF directly to an email or upload it to Nitro Cloud – and that’s it. Still, the batch processing (File | Batch Processing) helps to make up for that: you can convert, print and apply OCR to multiple PDFs at once, while creating a sequence takes frequently performed tasks out of your hands.

So should you download Nitro Pro or PDFelement? They’re both superb, but Nitro is better for those with a heavy workload, helping them to become lean, mean PDFing machines.

Unlike the other editors in this list, you can use Sejda for free indefinitely, but the caveats are numerous: you can only perform three tasks per day, can’t handle PDFs over 50MB or 200 pages in length, and can only convert documents one by one. That may work if you only do occasional editing, but most users would be better off with the paid-for version.

Sejda’s sleek interface condenses everything you’re likely to need into the All Tools dropdown menu, with a healthy selection to peruse. Our eye was drawn to the OCR capability, which works well. In our challenging ancient NME test, it gave us searchable, copyable text. Granted, it needed formatting when pasted into a Word doc, but that’s to be expected.

The file-compress function is similarly smooth. Depending on the size of the document, you’re presented with a screen indicating that “Your task is processing” for anywhere from a couple of seconds to a few minutes. In the latter scenario, Sejda compressed an image-heavy PDF of a magazine cover from 2.92MB to 411KB with no discernable impact on readability. Impressive stuff.

Sejda didn’t conduct image-heavy editing as successfully as PDFelement, with text on our test file popping out of alignment or changing colour when clicked, but those slight deficiencies are balanced out by practical, everyday tools such as digital signatures, “whiteout” (Tipp-Ex to us Brits), easy annotations, form creation and text replacement.

As well as the usual conversion to Word, TXT, JPG and Excel files, Sejda has a few more tricks up its sleeve: quickly turning a PDF greyscale will be a boon to users looking to save ink, while the ability to “flatten” a document à la Photoshop will seal in any edits. And there’s plenty to please small businesses here, with support for Bates numbering, watermarks, PDF unlocking and password protection. You can even use the software to repair a damaged or corrupted PDF, which may not be a common occurrence but is a neat fail-safe.

All of this makes Sejda an attractive proposition for individuals and small businesses. PDFelement is still the better upfront purchase, but keep in mind that Sejda’s rolling annual subscription ($63) provides access to the web-based PDF editor, which could be a clincher for users on Chromebooks or tablets.

Digital Transaction Management (DTM) is a category of business applications that use cloud-based software and services to digitally manage document-based transactions. It encompasses digital signatures (e-signatures), document workflow and archiving, authentication and automation, and is seen as a key step in an organisation's digital transformation journey.

In other words, DTM takes the processes many businesses have traditionally conducted on paper - proposals, contracts, forms, data assembly and agreements - and makes them 100% digital.

However, DTM is about more than just digital documents. Many services now include an audit history, identity proofing, secure transactions and enterprise administration tools that bring a whole range of business benefits beyond ridding the office of piles of paper.

The global digital transaction market is expected to reach over $8 billion by 2025 according to market reports, and it is an area that both SMBs and enterprises are beginning to see the value of, particularly as part of their digital transformation strategies.

This is in no small part due to the huge costs of paper-based processes. When evaluating the total cost to produce paper documents, one estimate puts it at 1-2% of enterprise revenues.

Although we may be some way from an entirely paperless office, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has forced organisations to speed up their digital transformation plans and many paper-based processes have been forced to go digital.

With that in mind, it is worth being aware of the benefits that fully digitising document processes can bring.

Time savings

Digitising your document workflow makes documentable processes much more efficient, saving time for both employees and customers. Even without the physical restrictions of coronavirus, printing, mailing, faxing, signing, and scanning documents complicate things and take up valuable time.

When you cut down on time-consuming paper-based processes like new customer sign-ups, terms and conditions agreements, contracts, and legal documents, you create a better customer experience. Customers expect experiences to be quick, seamless, and reliable, which paper-based processes are certainly not. In a 2020 DocuSign-commissioned Forrester study, 32% of respondents said manual processes resulted in abandoned deals and reduced contract completion rates. Meeting customer expectations is clearly important for retention and your bottom line.

What's more, digital processes give you full visibility over business deals, so that you can easily look back on things like contract history afterwards.

The time-saving benefits for employees are also considerable, especially in paper-heavy departments like HR, where DTM can bring together hiring paperwork, contracts, onboarding, and payroll forms into a single process.

In fact, according to a recent Forrester survey, 41% of business leaders said that improving efficiency was their top reason for adopting DTM. Automating and streamlining routine tasks gives employees the freedom to focus on more important tasks and can make them more motivated if they’re wasting less time with inefficient processes.

From more productive employees and happier customers, to time freed up for things like business development, saving time translates to saving money in both the short and long run.

Effective collaboration

Many businesses are still reliant on email for collaboration, and whereas it is a good communication tool, it's not necessarily the easiest way for multiple people to work on the same document. With the rise of cloud-based messaging platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, it's now easier than ever to relay necessary changes to a document and boost efficiency.

A good DTM software or service will make it much easier for teams to collaborate, with time-stamped changes, reviewers, authentication and more, speeding up the entire business lifecycle.

DTM also makes it possible for remote workers to work effectively alongside on-site employees on documents, rather than being unable to access printed files or having to carry sensitive information around in paper form. This is particularly useful right now, as a distributed workforce has become the norm thanks to COVID-19 office closures.

When many of the analogue processes involved in everyday business interactions are automated by DTM, employees are no longer tethered to the office, so as well as having the time to focus on their wider job role rather than document processing, they are also able to take advantage of more flexible working hours and locations.

Increased compliance

Since every DTM transaction leaves a digital audit trail, documenting compliance for laws, regulations and internal processes is much quicker and easier than paper.

Rather than posting copies of contracts or scanning and emailing copies of sales agreements, e-signatures provide an easy way of keeping these records without relying on proper filing or tracking the physical documents.

E-signatures also ensure all documents are signed legally, employing technology compliant with industry standard regulation. The best DTM for your business is one which can seamlessly integrate with existing applications, allowing for the technology to be utilised across each department.

Digitisation of processes also greatly reduces the risk of human errors. Through strict management of transaction workflows, compliance with legal and industry regulations can be in-built within the DTM, retaining customer privacy and data-protection.

Stronger security

A DTM system not only provides productivity tools, but is also beneficial for security and confidentiality through reducing the risks associated with storing files in a physical format.

With DTM, there is no danger of printed documents being left around, stolen, or going missing in the post, ensuring the information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Digital documents can also be tracked, whereas once you print a physical document, it could be grabbed from a shared printer or sent to the wrong person without any means of finding out where it's gone.

Additionally, digital tools often come with security features such as password protection and biometrics to provide access control, meaning that that documentation is managed and viewed only by authorised users, also going some way to achieving increasingly difficult compliance goals.

Supports digital transformation

Digitising paper workflows should by its very definition be a key part of any organisation's digital transformation strategy. But digital transformation is about more than just digitisation - it's about linking each aspect of the business to create an efficient digital operation.

Because Digital Transaction Management is all about the end-to-end process, it can play a key part in bringing together different processes and departments within an organisation, reducing errors and increasing efficiency, as well as making it much easier to do business with clients and customers.

Businesses can implement DTM on a departmental basis, prioritising sales, finance or HR, but some companies may find it more beneficial to introduce it at a company-wide level. However, it's important to make sure that there is stakeholder buy-in and enough training and support to make the transition. A mass-shift from any paper-based to digital requires making certain your employees fully are up to speed.

One point to note is that although there are many providers that have DTM offerings which may address the individual goals of a paperless office, a DTM service or software by definition encompasses every step of a digital workflow, and it is this end-to-end aspect which is most beneficial to digital transformation efforts.

Document management isn't a sexy new idea. It's at least as old as computing itself: as a child, I remember asking my parents why they needed so many little keys on their office keyrings, and getting the answer that these were for their individual, lockable output trays on the various printers and copiers they used.

The documents they handled were so sensitive that even a casual bit of misfiling could spell disaster - and individual secretaries were, even then, becoming anachronistic. So their employer had invested in a complicated, state-of-the-art copier that could keep track of who was making each copy, and deposit each user's prints securely into their own personal out tray.

Some years later, I happened to meet a programmer who had worked on the Post Office's OCR project - a project which transformed the business of letter sorting by electronically reading handwritten postcodes and turning them into those little blue dots you used to see printed on the outside of the envelope. It was a necessary evolution, he explained, as the number of letters being processed was outstripping the availability of workers to route the mail by hand.

Like the locking trays, those blue dots were reflections of the supreme importance of pieces of paper - and the growing difficulty of managing them. From one perspective, you might say that the Rise of the Machines began in the 1970s as a direct expression of the need for document management.

That's not to say that it's ancient history. Document management remains crucial in the 21st century. For sure, it's become something much broader than simply keeping track of sheets of paper: the QR code on your smartphone that lets you board a plane is a document, just as much as a letter from your landlord that lets you move into a new office. But the old issues - too many eyes on one type of document, not enough on another - remain as prevalent as they ever were.

All that's changed is that the modern equivalent of the lockable-tray copier has to deal with those who carry their sensitive data around on an iPad rather than in a cardboard folder (and who don't necessarily understand the limits of security when it comes to Wi-Fi printing). Indeed, there's still much to be said for the lockable paper tray, as a metaphor if not a reality. It may go against the optimistic precepts of certain computing gurus, but it's a practical solution to an everyday problem - and that's what document management is all about.

Paper trail

Small companies tend to assume that their workflow is too simple to justify investing in anything more than a filing cabinet or two. But even if you don't need to do much in the way of actual managing, technology can help. One of my old clients, in the course of a deal, ended up holding some sensitive documents that were (even by the standards of these things) very long. It rarely needed to refer to them, but had to retain them securely - which meant dedicating two full-height office cupboards, in a room with a locked door.

As you can imagine, the mere process of scanning in all this paperwork yielded huge rewards. The data was downsized into a single locked drawer, allowing the company to situate two additional staff in the room that had been freed up. In consequence, it ended up increasing its turnover by about a quarter of a million pounds a year.

That might sound like a special case, but that's the nature of the beast. Talking about document management in general terms has always been a challenge, because it's in the narrowest, most specialised roles that the technology most visibly pays for itself. Those who really need a lightning-fast write-once storage subsystem already know it; with the more generic stuff, like a simple scan and store process, it can be harder to point to exactly where the benefits are going to justify the investment.

Indeed, I come across plenty of businesses that are suspicious that costly document-management projects are scams or rip-offs. (Then again, that's not unique to document management - such accusations come up with IT projects of all kinds.)

Factor in a general perception of document management as simple and old-fashioned, and it's easy to understand why companies baulk at spending money on something that "ought to be easy". But even if we accept that some aspects of the technology are simple and old-fashioned, that's no bad thing. It's a classic geek mistake to think that every modern problem needs a rarefied, compute-intense solution.

Get the hardware right

You might assume that document management starts with a scanner, but it's nigh-on impossible to do rational document management if your printers aren't up to the job. If something starts out as paper, there's a good chance it's going to get printed out again at some point; we may want to save the environment, but people are more comfortable clutching a nice physical piece of A4 than referring to a digital representation of it.

Indeed, you should probably proceed on the assumption that people are going to print more than you bargain for - and the same applies to scanning. I've had arguments with companies who simply refuse to believe the figures for numbers of pages ingested per day into their document management systems.

In short, the best advice is not to skimp on the hardware, even if the initial cost seems higher than you'd hoped. Depending on your needs, you may be able to save money by investing in a big multifunction office printer with its own ADF, so it can tear through big scan jobs in minutes or seconds. By all means, test your procedures with a slow, clunky 29 inkjet MFP before you roll them out, but realise that thousands if not millions of sheets of paper are likely to pass through them before you next come to review your document management needs.

A few more practical points: if you expect to scan lots of big documents, scanners that move the paper past the head, rather than the other way about, are normally much faster.

(Read the PC Pro buyer's guide to desktop scanners in issue 278, p92, where you'll see reviews of Brother, Fujitsu, Plustek and Xerox machines. Or jump to the A-List on p18.) If you need to digitise lots of bound documents, camera mounts can grab high-quality snapshots while you turn the pages by hand.

Keep the goal in sight

The ambitions of document-management have expanded a long way beyond those early lock-boxes. One currently fashionable idea is seeking to connect together the many different apparitions of a customer across your diverse products and systems. The benefits are obvious, but if your CRM is in the cloud, your email server is 8,000 miles away, and your document scans are right beside you, it becomes quite a major project. Ask yourself whether it's worth the investment: you may well find that you're dealing with Pareto's 80/20 rule, as 80% of the data you're storing could well end up sitting dormant for the entirety of its retention cycle.

Indeed, while the benefits of document management may not all be obvious, there's much to be said for keeping things simple. As I've mentioned, it's an easy mistake to try to push the technology out of its comfort zone, and beyond what's really advantageous to your company. Keep focused on the practicalities and you won't go far wrong.

In the world of IT, the year 2020 will be remembered for many things, and among them should be PDFs rise to prominence. Of course, to most professional, PDFs are nothing new, yet the surge towards remote working (stranding workers far from their office printers) has enforced unprecedented reliance on this arm of digitisation.

On the one hand, PDFs are a scalable, ready-made solution to facilitate remote working. On the other, they are a vulnerability, with greater amounts of sensitive, digital data created for cyber criminals to target.

Today the cost of a cyber breach reaches on average $3.86 million, a figure made more devastating by the uncertainty in which we find ourselves. And the damage doesn’t stop there. When sensitive information falls into the wrong hands, reputations will be tainted and customer loyalty lost, not to mention the consequences if data protection regulations are breached.

Every single PDF document a company generates, distributes, edits and stores must be carefully safeguarded. Fortunately, some PDF tools come with in-built security features. A good start, but with PDFs accessed from various devices, across systems, and at different stages of workflow, the enterprise must do more to ensure security.

On your journey to protecting your PDF documents, there are three key factors to consider.

Password protection

A good PDF solution will allow differentiated access for creating, editing, saving, printing and reading PDF documents. In terms of password protection, there are two levels that are necessary for a sufficient level of security: permission to open a document and permission to edit it.

Protecting the document against being opened is important if only a defined group of recipients is allowed to open it. One example is if confidential information is sent by email - in principle, anyone who gains access to the email can also read the document. However, if the document is secured with a password, only the actual intended recipient in possession of the correct password will be able to open it.

Permissions passwords play an important role, particularly when collaborating with internal or external co-workers, or when communicating with customers. For example, team members may be able to view, print out and add comments to a project plan, but should not be allowed to remove or add pages to it. Similarly, customers should be able to fill in forms and sign documents, but not to modify the text in any way.

It is possible with some PDF providers to go further and use encryption to ensure that protected files can't be read by unauthorised people. But there are potential problems to be aware of with encryption, including meeting various compliance standards, and whether the encryption can be recognised by older PDF applications.

Confidential information removal

In many circumstances, personal data should be removed before a document is circulated to protect it, in a process often referred to as redacting. It is not enough to simply put a black line across the information that should be concealed, as an experienced PDF user would easily be able to remove this line again. Instead, the information must actually be removed permanently. Redacting the section in question simply indicates that sensitive data has been removed, which is particularly relevant for authorities and other public bodies that are required by law to highlight where information has been removed.

All private companies have to handle personal information that is subject to data protection, and must not be passed on to third parties. The consequences for non-compliance under GDPR regulations are severe. Therefore, a PDF tool must be capable of permanently removing this information in a traceable way, including potentially revealing metadata and hidden information.

Certificate-based signatures

It is becoming increasingly common to sign documents with a digital ID, which approximately corresponds to a signature on a paper document. If unauthorised changes are made to a document after it has been signed, the digital signature becomes invalid.

Documents may be signed several times by different people. When deciding on a PDF tool, it's best to opt for an application that not only enables documents to be signed, but also to be stamped with a digitally-authenticated timestamp. This indicates that the contents of any data file haven't been changed since that time.

Digital IDs not only allow a PDF solution to authenticate documents, but also to protect them. This is a process known as certifying, which allows the owner of the document to apply a signature and document protection at the same time. The signee can completely lock the document, or allow certain actions to be available for others such as form filling or commenting.

Document management is vital to all businesses, but some need to take more care over their data than others. Here we examine how to look after information in a mixed environment and the challenges faced by regulated industries.

Whether held in a filing cabinet or a server, documents and files are the crown jewels of your business they contain the details of every transaction made, every contract signed, every piece of intellectual property created.

And just like the crown jewels, if they are misplaced, mishandled or stolen, you have a very big problem.

That is why compliance is so important for businesses while it might not generate value in itself, it is the organisation's memory, keeping track of deals done, products and plans that worked or didn't, clients and employees who have come and gone.

Dealing with a mixed environment

Almost all organisations, whether one-hundred years old or just 18 months, will have a mixed profile of important documents, whether stored on paper, on disk, on the company server or in the cloud.

When it comes to document management, this can make keeping track of everything more complicated, as there are lots of strings to tie together.

James Mullock, a partner at law firm Osborne Clarke, said: "It is a difficult subject that a lot of businesses grapple with, and it tends to be something that gets swept under the carpet because it's not a revenue generating activity."

However, this can be a dangerous attitude to have.

"As things get moved to outsourced suppliers or as things get moved to a digital format and the paper copy is inappropriately stored or destroyed, that's when problems arise," Mullock said. "Quite often the fines that arise probably stem back to a slightly disorganised approach to data destruction and what was lost really didn't need to be held onto at all."

Examples of this kind of error abound, with record fines being issued for what could be described as simple carelessness.

So what is the answer?

According to Mullock it's a combination of rolling out a comprehensive, detailed data retention policy that will help guide employees as to what should be done with documents, databases and so on, irrespective of what format they are in.

"You need a cradle-to-grave approach to all data, from creation through storage and finally to destruction. In some ways it shouldn't matter whether it is stored in the cloud, on premise in servers, on disk or on paper," he said.

The keys to this are knowing what you have and how sensitive it is, knowing where it is, and knowing when it should be destroyed.

Equally, there are some types of data that may need to be held on to for a very long time or possibly indefinitely.

"Some categories of information you really should be keeping hold of, particularly anything that could be applicable in a legal case, as it could be disastrous if that was over enthusiastically destroyed," he said.

Regulated industries

Of course, for some sectors, the need to keep an eye on what data is stored where goes well beyond general good practice.

Personally identifiable information, such as names, addresses, bank account details are all protected under the Data Protection Act (DPA), which is applicable to all organisations, irrespective of industry. For example, if a company loses or suffers a data breach in its HR records, it could be penalised by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) under the DPA.

However, in the legal, medical and financial sectors in particular, as well as certain areas of the public sector such as social services, extra care must be taken to protect data while you have it and destroy it once you no longer need it, as all three handle high levels of sensitive personal data.

Fines for data breaches in these fields can reach into the hundreds-of-millions of pounds in June 2012, Sussex University Hospitals Trust was fined 325,000 after hard drives sold on the Internet were found to contain the personal details of thousands of staff and patients.

NHS Surrey managed to make a similar mistake a year later, resulting in a 200,000 fine, while the Bank of Scotland incurred a penalty of 75,000 after it repeatedly faxed documentation including photocopies of passports and driving licenses to the wrong number.

A comprehensive document management strategy, as described by Mullock, could have prevented these kinds of leaks from happening.

In the cases of the NHS Trusts, the destruction part of a properly implemented data lifecycle management policy would most likely have seen the data being erased before the hardware was sold on.

The case of the Bank of Scotland may be more complicated, however the organisation did identify a problem with employees misdialling on fax machines. Having noted this problem, a remedy, such as a secure file sharing service, could have been put in place.

However, if organisations in regulated industries do opt to use cloud or online services to store or process data, they must also take into account where that data is stored.

In particular, certain categories of data, such as medical records or bank details, must not leave the EU. This means ensuring suppliers have a data centre in one of the EU member states, with some organisations preferring to keep data within the bounds of the UK.

When it comes to printing sensitive data, an additional layer of security that can be added in these industries, or for particularly sensitive data in other sectors.

"Enforcing a policy where a password must be entered in order to print, whether at the computer or at the printer, is a particularly good idea," said Mullock.

Not all doom and gloom

As complex as all this may sound, it comes down to a few key points. Firstly, know what regulations your business is subject to this is particularly important in regulated industries, as it is likely there are several. Secondly, implement a data lifecycle management policy that takes account of rules and regulations and make sure it is both thorough and followed.

Finally, keep on top of the policy your data profile is likely to change over time, and new data protection legislation from the EU is expected this year. If your policy is allowed to moulder it will become little more use than if it didn't exist at all.

Following these steps along with the advice of your legal counsel should keep you compliant and your data safe.

For more advice on transforming your business, visit HP BusinessNow