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Perhaps you mean:

http://www.aiim.org/Infonomics/ArticleView.aspx?id=30580

Stiff sanctions have been awarded against parties who fail to meet their production obligations and criminal prosecutions are possible for deliberate attempts to interfere with federal investigations or administrative proceedings. (7)

7. See, e.g. Coleman (Parent) Holdings, Inc. v. Morgan Stanley, Inc., 2005 WL 674885 (Fla. Cir. Ct. March 23, 2005) (entering default judgment based on, iner alia, failure to timely produce relevant email); In re Prudential Ins. Co. of Am. Sales Practice Litig., 169 F.R.D. 598 (D. N.J. 1997) (imposing fine for failure to adequately act to preserve email). In addition, as part of the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, Congress stiffened existing law and added new criminal penalties if one knowingly alters or destroys documents with the intent to impede a federal investigation or proceeding or "in relation to or contemplation of such matter or case." 18 U.S.C.A. 1519 (2002).

Actually, it's a bad idea to depend on ANY single vendor for the format of important records that have to be held long-term. We can still read the Magna Carta, no problem. Anyone tried to read Microsoft PowerPoint version 2 files? Or WordStar files? Even Word Perfect is increasingly complicated for many people.

For long-term records, I can easily imagine a requirement to store them in an ISO-standard format. OO.o's format is actually especially nice: it's compressed (.zip) and XML-based, so it takes very little space.. perfect for long-term storage. Even if all the programs stopped working, as long as you knew how to unzip the files, you could view them in XML.

For public information, you need a format that any user could read, no matter what their operating system or office programs are. Again, a standard format works nicely. And the fact that OO.o files are compressed is helpful for low-bandwidth users (esp. the poor and those in eastern Europe).

Microsoft's ".doc" format has been used for these purposes, but it's not really good at it. It's really only designed for a single word processor, it's not really documented, it doesn't support standards like XML, etc. And I believe Microsoft's new XML format doesn't even capture all the information from Word (while OO.O's clearly does). The ".rtf" format isn't really that much better. And although they're talking about developing better conversion software, the OO.o software already includes .doc conversion software, which could already be used to support an upgrade.

There's already work to create a standard for PDF to support very long-lived documents that must be available "forever" to arbitrary platforms. It's called PDF-Archive PDF-Archive looks very useful for its purposes, but it won't support exchange of editable documents; its purpose is to fix everything (such as page breaks and so on).

The world's needed a standardized editable office document format for a long time, where the standard is a real standard that is publicly documented, can be implemented by multiple vendors (without patent royalties/limitations), and isn't controlled by any one company. Maybe the world will finally get such a standard.

Frankly, if there's a standard and the EU pulls off such legislation, that's a big coup. If many governments start releasing files in such formats, then others will want to make sure they can read/write those formats. And if it's a standard, it's much more likely that competitors (like OpenOffice.org itself) will have a chance.

A company I worked for in the mid-nineties wrote an ODMA integration module for AutoCAD which required that the user complete the title block of the drawing before they could save the file. The pertinent attributes were extracted from the drawing and passed on to the document management system (DMS).

With most DMSs, the file to be saved is full-text indexed as well (often this work is done as a background task during slower periods) so that you can locate a document with fuzzy searches, even if you do not no what attributes were used to store it.

Novell Groupwise includes an ODMA compliant DMS which also includes viewer modules for many common file formats, and with the web interface can allow a user on the road to search an entire library, view the results via a web browser, and download or checkout the desired documents.

It would be wonderful if someone could come up with a standards based way to provide similar functionality in a Free Software based DMS. I know of a few companies who cannot switch away from Windows/Novell because of the need for a robust DMS, and the clients to integrate with it. This is especially important in fields like Medicine and Legal, where large numbers of documents are generated on a regular basis.

1) Law Firm - each document is indexed by type of case (e.g. tax, property, litigation), client number, client type, federal vs. state vs. local, etc. That way other lawyers in the firm can search for similar cases and "re-use" existing work. I know for a fact that this is a widely used scenario in law firms.

2) Insurance company - each paper claim is scanned and stored, indexing by customer id, type of claim, etc.

If you don't believe this is a big market, check out AIIM, the industry association for this type of software.

And I got a frickin' link wrong.

Document Management Alliance.

George

In general, anything which really needs to be kept should be printed out and archived in duplicate (this also has the advantage of settling once and for all what time a document was created, unlike electronic formats),

This is dang expensive, bulky, and could put your company out of business. You need a lot of space, and every 20-50 years you would need to copy the documents (acid based paper).

Caterpillar has chosen to electronically archive almost everything, to save money and time in printing repair manuals.

You can read other stories about electronic document management at the Document Management Alliance homepage.

Disclaimer, I work for a Fortune 50 company that specializes in Document management, so I do have a vested interest in this.

George