PDF Beats Microformats for Long-Term Document Storage

An AIIM report, Content Creation and Delivery—The On-Ramps and Off-Ramps of ECM, indicates that PDF has surpassed microformats for long-term document storage.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Recent AIIM research found that 90% of organizations are using the PDF file format for long-term storage of scanned documents, and 89% are converting Office files to PDF for distribution and archive. Not surprisingly, paper is currently used by 100% of organizations, but when asked to predict the situation in 5 years time, use of paper for long-term storage dropped to 77%, whereas PDF rose to 93%. . . .

Time-honored storage on microfilm or fiche is still used by 43% of organizations, but this is expected to drop to 28% over the next five years. At the other end of the media spectrum, 34% of organizations are archiving digital video, rising to a projected 47% in 5 years. Digital audio archiving will rise from 30% to 37%.