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>
> i've been thinking of archiving with xml, but i'm going to stick with
> pdf's for documents at the moment.
I would think the general rule is that you should archive the message that
formed the original interaction. If you sent the user a PDF you should
archive a PDF; if you provided an XML document and a stylesheet for
rendering it (or if a customer placed an order using an XML message) then
you should archive those.
There are a lot of traps here. When I started sending out invoices last year
I was shocked to discover that instead of the invoice date I had entered in
the Word document, Microsoft had inserted code to print the current date at
the time of printing, (thus displaying the level of intelligence one would
expect from an animated paperclip). Since the invoice date has significant
implications, I was not amused. If there had been any legal disputes as a
result, it would have been important to have an archive of the actual Word
document that I sent, so that in subsequent arbitration it could be shown
that it was all Microsoft's fault.
In this country, I believe that any electronically archived information is
only as good as your ability to prove that it is a reliable record of past
events, which depends on showing that you had well documented processes and
that you followed them.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
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