The world's first electronic website archiving system in compliance with the ISO PDF/A standard

Application requirements

The company secretariat at UBS is responsible for archiving management process documents within the Corporate Center and Business Divisions. During a routine archive review it was discovered that the UBS homepage was not included in the archiving process.

Despite an extensive disclaimer on the homepage it was decided that UBS should be able to prove in 5 or 20 years time what it communicates via its homepage today. This would provide UBS with greater security as regards the traceability and verification of communication content and would also be advantageous from a historic viewpoint.

Customer benefits

The system detects any changes to the archived version and knows whether or not to create a new version for the archive. The size of the websites to be archived is adopted 1:1 in PDF/A format. This creates a rolling page in PDF/A format, whereby page numbering is controllable.

Archiving occurs analog to existing archive material and is supplemented by a full text search function.

Implementation

Anything of relevance from a Corporate Governance viewpoint requires long-term archiving. This includes all linking functions. However, it also became apparent that not all content is worth archiving or can be converted to an archivable state. It was therefore necessary to view and list all of the contents.

Searches for identified content are executed based on URL and date. This made it clear that only the PDF/A format would be able to meet these requirements. UBS decided to utilize the 3-Heights® Document Converter Service from PDF Tools AG as a result of the evaluation.