ANALYSIS: A lot of us--especially the "CrackBerry" addicts among our readers--probably got a chuckle when, after serious deliberations, the powers that be told newly inaugurated President Barack Obama that he could keep his BlackBerry. But the national security issues surrounding its use--as well as the preservation of communications for historians--are real logistical issues that cause more heartburn than laughter among those charged with recording his every presidential move.

It brings up a document-management matter with which a lot of governmental and corporate entities are struggling: What to do with "born digital" documents and communications, such as emails, text messages, chats and Microsoft Office documents that never see the light of paper--and how to preserve them for purposes of internal recordkeeping, posterity, and regulatory compliance.

PDF, of course, is the answer: Software vendor LuraTech is one of a new breed of companies tackling the challenge, adapting its PDF Compressor—originally designed to batch-process scanned documents, OCR them to PDF, and compress them into thin digital archives—to include electronic documents with its Born Digital add-on for PDF Compressor announced in March.

LuraTech hitched its wagon to PDF for archiving because, as president Mark McKinney says, it's the standard.

"It's such a ubiquitous format—a lot of people are storing a lot of really important content in PDF," he says, citing the free Reader as a very convenient component of archives for end-users to view archived, compressed documents. "So it makes sense to approach the market with something that's so fundamentally used."

It's tough for IT managers and electronic-records administrators not to be cynical about any particular document format's long-term prospects. Anyone who used Microsoft Write in the late 1980s—and needs to somehow get old content from those files into 2009 software—can attest to that.

LuraTech and its market peers are banking on Adobe's having forked over the PDF 1.7 standard to ISO--and advocating for PDF subsets (PDF/A for archiving, PDF/X for prepress, etc.) to be published as ISO standards--being a solid hedge against the data rot that neutralizes seemingly all other data formats, sooner or later.

"It's through the ISO standards committee and really good open standards that you're able to guarantee longevity and access to stuff," McKinney says. "The second that you have a body that is publishing documentation that anyone can access...then you enter in the realm of guaranteed access to content stored in that file format, so long as there's hardware and people have electricity to run computers."