The dates that are used in searches in the system must correctly reflect the reference
dates in the original documents: birth or death certificates, letters of credit, and others.
There are several types of dates:
- Date of reference
- The date of reference is expressed in the content of a physical document or transaction that is
used in daily business collaboration.
- Date of record
- The date of record is assigned by a user in a date field of an
electronic document either in the pre- or post-committal stage.
- Date of entry
- The date of entry is assigned by the system that created the document.
The date of entry might align to the date of record or reference depending on the lag in the
entry system that might be several days. In the conduct of business between the users of the system
and their customers, the ideal case is to be able to search on dates of record, view document
content, and examine the dates that are viewed in the document and hope they are the same.
The users of the system also place a lot of value in the date of entry, because that defines
their limit of responsibility or liability; whatever the nature of the discussion with their
customers, they cannot be held responsible for handling transactions and documents prior to their
existence in the system
In this case, the backend system consists of two subsystems: the
IBM®
FileNet® P8 and
FileNet Image Services subsystems
- The IBM
FileNet P8 subsystem
consists of the following components:
- Content Platform Engine
- Application Engine
- Client applications such as Workplace or Workplace XT
- Applications such as IBM Enterprise Records
- The FileNet Image Services subsystem
consists of the following components:
- The FileNet Image Services server
- Clients applications such as FileNet IDM Desktop, FileNet IDM Desktop/WEB
Services/Open Client, and Image Services Resource Adapter
Pre-committal systems that feed documents into the backend system are document imaging and data
extraction and indexing systems such as IBM
FileNet Capture, BatchIt, and
HPII.
Each subsystem handles dates as follows:
- FileNet P8 stores all date and time internally in UTC. FileNet P8 clients translate back and forth all FileNet P8 UTC date and time fields to local date and time (as per client
time zone). The entry date of a document or an arbitrary date that is entered by a user on a
document is always adjusted to reflect the local date and time zone where the document is being
viewed.
- FileNet Image Services does not store the time; only the date. All FileNet IDM Desktop, FileNet IDM Desktop/WEB
Services/Open Client and Image Services Resource Adapter clients are on the FileNet Image Services
server date and time zone, irrespective of the local time zone of the client workstation. The entry
date of a document is always the date of the FileNet Image Services system time
zone, and an arbitrary date that is entered by a FileNet Image Services user is
recorded as is in the FileNet Image Services server, no matter where the
document was entered or is being referenced.