kgs Provides Window into Autonomous Archiving

KGS realigns its business focus on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. The new brand name ‘tia’ bundles the archive manufacturer’s existing product modules into a common vision of the intelligent document archive. tia introduces a new generation of archiving that integrates with any application, storage solution and cloud-based technology. It furthermore offers companies a ‘single point of truth’ for document archiving. In addition, KGS is developing new smart technologies for autonomous archiving with tia.

SAP Archiving

For 20 years now, KGS has been at the forefront of lean document archiving that fully integrates with the superordinate application. Previously, it was primarily SAP user companies that benefited from KGS’ proprietary archiving solution. It provided them with a tool that, in contrast to SAP’s own content server, also supports the legally compliant management of large quantities of documents without generating the financial and organizational overheads that go along with traditional DMS or ECM systems.

KGS Archive Is Now ‘tia’

“Our KGS designers have taken great strides, and now the time has come to present tia to the world,” says Winfried Althaus, Managing Director of KGS Software GmbH. The idea of providing a lean, almost invisible archiving software has remained unchanged. However, the new KGS solution takes this approach to the next level: tia – the intelligent archive – closes the final gap in the lifecycle of corporate documents, no matter which applications need to be connected. “In 2020 we are taking a giant step forward by introducing an intelligent archiving system that addresses the needs of major projects,” Althaus continues.

Any Application, Any Storage System

tia flexibly integrates with various IT systems. It supports any storage system and connects with any existing corporate application, whether implemented as an on-premises or cloud solution. This means that tia can archive documents from various key IT tools besides SAP, including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics or other specialist applications and portals. Given this design, document archiving with tia can also be used for system landscapes operated completely without SAP.

Single Point of Truth

Archiving with tia creates a Single Point of Truth (SPoT) for corporate documents. The term SPoT is mainly used in the context of data warehousing. The idea is to have a generally valid, non-redundant data pool. “With tia, we actually go beyond the mere non-redundancy claim,” clarifies Althaus. Benjamin Schröder, Head of Development and Support at KGS Software GmbH, explains: “tia provides companies not only with a uniform archiving structure, but it also empowers them to add intelligence to their documents by making them visible independently of the source system. Among other features, the intelligent document of the future knows where it originated from, what its required retention period is, how often it is being searched for, and who is allowed to access it. This results in a vast variety of digital use cases: No matter which applications are used for daily business – be it Salesforce, SAP or others – users can easily find and access all archived documents from anywhere, provided they are authorized to do so. In addition, applications can be extended or replaced without effort, regardless of the archived documents, because all documents remain accessible at all times. “Complex and, above all, expensive projects that address data replication between superordinate applications become obsolete with tia,” says Schröder.

Smart Technology Drives Autonomous Archiving

KGS is working on introducing even more extensive system intelligence. “It is not our aim to make archiving in enterprises more cumbersome; on the contrary, we wish to make our solution even more ‘invisible’ than before,” adds Althaus. Autonomous archiving is being advanced to address functions such as predictive document services. Among other things, the archive of the future will be able to recognize various patterns autonomously and make forward-looking suggestions for optimization. Examples include the distribution of archived documents to corresponding storages in a manner that accounts for financial and legal criteria, or rule-based storage reorganization to maintain a constant archive size and thus prevent cost creep. ‘Self healing’ is another important aspect. It refers to a system’s ability to identify access and certification problems and to replace or restore corrupt documents. The health status of the archive can be diagnosed at any time via dashboards, and the integrity of each individual document is transparent at all times. Finally, the archive of the future also integrates machine/deep learning features. For example, tia comes with an ‘auto speed valve’ that automatically identifies the right migration scope for large document migrations in view of the current load on the corporate IT. As a result, migrations can be carried out with virtually no user interruption, as before – but now this process is largely autonomous, thus making the system even more efficient.