AIIM is the official Standards Development Organization (SDO) for Enterprise Content Management standards authorized by ANSI. It is the goal of the AIIM Standards Program to support and represent the U.S. interests at the ISO level.

Through its involvement in the development of PDF, Portable Document Format, standards, AIIM is becoming the leading authority in PDF standards.

AIIM Standards serve as a means of:

• Promoting interchangeability and quality control of products;
• Eliminating misunderstandings or confusion between manufacturers and users with respect to products for which standards are adopted;
• Advancing the growth of the industry;
• Benefiting the public health, safety, and welfare; and
• Facilitating domestic and international trade, communication and understanding.

The scope of areas of work undertaken by AIIM's standards committees is the standardization of terminology, definitions, sizes, formats, quality, methods of measurement, apparatuses and procedures for the production, use, and storage and retrieveal of structured and unstructured content (documents) and related source data and processes related to enterprise content management.

AIIM's Involvement in PDF Standards Development

AIIM's Standards Program covers a wide range of technology areas that relate to the overall mission of the Association including imaging, document management, storage technologies and ECM. One of the newer areas that we have become involved in is the development of standards that define electronic file formats. AIIM is the standards development organization that is facilitating the development of the PDF Reference as an ISO standard on behalf of ANSI (American National Standards Institute) as well as several of the PDF subset standards such as PDF/Archive, PDF/Engineering, PDF/Universal Access, and PDF Healthcare. In this capacity, AIIM holds the secretariat for the ISO working groups where the standards are being developed with the assistance of over 13 ISO member countries. In the United States, AIIM is the administrator of the U.S. committee that represents the interests of the industry in the U.S. by voting on drafts and sharing recommendations for new features and functions that may be included in the standard. AIIM is also the standards development organization for the StratML file format which is an XML based format for structuring strategic and performance plans and reports.