Determining local and global dates

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® Content Cortex and FileNet® Image Services subsystems
  1. The IBM Content Cortex subsystem consists of the following components:
    • Content Platform Engine
    • Applications such as Enterprise Records
  2. 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:
  • Content Cortex stores all date and time internally in UTC. Content Cortex clients translate back and forth all Content Cortex 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.