Today, the need for document exchange includes external parties. Companies need to exchange documents with customers and partners, and in the public sector. In the short- to medium-term IT investments in the government and private sector will be driven by, among other factors, the need to increase customer centricity of service delivery, including increased use of electronic communication.

Exchange of information between enterprises and other external parties and customers has increasingly moved to electronic formats, including areas such as e-procurement, electronic invoicing, and e-sourcing.

Internally, enterprises and organizations have the same and increasing requirements for the exchange of documents. Because most organizations today either are knowledge driven or have a significant knowledge element, the collaboration between employees becomes essential.

In both the commercial and public sectors, the use of OfficeLink is growing rapidly, because OfficeLink offer a modern document management and the integration of document formats with back-end applications as part of automating the process are among the challenges most organizations face today.

In addition the need to archive and, more importantly, retrieve larger and larger repositories of documents adds a new dimension to OfficeLink. For many organizations, it is desirable to be able to store documents for a long time and make sure that if they have to be retrieved, the format of the document is still readable. For public archives, the "long-term" time horizon can be up to 100 years or longer!