For business resilience and compliance reasons, important process content still needs to be retrievable after multiple decades. For that reason, Stages can generate archives with the following capabilities:

• Archives are exported as a ZIP file containing
  • Process description of the current workspace rendered as a PDF/A export. The content of the PDF/A export is configured in the metamodel of the workspace to be archived, similar to other PDF exports.
  • If a workspace contains process descriptions in multiple languages, one PDF/A export per language is rendered.
  • File, templates, checklists, and other relevant files managed under Work Products and Guidance
• Archives can be protected by a password to comply with data protection regulations
• Archives generated for long-term store can not be re-imported into Stages. If this is required, the normal ZIP export capability should be used.

PDF/A is an ISO-standardized version of the Portable Document Format (PDF) specialized for use in the archiving and long-term preservation of electronic documents (Wikipedia).

It contains all required fonts and similar information so the document can be opened without relying on any external dependencies. PDF/A files therefore tend to be larger than their respective PDF counterparts.

To archive a specific process version, navigate to the respective workspace and go to “Management > Process Versions”.

Then select the “Create archive” menu for the process version to be archived.

If the archive should be password-protected, enable the respective switch and provide a password. The ZIP archive will then be encrypted with the AES-256 algorithm.

If the archive generation runs into any problems, a respective warning will be shown and the details are shown via the “Warnings” button.

The finished archive can be downloaded via the “Download” button.

For the process archive creation, the user needs to have the following read permissions for the workspace in the following permission domains:

• Process
• Process Version
• Process Import/Export
• Workspace

The generation of links from the PDF/A file to the included checklists, templates, and other files is not guaranteed to work for Asian character sets.

In some cases, the Windows built-in ZIP extraction might have problems to open an encrypted ZIP archive. Please try using 7-Zip or similar specialized tools for this purpose.