The manual processes used today to capture, produce and supervise Web content are inefficient, tedious and ripe for automation. Stop the insanity.

We recently took a poll to find out how financial firms were fulfilling their recordkeeping and supervision requirements when it comes to Web content. Turns out that over half of respondents spend time printing out or creating PDFs of their websites. So let me say this again: Stop the insanity.

Manual processes like these take hours and hours of your valuable time, and are error-prone to boot. Let me count the ways:

• Hidden content isn’t captured.
  When you print a page, you only have a record of the surface of that page. Any slideshow, tab or interactive content will be lost. You can’t watch a video on a printed page. Many companies can’t even use any of the awesome interactive tools their competitors have been marketing with for years, simply because they don’t have a way to capture it.
• Can you truly enforce supervision policy?
  How often does someone make a change to a website that you’re responsible for approving before publication, but forgets to tell you about it? It may not be a significant change, and maybe you’ll find out about that new header or sales paragraph…but maybe not. You need to know when changes are made and enforce your supervision policy automatically.
• Finding that archived site is too painful.
  Maybe it only takes a few hours each week or month to print your websites. But after amassing such a large set of files, rifling through your file cabinet in search of a specific record can be arduous. Searching email before electronic archiving was just as tough.

We need to do the same thing with websites that we already did with email over a decade ago: Archive it securely and electronically, search it quickly, and produce it on demand.
That’s what we’ve just done with Smarsh Web Archiving.

• Fully interactive, native format archives of any website.
  Smarsh Web Archiving provides an irrefutable record of what was published and when on any website. This includes all the interactive tabs and slideshows that don’t show up in printouts.
• Monitor for changes.
  If you enjoy surprises in your compliance procedures, I owe you an apology. Smarsh Web Archiving will automatically email you a record of what was added to and deleted from any site you’re archiving.
• Full-text, historical search.
  It’s like Google search, with a timeline: Scroll to any Web page in a single click, and follow links as they existed when the site was published. Search across your entire archive instantly, or specify a date range or specific websites.
• Automated. No installation.
  Regaining your time is all fine and good but if it takes months to set up, what’s the point? Smarsh Web Archiving requires no installation, integration or anything at all like that. Once you turn it on, it just works. Period.
• Your Data. Our Expertise.
  As with all Smarsh archives, all your data is your data. We provide the third-party attestation, we manage it, we secure it, and when the time comes, we can produce it for you. Support is always 24×7.

For Smarsh, Web archiving is another opportunity to help our customers with a huge pain point. See for yourself.