ADSS LTANS Service Overview

The ADSS LTANS Service provides long-term archiving and notary services. It facilitates the long-term secure archiving of corporate documents, emails and data using digital signature and timestamp technologies. The LTANS Service also provides and manages document retention policies and the policy-based refreshing of evidence data.

A typical workflow for the ADSS LTANS service is as follows:

An end user sends the document to be archived to a business application.
The business application (pre-registered on ADSS Server) leaves the complexity of archiving to the ADSS Server by sending the archiving request to the ADSS LTANS Service.
The ADSS LTANS Service performs all the standard document archiving operations using the specified algorithm. As part of this archiving process, ADSS Server will also request a timestamp token from the configured timestamping authorities.
The Timestamp Authority (TSA) returns the timestamp token information to the ADSS LTANS service.
ADSS Server will then provide a document archive response to the calling business application. Note ADSS Server can also return the generated archive object along with the archive response. This is useful in case the business application is responsible for document management whilst the ADSS LTANS Service is only being used to produce the long-term evidential information, i.e. the secure archive object.

The ADSS LTANS Service is based on the IETF LTANS Working Group specifications, in particular the communication with the LTANS Service is conducted using the XML/SOAP LTAP (Long Term Archive Protocol) interface and the actual archive object is stored according to XMLERS (XML Evidence Record Syntax) Specification.