Fall 2023 AFP Consortium Meeting Recap: Continued Focus on Enhanced AFP Security
By Jack Condon
In October 2023, the AFP Consortium Fall Meeting was held as a virtual meeting. Once again, our international team of AFP experts came together to continue our work to expand and improve AFP for all our customers.
At this meeting, we focused on:
Other topics discussed at the meeting included:
Finally, in addition to the publication of updates to the MO:DCA and IPDS References in June 2023, an updated version of the BCOCA Reference (AFPC-0005-10) , along with the first edition of the Metadata Guide for AFP ( AFPC-0018-01) will be published in the fourth quarter of 2023.
As always, working on AFP improvements with the experienced, knowledgeable, and insightful people from our member companies around the world was a great experience! Our next meeting will be held in Boulder in the Spring of 2024, where we will continue to chart the course for AFP into the future.
At this meeting, we focused on:
- Encrypted Data Objects – The lion’s share of the meeting was focused on refining the Architecture Change Requests (ACRs) required to add encryption support to AFP at the data object level. This support will allow customers to encrypt and protect objects in the AFP output stream, including text, images, graphics, barcodes, object containers, and metadata.
Other topics discussed at the meeting included:
- Other ways to enhance AFP security in the future
- How to address the need to add metadata tags to existing AFP documents
- Creating an AFP survey to see what users think about the direction of AFP
Finally, in addition to the publication of updates to the MO:DCA and IPDS References in June 2023, an updated version of the BCOCA Reference (AFPC-0005-10) , along with the first edition of the Metadata Guide for AFP ( AFPC-0018-01) will be published in the fourth quarter of 2023.
As always, working on AFP improvements with the experienced, knowledgeable, and insightful people from our member companies around the world was a great experience! Our next meeting will be held in Boulder in the Spring of 2024, where we will continue to chart the course for AFP into the future.
