This part of ISO/IEC 10166 specifies the Document Filing and Retrieval Abstract Service that enables a user to communicate with a remote Document Filing and Retrieval server (DFR-Server) in Order to access a remote document store.

This part of ISO/IEC 10166 - specifies a client-server type model in accordance with the Distributed-Office-Application Model [ISO/IEC 10031-11;

• specifies functions and Services provided by Document Filing and Retrieval servers;
• specifies a specific Document Filing and Retrieval model for managing documents and groups of documents;
• specifies the Document Filing and Retrieval Abstract Service using the principles established by the Abstract Service Definition Conventions (ISO/IEC 10021-3);
• specifies the usage of other Services.

ISO/IEC 10166 serves the following important fields of application:

• supports large capacity document storage for use by multiple users in a distributed System;
• supports ordered filing and multi-key retrieval of documents;
• supports structured organization of groups of documents;
• supports storage of an open-ended number of different document types;
• supports referencing documents and groups ;
• supports filing and referencing of documents outside of the document storage (for example, non electronic hard copy documents); 
• supports the association of attributes to documents, groups, references and search result lists independent of the content;
• supports storage, retrieval and deletion of documents of the document store whatever their content;
• supports searching for, ordering, retrieval, and deletion of Single documents or groups of
• supports management of different Versions of a document, including such concepts as “previous Version”, ” next Version” and “last Version”; - supports protection against unauthorized storage and retrieval of documents;
• supports the control of concurrent access to DFR objects.