HITACHI SEIBU SOFTWARE, RICOH, SONY INTRODUCE SUITE OF SALUTATION PRODUCTS FOR DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT OVER A NETWORK
SAN JOSE, Calif., February 24, 1998—Hitachi Seibu Software, Ricoh, and Sony have introduced a new suite of network document management software and supporting office peripherals using Salutation technology to simplify network interoperability, said Robert F. Pecora, managing director of the Salutation Consortium. Salutation is open middleware technology for locating and controlling equipment across the Internet or a company intranet.
The products increase support for IBM's NuOffice document management software in the Japanese market, where it already boasts a family of supporting peripherals and software from Canon, Fuji Xerox, Mita, Muratec, and Ricoh. Several vendors have announced NuOffice products for availability in the US market later this year. NuOffice, based on Lotus Notes, provides a complete office system for large customer sites with many mobile or telecommuting users."Sony's Salutation-enabled product is the first from a major vendor who is not a member of the Salutation Consortium," said Pecora. "Consortium members set their goal to develop an architecture that would attract wide industry support, and to make that technology available without cost and license fees to all developers."
Hitachi Seibu Software's Millemasse Salutation Gateway automatically registers scanned image data and fax images to a Lotus Notes database via NuOffice. The image data itself is registered to the Millemasse/FS server, and only document management information for the image is registered to the Notes database, reducing the capacity required on the Notes database.
Ricoh Co. Ltd. released RGO Salutation Software for Ricoh's existing family of Salutation-enabled digital multifunction peripherals (MFPs) and laser printers. RGO software, residing on a server along with IBM's NuOffice, enables the Ricoh peripherals to serve in a network in the Notes groupware environment. Notes users can scan an image from an MFP directly into a Notes client and save the image in a database. Early versions of RGO supported more than 37,800 Lotus Notes users at Ricoh.
Additional software from Rios Systems, a company jointly owned by Ricoh and IBM Japan, enables Notes users to send and receive Notes documents via fax. Fax documents can be received as images into a Notes database, as well.
Sony Corp. introduced i-file and WebDoc, which together handle the total document life cycle of both conventional paper documents and network-accessible files. The new products integrate document management with groupware, workflow, databases, and MFPs from several vendors to make documents more accessible from the device at hand.
For example, a document can be scanned by a copier or a fax machine for direct input to an i-file server, and in reverse, an i-file document can be printed on a copier or fax, in addition to a conventional printer.
WebDoc uses the web on an extended intranet. WebDoc can register a paper document to a home page and display it merely by scanning it into i-file, with no manual HTML translation required.
The Salutation Consortium is a non-profit corporation with member organizations in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Member companies include Adobe Systems, APTi, Axis Communications, Brother, Canon, Cisco, Fuji Xerox, Fujitsu, Granite Systems, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Kobe Steel, Komatsu, Konica, Matsushita, Mita, Mitsubishi, Murata (Muratec), Okamura, Oki Data, Ricoh, Sanyo, Seiko Epson, Sharp, Sun Microsystems, Toshiba, and Xerox.
Information about the Salutation Architecture is available on the Consortium's web site (http://www.salutation.org).