U.S. Railroad Retirement Board, Purchasing Division, Room 1230, 844 North Rush St., Chicago, IL 60611-2092

D -- CONVERSION OF IMAGING SYSTEM FILES SOL 99C17 POC Ms. Velinda Nix, Contract Specialist, (312) 751-3387 The following questions were asked by other potential offerors. 1. Question: Is the PaperWise system still in use or functional? Answer: Effective June 9, 1999, the PaperWise System will no longer be the production imaging system. The solicitation seems to indicate that you wish to convert directly from the Panasonic platters rather than exporting from the storage mechanism and database. Typically PaperWise used the Pegasus storage facility to archive images to the Panasonic platters. PaperWise came with certain utilities for manipulation of the storage environment. i.e. export. 2. Question: Are those utilities available to us? Answer Yes utilities are available. Vendors shall use their own resources to access PaperWise utilities. 3. Question Is it possible to obtain a copy of the Btrieve index to analyze in order to generate our cost estimates and quotes? Answer RRB can not access the Btrieve database. The versions we are running are: Btrieve, version 5.10 for networks, Btrieve/N Record Manager, version 5.10a, BTUTIL -- Btrieve Utility Program, version 1.00D RRB shall provide a copy of the NDX and TCK files with FLD and ENV files on CD upon request. The CD remains the property of the RRB and must be returned when the analysis is completed. 4. Question Can you confirm the product that controls the jukebox and optical drives? Is there any reason we could not or should not export from that mechanism to facilitate the conversion? Answer As far as we know, Pegasus version 4.1 is running the jukebox. (It is a DOS version.) If by export, you mean copy the files on the platters to a hard drive for conversion, we do not see any reason why you can not export from that mechanism. 5. Question Has the Eastman system already been purchased? Was it purchased from the Federal Group of Eastman Software? Why didn't they provide the conversion from PaperWise to Eastman as part of the sale? Answer The Eastman system has been purchased. A business decision was made to procure conversion services separately from software imaging. 6. Question The Panasonic platters of that time frame would have been approximately 1.3GB per platter. We are estimating that you have approximately 30 of these platters you wish converted. Can you confirm that? What is the capacity (in MB or GB) per platter? (Total of 39.4GB plus 762MB stored on server) Answer RRB has twenty (20) 940MB double sided platters (BUS9301 through BUS9602) and sixteen (16) 1.4GB double sided platters (BUS9603 through BUS9904). There are seventy sides on data. There may be one additional 1.4GB platter depending on the volume of work. 7. Question The solicitation indicates that it wishes to have all images converted in 30 days. Does this mean that all images must be delivered in 30 days at once, or are we allowed to submit converted images as they are processed? Answer The contractor may submit converted batches of images and indexes as they are processed. 8. Question The solicitation does not indicate, (or I missed it) whether this conversion must take place on-site or not. IF the conversion is allowed to be performed off-site, with appropriate security, could we have access or remove the platters and PaperWise system (Server and Jukebox server) to one of our offices? Answer The RRB still have the back-up platters in house so we can either send out the original or backup platters and still have a set. We can not send out the servers. 9. Question Can you extract some sample single-page and multi-page image documents and send us the resulting files? Answer All the documents are scanned into .TCK "bucket" files. The maximum size of a file is approximately 26 MG. When the files reach that size, another file is opened and the images start storing there. Depending upon the volume of the work being scanned in, one .TCK file can contain many days worth of scanning. RRB can send a sample .TCK file on a CD (too large for a disc). Extracting single-page and multi-page image documents is what we need the contractor to do. 10. Question Are the image files in TIF format? -- (No they will be converted to TIFF format) Answer No, the images are in a .TCK "bucket" file. We are converting to a .TIF files during the conversion. 11. Question Is the index data in an SQL database? Answer No, the index information is in a Btrieve database. 12. Question Does the ImageWise product have a developer's toolkit or automated retrieval capability to extract index and images? Answer The RRB does not know whether the ImageWise product has a developer's toolkit or automated retrieval capability to extract index and images. 13. Question What optical drive (5-1/4 Panasonic optical disks) and jukebox are in use? Answer The jukebox in use is a Plasmon IDE Multi I Library Systems, 60-slot, 90GB jukebox with two Panasonic half-height optical disc drives. It is a SCSI device which is controlled via the SCSI bus using SCSI-2 commands. 14. Question Is the PaperWise system compatible to the Eastman system? Answer The Eastman system can not read the PaperWise images or access the database. 15. Question Are the TCK files proprietary to PaperWise/Bell & Howell? Answer The RRB has no knowledge of .TCK files being proprietary to PaperWise/Bell & Howell. PaperWise is the only imaging software we have used up until now. 16. Question What is a .TCK file? Is it a format that can be read with software? Answer A .TCK file is a cluster file ("bucket" file) that contains the actual text data. This is where the digitized information is stored that makes us the text data that is seen on the screen. A .TCK file cannot be larger than 26MB. The larger the .TCK file size, the faster the retrieval of the optical platter. The reason for this is that with large .TCK files there are fewer files on the optical disc and therefore fewer files to search through. All of the index information required to retrieve the corresponding text data is located in a Btrieve file named TKOALL.DB. VOLUME.DB IS A Btrieve file that indicates whether the data (.TCK) files are on magnetic or optical. The NOTES.DB Btrieve file contains information identifying which note is attached to which image. The images are viewed using PaperWise. 17. Question Is this non-technical or just a name? Answer When text data is saved as images the files are named with a hexadecimal number and the extension .TCK. For example: 36E6EB2D.TCK, 36EE94A8.TCK and 37052A09.TCK Posted 05/19/99 (W-SN333499). (0139)

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