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

D -- INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SERVICES, INCLUDING TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICES SOL 99-rfi-32 DUE 090299 POC Velinda Nix 312/751-3387 A potential offeror submitted the following questions in response to 99-RFI-32. 1. The potential time frame of need. Answer: Document Sciences Corporation will stop contractually supporting the TextBOOK software as of March 31, 2000. The current product is Y2K. 2. Is there an acquisition plan for this yet? Answer: No. 3. Has funding has been appropriated and in which fiscal year? Answer: No funds have been appropriated for fiscal year 1999, but fiscal year 2000. 4. How many document files are there in the 500M and in what specific file formats (WP, MSWord, etc.) Answer: The exact number is unknown but we estimate approximately 1000. 5. What is the file format of the graphics (BMP, PCX< TIF< PCT< etc.) to be used or currently being used? Answer: The file format of the graphics not in Word or WordPerfect are mostly stored as BMP and TIF. 6. What security is preferred or mandated on using and communicating the information? Answer: The procedural manuals are for all employees and customers (through our Internet site). If we had the capability to view memos, reports, etc. on other servers throughout the agency, these would need to be limited to certain employees only. 7. How dispersed are the users across the Intranet being planned? How many locally vs. remotely? What access times are expected for remote users? Answer: There are 899 employees located at headquarters, 844 N. Rush Street, with 367 in the field. The field personnel have access to the mainframe and Internet through a frame-relay system. 8. How many seats/users are anticipated concurrently and total? Answer: 1267 9. What is the nature of the network that this is intended to be used with, especially with regard to searching across multiple servers? Answer: We have a Cisco VLAN using TCP/IP. 56 remote offices access the VLAN via frame-relay connections. We are consolidating servers down to approximately five. We don't anticipate storing data on multiple servers. 10. What equipment is being considered to host the software? Either NT server or mainframe NT Server: Dell PowerEdge 4300: PowerEdge 4300, Pentium III 550MHz/512MHz Cache, Redundant Power Second Processor: 550MHz Additional Intel Pentium III Processor w/512K Cache Memory: 512MB RAM, 1 DIMM Hard Drive Backplane: 6 Bay Hot-Pluggable Backplane (1.6" and 1.0" Hard Drives) Primary Controller PERC 2 RAID Controller, quad channel, 32MB cache Hard Drive Configuration: RAID 1 -- Requires even number of drives 1st Hard Drive 9GB Ultra-2/LVD SCSI 10,000 RPM Hard Drive 2nd Hard Drive 9GB Ultra-2/LVD SCSI 10,000 RPM Hard Drive Diskette Drive: 1.44MB Diskette Drive Operating System: Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Network Controller: Intel Pro 100+ Ethernet NIC w/ Adaptive Load Balancing and Adapter Fault Tolerance OR Mainframe: Hitachi array sub system emulating IBM 3390 mainframe storage 11. What is the availability (24x7?) required of the systems for editing and searching? Answer: 24/7 unless we need to turn the server off on weekends so the software can rest. 12. What is the expected maintenance and support concept. e.g., on-call, on-demand vs. n-hour delay, etc.? Answer: On call, in the sense that we would call and receive immediate assistance. Posted 08/27/99 (W-SN373518). (0239)

Loren Data Corp. http://www.ld.com (SYN# 0042 19990831\D-0020.SOL)