Feds can put info into eCabinet

Any federal agency struggling with large amounts of unstructured information—ranging from e-mails to photocopies—can file it all away thanks to new product from Ricoh Silicon Valley Inc.

RSV unveiled eCabinet, a product that automatically captures, digitally files, indexes and retrieves office documents such as e-mails, faxes, scans, printouts and Web content, at this week's FOSE trade show in Washington, D.C.

The product could prove especially useful to agencies that deal with a mountain of Freedom of Information Act requests, such as the FBI, the CIA and the Justice Department, said Laura Deaton, director of public and analyst relations at RSV.

"We just launched [Tuesday], but the initial response has been fabulous," Deaton said. "We did a pre-launch with the Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps, and the Navy doesn't want to give it back."

The product can hold up to 25 million pages and can be used alone or as part of a network-attached storage system. The only network requirement is a 10/100Base-T TCP/IP system, and the PC capture requirements are 200 MHz or greater processing speed, at least 64M of RAM, a Microsoft Corp. Windows 95, 98, 2000 or NT operating system, and 2M of available disk space.

Other key features include full-text searching capabilities and the ability to save a document in its original form or in PDFs, Deaton said. The PDF option should benefit agencies dealing with FOIA requests because they can easily black out anything not for public view while still putting the document on the Web.

As part of the launch, RSV announced that GTSI Corp. has signed on to resell eCabinet in the federal market through NASA's Scientific and Engineering Workstation Procurement II and the National Institutes of Health's Electronic Computer Store contracts, Deaton said.

RSV also announced an agreement with Hewlett-Packard Co., which combines eCabinet with HP's Digital Sender 9100C. The HP product enables government agencies to send paper documents without a dedicated PC, while eCabinet serves as the storage and retrieval platform for the solution.