SAN JOSE, Calif., February 3, 1999–Ricoh Corporation announced this month that it has adopted IBM’s NuOffice document management software for its digital imaging systems. According to Robert F. Pecora, managing director of the Salutation Consortium, NuOffice is the first major product in the United States to incorporate the Consortium’s technology for network plug-and-play interoperability.

IBM’s NuOffice, based on Lotus Notes, provides a complete office system for large customer sites with many mobile or telecommuting users. NuOffice will be compatible with a variety of Ricoh’s digital products by the end of 1999, according to the Ricoh announcement.

NuOffice is already a successful product in Japan, along with a family of supporting peripherals and software from Canon, Fuji Xerox, Mita, Muratec, and Ricoh. Market momentum around the NuOffice effort has resulted in Fuji Xerox adopting the Salutation Architecture as a company standard for networking office automation equipment.

The Salutation Architecture is open middleware technology for locating and controlling equipment across the Internet or a company intranet. Once a device has been located, Salutation can facilitate the attachment of the proper device drivers, allowing maximum possible use of the device and its characteristics. Salutation reduces LAN administration by autoregistering new devices on the network and by supporting ad hoc discovery, with no need for enterprise-wide directories.

NuOffice Based on Salutation Architecture

The NuOffice office system includes Salutation extensions to Lotus Notes that enable users to print, scan, fax, and email without concern for device drivers or directories. The NuOffice user can send documents to printers and other peripherals, rather than only to a PC. The user can receive fax information as email and send email to fax machines. Running on Lotus Notes Domino Server and Lotus Notes Client, NuOffice allows a document received from a peripheral, for example, a scanner or fax, to be imported into a Notes database. Additionally, a NuOffice user can access and distribute information right from a peripheral device, without opening a laptop, logging in to a workstation, or dialing a phone number.

“This announcement underscored the momentum Salutation is gaining in the market. Salutation technology is already included in the flagship product lines from several major manufacturers. The Ricoh/IBM product follows an announcement made last September that Xerox intends to add Salutation Architecture support to its flagship Document Centre family of digital multifunction office systems. Salutation is helping vendors deliver a unified system for scanning, document management, e-mail, messaging, fax, and distributed printing,” said Pecora.

About the Consortium

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.