Tammy--

I regret that I need to go to a regional fiber meeting
that overlaps with Friday's meeting on point of sale.
This sounds interesting.  Happily, David Stihler has
confirmed that he will be able to represent our technical
interests.

I did read through all the material that was forwarded
through Rich.  I went to the company web site.  They
are $500M a year.  That's impressive.  But the docs are
not.  I wonder whether the material is current.  Thinnet,
10 Mb/s hubs?  What year is it?  I searched both docs
for "tcp" and came up with nothing.

I think what we want to tell bidders is that our power
conforms to the requirements of the National Electric
Code for the year it was installed, and data connections
conform to the installation and product requirements of
TIA568.  We do not do beautique grounding; we do not
know if any of our conduit is non-ferrous (we doubt it),
but it all meets code.  We're not inclined to open up
walls to find out whether it is aluminum or steel.  We
think it would be folly to home run branch circuits to
the building entrance instead of to the appropriate 
subpanel and, quite frankly, we question the technical
expertise of anyone that would suggest otherwise. 
Our data plant is unshielded Category 5 and it has passed 
the standard tests for Cat 5 or 5e, depending on when it 
was installed.

We do wish to purchase systems that can run on commercial 
grade power and standards-based wire plant as described 
above.  Just staple that into your RFQ.  

I think that the systems I read about were intended to be
installed in a single building.  There is nothing on the
vendor web page to indicate they serve a campus market
rather than a single-building market.  There is nothing
in the material presented that says these systems run on
top of IP.  We cannot route arbitrary protocols. So add
a requirement:

  POS terminals must communicate to their controllers using
  IP encapsulated in Ethernet.  Must meet all applicable 
  sections of RFC1122.  

  Architectures that have POS devices that connect with
  a serial protocol (e.g. RS-422 ) to controllers that speak
  IP to their server (two layer architecture) may be considered 
  but any wiring required will have its cost charged against 
  proposals tha require it.

Not so much a requirement for the vendors as for the project,
but a historical problem with the Cbord system (there are
many, but) is that the readers were unplugged and stored
between meals.  There are two problems with this.  First,
connectors and cords will break with that kind of handling.
You cannot have a reliable system that is reconfigured 3X
a day.  Second, to have a fully monitored system, it is best
if the system is fully connected and ready 24x7.  We need to
know that a failure to respond is a truck-roll event.  Otherwise
we have to wait for the phone to ring before we can tell
something is wrong.

Let me know if I can be of any help.  -jim