Bear Access 98 is here! By Beth Goelzer Lyons   Bear Access 98 (also called Bear Access 2.0) is no mere update. Gone are the astronomical metaphors of the rocket ship and Launch Pad. The familiar image of the Bear Access road leads not to the red and white list of services, but to a window of colorful icon buttons and folders. All of the currently available services are here in this new Bear Access Viewer. The most popular ones appear at the top. Clicking on a button launches that service. Related services, such as Cornell University Library's services, are nested within folders.

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"Overall I like the new interface. I found it easy to use and an improvement over the old Bear Access," said Alex Nemeth, microcomputer specialist at the College of Human Ecology and a Bear Access product tester. Recommendations for upgrading Instructions for getting and installing Bear Access 98 are on the Web. Bear Access 98 runs best on a Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0 computer with a Pentium 133 or faster processor, or on a Macintosh with a PowerPC or 68040 processor running MacOS 7.6.1 or later. At least 32 MB RAM and 100 MB of free hard disk space are advised. Users with computers below those standards should continue using the old Bear Access 97, which will be supported until fall 1999. CIT recommends switching to Bear Access 98 by January 1999 to take advantage of anticipated service upgrades, such as the COLTS II timecard system. Because the Bear Access 98 installer is large, EZ-Remote users may prefer to wait until the Bear Access 98 CD-ROMs are available at the end of July, or use a computer with a direct network connection to copy the installer to a ZIP disk. New features made possible by new architecture The look of Bear Access 98 is one of several enhancements. Others include upgrades to many services, more-informative "request to download" and error messages, a better way of working with Kerberos tickets and an all-new underlying architecture. Details on the service upgrades are on the Web. Bear Access 98 fulfills a long-wanted wish of many users: "The messages saying that you need to download or update a service now tell you what files will be downloaded and where they will go," said Jon Atherton, Bear Access project manager. "This kind of information is invaluable to campus support providers and people who are trying to troubleshoot a problem." In addition, error messages have been rewritten to be more informative and, in some cases, suggest how a problem might be fixed. Behind all these changes is a new architecture dubbed Project SALSA (Service and Licensed Software Acquisition). A Cornell-developed technology, Project SALSA is far more powerful and flexible than its predecessor, Project Mandarin, which was the architecture of the old Bear Access. "Project SALSA has several important benefits. It can deliver services using installers instead of downloading individual files. It can support multiple viewers, like web viewers. It can keep track of a service's location on the user's computer, even if the user moves the service. And it makes it much easier for developers to build and maintain services," said Ron DiNapoli, Project SALSA technical lead. Currently only the standard Bear Access Viewer is available. It has basic functionality and its appearance cannot be modified much. The Bear Access team will be meeting with users and technology support professionals to develop future requirements and options for the viewer. Changes in password protection In Bear Access 98, password-protected services such as Eudora, Employee Essentials and COLTS still rely on Kerberos tickets, which users obtain by entering their Network ID and password when prompted. But instead of being a "broken" key in the Bear Access window, the Kerberos ticket is now shown as a yellow key in the system menu and a small floating window containing the user's Net ID. In Windows, the yellow key is in the system tray at the end of the task bar. On the Macintosh, it is at the upper right corner of the screen. If a user does not have a Kerberos ticket, a red circle with a slash appears on top of the key, and the floating Net ID window is gone. These changes let users quickly see whether they have a Kerberos ticket, even if the Bear Access Viewer is not open. Tickets can be canceled by either closing the floating Net ID window or choosing the yellow key and selecting "Logout." SideCar, the other component to Kerberos security, has been streamlined. SideCar will now start only with services that require it, instead of starting with Bear Access itself. Most of this article also appeared in the 18 June 1998 Cornell Chronicle.