Steve Masover, IST–SIS
In time for the start of fall semester, new application servers and architecture to support the critical set of administrative, academic, and financial services available through Bear Facts (http://bearfacts.berkeley.edu/) went into production in early August 2005. The new hardware and the J2EE container in which Bear Facts for Students will run is expected to better meet increasing demand and expectations. At the end of fall 2004 and spring 2005, spikes in logins by students interested in learning their final course grades created a load on the older servers that prevented faculty from being able to enter the very grades students wanted to see. Load testing over the summer suggests that capacity has increased substantially, and the implementation of additional capacity management strategies in the coming months will further improve Bear Facts's robustness.
New services are available through Bear Facts as well.
Students can now pay CARS bills online through Bear Facts using Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). Students can also authorize someone else, such as their parents, to see their CARS bills. In the near term, student sign-ups for EFT deposit of CARS refunds and financial aid awards is expected to help avoid delays due to a scheduled September 9–23 shutdown of the system that prints paper checks for these disbursements. For additional information about e-billing, students should visit the eBill Billing and Payment Services page (http://mybill.berkeley.edu/ebill/).
Web-based access to degree audit reports is now available directly to students. Last year, students requested 40,000 degree audit reports through their student advisors. Providing a means for students to request the reports directly, in order to view degree requirements and a summary of progress to date in meeting them, is expected to streamline and simplify access to information critical to academic planning. Student advisor access to the reports, previously accessible only through a mainframe interface, is also greatly improved.
Tele-BEARS and Info-BEARS, the campus enrollment and real-time registration information systems, are also changing. Modifications to the Tele-BEARS interface and architecture have paved the way for retirement of the old PeriWeb application server. The fall 2005 deployment, in a J2EE application server, will facilitate the merging of Tele-BEARS and Info-BEARS functionality into a single interface during the fall semester.
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