WinSelect and WinU

[ckidd at easilink.com]

Date sent:      	Tue, 23 Jun 1998 12:57:05 -0700
Send reply to:  	goodeld at wou.edu
From:           	"Dale E. Goodell" <goodeld at wou.edu>
To:             	Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
Subject:        	WinSelect and WinU

> I'm working on an upgrade of our public workstations to Windows 95 
> and Netscape Navigator 4.05.  I'm considering purchasing:
> 
>      1)   WinSelect KIOSK (the current version is 3.31) to secure the 
>            menus within Netscape.
> 
>      2)  WinU from Bardon to secure Windows 95 itself and to provide 
>           a menu/desktop interface.
> 
> I would be interested in hearing from others who have implemented 
> this combination.  How has this worked for you?  What problems 
> or difficulties have you encountered (and hopefully resolved)?  Any 
> other recommendations?
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> 
> ==================================================================
> Dale E. Goodell
> User Support Analyst
> Western Oregon University Library
> Monmouth, OR 97361
> 
> Internet:   goodeld at fsa.wou.edu
> Voice:      503/838-8891
> Fax:        503/838-8399
> 

We've used both for about a year and a half. Both are excellent products and 
are highly recommended.  It's unfortunate though, that one has to use these 
products in tandem rather than a single program that provides an acceptable 
level of security.  However, as each program matures, there are signs of 
merging traffic ahead ...

WinU is nice for the menu system, usage reports, and software metering.

Ikiosk/WinSelect is much better at disabling (greying out) application menu 
options that allow potential security risks (i.e. typing c:\command.com in the 
Netscape location bar).

The problem here, however, is that if you make available on the public 
workstations (as we do) a large and eclectic number of reference databases 
that can be either internet-based, hard drive resident, CD-ROM server resident, 
or NT server resident, it becomes time-consuming and problematic to plug all 
the holes with WinSelect.  WinSelect's tendency, with 3.3 and above, to 
provide specfic app disabling (right now mostly varying IE and Netscape 
versions) is helpful.

Workstation system security with either product, seems in our experience to 
be 6's or 9's. Both products work well.

I suspect experientally, though haven't taken the time to verify, that while both 
programs work well together, there is a greater drain on memory and system 
resources with both in place.

Our solutions?
Do a weekly scandisk and defrag, purchase only machines with 512K Level 2 
cache, and 32MB RAM should be a minimun configuration.

Best of luck.

Creed Kidd
Assistant Librarian
Uintah County Library