News

To exploit the cloud computing technologies, CityU has decided to adopt the Microsoft Office 365 (Office 365 hereafter) for Education. Office 365 is the cloud computing solution offered by the Microsoft for academic institutions. As an initial step, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) will replace the existing UNIX-based email system for students by the Exchange Online of the Office 365 in the coming Semester in 2013, and staff is optional to join Office 365 as a supplementary email service.To set up Office 365 for CityU, the CSC needs to decide on a common and easy-to-remember namespace for Office 365 so that users can easily set up access from their email clients on their desktop PCs and mobile devices. With this in mind, the CSC has assigned my.cityu.edu.hk to be the primary SMTP namespace for this new email service.

/* The following article is extracted from the "Information Security Newsletter" published by the JUCC IS Task Force. */  In view of a numerous benefits of virtualisation, virtualisation technology has recently gained popularity in the marketplace. According to Gartner, percentage of workloads running on virtual machines will jump from 16% to 50% by the end of 2012. Some overseas universities (e.g.

/* The following article is extracted from the "Information Security Newsletter" published by the JUCC IS Task Force. */ Virtualisation is the separation of resource or request for a service from the underlying physical delivery of the service. It can dramatically improve the efficiency and availability of resources and applications in your organisation.

In response to the University's emphasis on Discovery & Innovation and the subsequent implementation of Discovery-enriched Curriculum (DEC) in academic year 2012-13, the Chief Information Officer together with the Department of Computer Science (CS) proposed to set up a few DEC Labs for academic departments to conduct courses which empower students to discover and innovate, and the proposal was subseq

Taking a huge leap forward, Microsoft launched the latest version of the Windows Operation System – Windows 8. The new operating system radically changes the way Windows works by introducing a new shell and user interface designed to be used with touchscreens yet maintaining certain compatibility for mouse and keyboard users.

Numerous websites and applications have been deployed on the Central IIS production Web Server, namely the www6.cityu.edu.hk. Without proper User Acceptance Testing (UAT), site owners cannot guarantee the new sites are delivering the expected quality or the new applications may even cause undesirable effects on the hosting servers, worse still affecting other websites hosted on the same server. To ensure quality of websites and stability of the production server, a proper environment for UAT and user training is now provided through a staging www6 server. This staging server allows site administrators to test their new websites thoroughly before deploying them to the production server.

/* The following article is extracted from the "Information Security Newsletter" published by the JUCC IS Task Force. */ Code injection attacks pose massive threats to the IT environment within universities. They could allow hackers to compromise universities' network, access and destroy their data, and take control of the information systems. As such, appropriate hardening steps should be in place to guard against these attacks.

Microsoft officially launched its latest web browser Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in mid-March 2011. In comparison with IE8 and IE7, IE9 is clearly faster and safer than its predecessors. Furthermore, Microsoft claims that IE9 even outperforms some rival browsers. In order to allow offices, support units and application developers to have more time to prepare for IE9 support, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) has adopted a temporary policy to prevent IE9 from being downloaded automatically to computers which are joined to the University’s CityUMD domain (i.e. all Staff LAN and Student LAN PCs, except the CSC Student LAN PCs in which IE9 has already been set up in the Win7 environment).

After several months of preparation and hard work, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) Service Counter and Teaching Studio Areas have been successfully moved from Academic 1 (AC1) to Academic 2 (AC2) before the commencement of Semester A, 2012-13. In fact, the new Service Counter located on 4/F (AC2) had started to provide full services since 24 August 2012. There is a total of 19 Teaching Studios providing 870 PCs and 30 iMacs for teaching and learning. In addition, there are over 900 notebook computers available for daily loan to students. For location, room capacity and operating system of these computers, please refer to the article on “Moving CSC Student Terminal Area from Academic 1 (AC1) to Academic 2 (AC2)”, Network Computing Issue 72 - June 2012.

Introduction The central web hosting service is set up to provide a consolidated, fully monitored and managed environment for hosting departmental and project websites for all departments and offices.The hardware and software offered by the central web service are maintained and supported by the Computing Services Centre (CSC) while the web page contents and applications are developed and maintained by individual departments. Compatibilities with web standards and technical advices are provided by the CSC to departments to assist them in the development of new websites or the upgrade of existing websites.Planning a website development In order to provide a stable and safe web hosting environment for all web sites and services, users are expected to do all the development on their own machines and fully test them on the staging server before uploading to the central web hosting servers. Website administrators/developers are strongly advised to follow the development/staging/production life-cycle for website development (please refer to the article on “www6 Staging Server is Now available” in this issue of Network Computing).