News

The website (http://literacy.cityu.edu.hk) of the Student Computer Literacy Programme (SCLP) has been revamped this summer to better serve the needs of students and meet the requirements of today’s web standard. The following web design guidelines have been adopted:

Dr Andy Chun Hon-wai, Chief Information Officer and Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, has been named one of Asia’s 15 most outstanding IT innovators for 2010 and one of the top 50 international CIO and IT leaders in social media.

Microsoft Office 2010 provides some attractive features to assist users in work, including Backstage View, Paste Preview, Customization of Ribbon, Photo Editing Tool, Removal of Photo Background, New Screenshot Feature, Improved Sharing and Collaboration, Ribbon Interface for Outlook, and many others.

In addition to the basic phone and fax service provided by the CityU IP Phone System, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) is preparing to deploy a personal fax service supported by the RightFax fax server where users can send and receive faxes using their own networked PCs. Fax server is a comprehensive network fax solution for creating, sending, receiving, and managing faxes directly from a user’s desktop computer. With RightFax, users can fax documents as easy as printing them to a networked printer.

Since the start of academic year 2008, more than 7,000 students had participated in the Student Notebook Computer Long Term Loan Scheme (LLS). The scheme entitles eligible students to loan a notebook throughout their period of study. Students can select between two models of notebooks, namely the light-weight notebooks (Lenovo X200) and the ultra light-weight netbooks (Lenovo S10). When the students graduate, they are asked to return the notebooks to the university.

During the last academic year 2009-2010, the Student Computer Literacy Programme (SCLP) (organized by the Computing Services Centre (CSC)) has arranged 36 training classes for 7 different courses. 1350 applications from students were accepted.The course evaluations on students who have attended the training classes were all positive:-

Due to the pervasive availability of Wi-Fi devices such as notebook computers and smart phones, the demand for wireless connectivity throughout the university has grown significantly in the past few years. Recently, we have received complaints saying that users experienced bad throughput in densely populated areas such as Library and 4/F Mall even though the radio signals were good. We worked with the engineer of the Aruba Networks (manufacturer of our WLAN equipment) immediately to troubleshoot the problem and found that clients using 802.11b/g/n in the 2.4GHz band were affected while clients using 5GHz were not.

You may have noticed that, since the end of last month, you have been receiving email from your external correspondents in only a matter of seconds. This is the result of the recent system upgrade performed on the university incoming mail gateway.Spam/junk email had been the headache of email users and email administrators for many years since electronic mail became popular. The number of spam email is steadily increasing every year. Nowadays 80% to 90% of email delivered over the Internet is spam. (ZDNet: In Asia Pacific, roughly 91.8% of all emails are spam). The implementation of “drop the email if its spam-level detected is 99% or higher” policy (adopted by the Committee on Information System and Technology (CIST) in December 2006) had significantly reduced spam email delivered to our user mailboxes. However, the proliferation of spam email had caused our incoming email gateway servers to be more and more overworked in filtering spam email and delivering the legitimate messages to our users. In the past few months, our mail gateway had been bombarded with an increasing number of spam email, causing hours of delay in its external email delivery.

Microsoft set up the DreamSpark program in 2008 to provide free professional developer and design tools to students around the world to help them improve their learning and skills through technical design, technology, math, science, and engineering activities. The only restriction on the use of these tools and software is self-explained.Getting your student status verified

With the mobile workforce growing continuously, it is a major concern for IT decision makers to protect sensitive data on mobile computers. Starting from Windows Vista, BitLocker Drive Encryption helps protect sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users. BitLocker To Go extends such data protection to USB storage devices, enabling access to be restricted with a password. BitLocker To Go can even be forced to apply on all removable drives in an organization by IT administrators through the group policy.