News

In October, with the endorsement of the Committee on Information Services and Technology (CIST), our Chief Information Officer, Dr J T Yu announced the adoption of the Blackboard Academic Suite as the e-learning platform of the University. As this is an important decision of the University and the task of implementation has already started, Network Computing talked to Dr Yu to find out more about the background to the decision, the capabilities of the software suite and the plan for its release for general use in the University.

VPN stands for "Virtual Private Network" and it is a way to provide remote access to an organisation's network via the Internet. VPNs send data over the public Internet through secure "tunnels". Therefore, if you decided to use the services on the CityU network from a remote site e.g. from home, you could safely log on the campus network by establishing a VPN connection between your home PC and CityU via the Internet. For more details and the steps on how you can set up such a connection, please visit the CSC Web site at http://www.cityu.edu.hk/csc/deptweb/facilities/ctnet/vpn/vpn.htm

CityVoD, first launched in February 1999, allows users to select and view video from an archive over the network. This technology greatly enhances the availability of multimedia information for lecture and leisure, and adds substantial value to the quality of higher education.Video sessions of lectures, conferences, forums, seminars, demonstrations and course materials etc. can be recorded, encoded and stored on the media server, allowing simultaneous real-time access to the same piece of information at users' own pace.

Since many easy-to-use and powerful Internet applications are now readily available, more and more people in CityU are making use of the Internet for their daily studies, researches and electronic communication of all forms. In addition, with an increasing number of students living in hostels, the network communication between CityU and the Internet had risen significantly.

A Big Leap in Email Quotas As email now becomes an indispensable tool for communication, and with different forms of multi-media documents regularly being exchanged via email, providing sufficient disk quota to accommodate the email and its associated documents is as important as providing unfailing and speedy delivery of email.

With the recent implementation of the new Banner Payroll and Personal Data Enquiry System, we have reached a major milestone in enhancing the user experience in accessing payroll and personal information as well as improving the inter-departmental workflow efficiency, such as the Human Resources Office (HRO) and Finance Office (FO), among others.

In addition to a collection of all the security fixes to date, Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) contains major improvements in network protection, memory protection, email security and browser security to effectively guard against hackers, viruses, and worms. Indeed, SP2 seems to provide an operating system upgrade rather than just a series of bug fixes.

The new, user-friendly campus map is a convenient tool to help visitors find their way to CityU, or search for a specific location / building / facility at the University.

The Video Conferencing facility (VC) has always been popular among CityU users, and have you ever wondered what it is used for?The use of VC in CityU can be catalogued into the following types:

Some of the technical terms we use in our daily work were mentioned in our last issue. This issue, we shall continue to provide definitions of the ones that were often raised at the CSC Help Desk.