News

With technology moving along at a rate so fast that it is easy to fall behind if one does not stay up to date with one’s IT skill set. The Computing Services Centre (CSC) saw the training needs and had been running Staff Computer Courses and Student Computer Literacy courses for many years. Course statistics over the years had shown that although the enrolment is not particularly high, computer courses are still popular among staff. Student literacy courses, on the other hand, had shown a decline in both the number of applicants and student show-up rates in the past three years despite more training classes were offered.

CityU has been offering wireless LAN (Wi-Fi) service since year 1997. It enables us the freedom and flexibility of accessing the Internet without cable. With the sharp growth of different brands and models of Wi-Fi user devices being brought and used on campus which may run different Wi-Fi components and software versions, even on same brand and model, there are increasing usage problems and thus providing Wi-Fi support is becoming more difficult.

What is Lync Online?As the University has adopted Microsoft Office 365 (O365) not long ago, one of its module, Lync Online Service (Lync for short) is also offered in the software suite. Lync is a unified communication cloud service hosted by the Microsoft which supports various interactive communication means between two or even among many different parties at the same time.

A delegation from the Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia learned about the Paperless Office Project implemented at CityU during a visit on 3 December.

With the successful migration of the University email systems for students and alumni from the on-premises systems to Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Online (“O365” is Microsoft’s cloud solution for educational institutions) in 2013, the Information Strategy and Governance Committee (ISGC) of the University has endorsed (i) the immediate migration of the University email system for staff from the on-premises Microsoft Exchange system (“Exchange”) to O365, and (ii) the whole migration be completed within one year from August 2014.

Relocation of Mac Lab lockers, benches and the working environment are maintained.  Room AC2-5607 is now equipped with advanced PCs providing two operating systems (Windows 7 and Windows 8.1) for general use (see table below). Instructors should pay attention to this change while making Mac Lab booking.

Nowadays, the adoption of mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones are changing the way that people work.  Using personal devices at work makes users feel more comfortable and work faster with their own customized and personalized settings, thus increases productivity levels as well as user satisfaction.

 

The Computing Services Centre (CSC) envisions this trend and explores the feasibility of adopting personal mobile devices for teaching and learning.

/* The following article is extracted from the "Information Security Newsletter" published by the JUCC IS Task Force. */ Firewalls are part of the IT environment of universities and shall be secured in accordance with the universities' Information Security Policies and relevant industrial standards. Hardening steps for the firewall systems are recommended to focus on "Access Security" and "System Security".

/* The following article is extracted from the "Information Security Newsletter" published by the JUCC IS Task Force. */ Like universities' other information systems, desktops or networks, firewalls are computing devices/applications and also have vulnerabilities exposed to certain type of exploitations.

Why Upgrade?Since the establishment of City University, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) was charged with the full responsibility of providing all Central IT services to the University to support all its administrative, academic and research works. Since then, the CSC has followed closely with the IT Industry standards and trends, so as to provide the most robust and cost-effective solutions for providing the services. Many of these methodologies were studied and adopted, among these included the use of the full function and mature server and network virtualization techniques, as well as the adoption of the Central SAN Storage Provisioning (which can also be viewed as a disk virtualization technique). These are two of the most important technologies nowadays in the Enterprise Class IT Implementation. Without these, it will be impossible to provide effective and efficient resource management to an Enterprise organization such as our University. And to date, almost all of the University critical services were built on top of these two technologies.