OCIO Newsletter Issue 1

OCIONEWSLETTER Issue 1 • OCT 2010

Words from the CIO It is indeed my great pleasure to introduce this first issue of the quarterly “OCIO Newsletter.” We hope this newsletter will keep everyone at CityU up-to-date on all the new and exciting IT services and systems we are putting into place to support our University’s mission and our new University Strategic Plan. Although this issue contains mostly activities from the central IT team, we plan to include departmental IT activities as well in future editions.

The most urgent IT priority right now is of course to get From left to right: Mr. Raymond Poon (Director of Computing Services), Dr. Andy Chun (Chief all our administrative systems ready to support the new Information Officer), Mrs. W K Yu (Director of 334 academic reform. This include changes to how our curriculum is coded within our Banner student information Enterprise Solutions Office) system, changes to our admissions systems to support the new JUPAS system and data coding, as well as deploying new systems, such as the DegreeWorks system for academic advising and degree audit. We are also enriching our e-learning environment.

For example, we deployed a new version of the Blackboard learning management system as well as new collaborative services from Google GApps and MS Live. This newsletter will keep the CityU community abreast of these and other new IT initiatives as we roll them out.

As always, our entire IT organization is dedicated to serving the CityU community and to helping make CityU a leader in the innovative use of technology for teaching, learning, research and administration.

My door is always open and I welcome any feedback or ideas you may have on any aspect of IT at CityU.

Andy Chun

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OCIO NEWSLETTER

SPOTLIGHT

Central IT Systems for the 334 Academic Reform W K Yu The central IT systems for the “3+3+4” academic reform consists of 3 main parts – IT infrastructure, e-learning and Student Information System.

IT Infrastructure In line with the development work for 2012/13, viz. new building, more classrooms, increase in number of students and faculty members, new application systems for the 4-year degree structure, etc., there is also expansion in the IT infrastructure and IT support. Preparation is in progress, including • Wireless LAN – the coverage has been expanded and the service will be set up in new buildings. Recently the wireless LAN has been upgraded to support IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n.

• Internet bandwidth – the CSC is working with other UGC-funded institutions to increase the bandwidth for learning and research by students and staff.

• System capacity – new servers are expected to be installed to support application systems and other initiatives. Planning for capacity, operational support, disastrous recovery, etc. is required.

• Terminal room – the existing terminal rooms will be re-located to the new academic buildings.

• Service design – the service and support model will be reviewed to cope with the challenge of multiple academic buildings, offices in different locations in Hong Kong, and the increase in number of users. “Go Green” is one of the considerations in the design.

E-Learning Health check and capacity assessment on the e-learning system are performed on an annual basis starting every March to project the system requirements for the next year. The projected student number increase in 2012/13 will be taken into account in the assessment exercise 2011/2012. Appropriate action will be undertaken to ensure the system is sufficient to handle the demand in 2012/13, should the result indicate such need.

Student Information System (SIS) The new 4-year degree curriculum to be launched in 2012 will bring about many changes in the student management processes. A lot of system developments and modifications are required to accommodate these changes. Below are some highlights:

Fundamentals The new 4-year degree curriculum has a different structure from the current 3-year programme. The current programme coding scheme is no longer applicable and a different scheme will be adopted. In future, students in different disciplines will be identified by their degree and major. For firstyear students entering the University without a major, an “Undeclared” major will be assigned to them.

Access to student information and the right of updating student data by different stakeholders has to be redefined. The existing functions of the SIS have to be modified accordingly.

One of the major functions - Student enquiry on AIMS - will be revamped to support different groups of users retrieving the information of their relevant student groups.

Admissions Our Admissions System is also undergoing significant system changes, including • Modifications for working with the new JUPAS system • Applying different rules for calculating JUPAS scores • Automating the screening process • Enhancing selection process and JUPAS interview arrangement

Records Under the new 4-year degree structure, students will benefit from a broadened curriculum. Yet compared with the students in the 3-year degree structure, they will need to make a far greater number of choices regarding courses, electives, majors, and minors, etc. A new initiative by OCIO and Associate Provost together with ARRO was made to introduce academic advising. With the University’s approval, DegreeWorks, an application system supporting student planning, academic advising and degree audit, was acquired and installed. The system is to be implemented by 3 phases. Phase 1 implementation will be in December 2010, applying to the 7 programmes which are piloting the 4-year curriculum in 2010/11. The 2nd phase will include the 29 programmes adopting the 4-year degree structure and be launched in Semester A 2011/12, while full implementation of all 4-year programmes be at the start of 2012/13.

Issue 1 • Oct 2010

FEATURE

Project 4Y (P4Y) Annie Ip

The existing course management system, i-CMS, is to be redeveloped to match the 4-year degree structure and the policies related to awarding classification and other processes, and at the same time be able to serve other non-4-year degree courses and programmes, e.g. postgraduate level. The new system is targeted to be launched in 2011/12 to allow contingency and time for further improvement.

New processes are required to be in place for declaration of major and minor. A process for students to declare minor was defined and IT functions were also deployed in August 2010. Work for declaring major is planned to start in early 2011. In addition, there is need to develop system functions to support other new processes like application for graduation, credit transfer or exemption, etc.

There are also many processes to be re-visited for ensuring their adequacy to support the new programme structure and the

increase in student population.

Examples are time tabling and course registration. Expected are also changes to reports like academic transcripts and graduation certificate.

Project Management and Contingency Plan A management team comprising CIO, directors of ADMO, ARRO and ESU is in place to plan, steer the development, and monitor the progress of the Student Information System for the 4-year curriculum. Project plans have been laid down. The team meets every other month. Any slipping tasks can easily be identified and remedial action taken promptly. The existing plan is to implement the systems in phases, piloting for a few programmes and processes in 2010/11 and extending its operation for about half of the programmes covering all disciplines in 2011/12. The management team will also review the implementation stages to ensure a fully operational system to be in place for 2012/13.

“Project 4Y” is a project funded by the UGC’s Restructuring and Collaboration Fund. It is led by City University of Hong Kong, in collaboration with Lingnan University and the Hong Kong Institute of Education for jointly developing the administrative processes to manage student information for the new 4-year degree structure and implementing these processes on the SunGard Banner system platform. The Project, entitled “Re-engineering of Student Administration for the 4-Year Normative Degree Structure”, was started in July 2007.

During the past three years, P4Y has organized many joint activities. In May 2010, it held a “P4Y Forum on Institutional Planning”, and a sharing session on academic advising. In the P4Y Forum, institutions shared their planning on student demand, course offering, budget allocation and teaching facilities for the 4-year degree. In June, the Project invited Professor Nicholas de Takacsy, Emeritus Professor of McGill University to visit the three institutions to share McGill’s experience in budgeting, resource planning and analytics. Professor de Takacsy had met with the Associate Provost, CIO, Director of Finance, Director of ARRO and ESU colleagues during his visit at CityU.

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OCIO NEWSLETTER

FEATURE

Re-launching the Student Computer Literacy Programme Yeung Man Introduction To equip our students with the fundamental IT skills for their study, research and work after graduation, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) sees the need to boost their IT knowhow through basic and advanced computer training as a complement to their formal curriculum. To fulfill the above objective, the CSC has set up the Student Computer Literacy Programme (SCLP) since 1985 with a series of free IT short courses targeting new students. In academic year 2009-10, 36 courses in 7 subject areas attracted around 1,350 applications from students.

According to students’ evaluations collected after classes last year: • 97% of students showed their interests to the course • 94% of students considered the quality of course materials was either good or excellent • 93% of students found that the course was useful

• 91% of students concluded their overall impressions were from good to excellent

User Survey In order to identify the IT training need of students, the CSC conducted an online survey during March 22-31 to collect suggestions and comments on SCLP courses from all staff and students. Totally, 225 valid responses were received. The following highlights the survey results: • The most suitable length for a course session should be 2 or 3 hours • Most find the training classes are better arranged in weekday evening or Saturday day time • The top 10 courses chosen by students º Microsoft Excel 2010 – Advanced º Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 – Advanced º Microsoft Word 2010 - Advanced º How to solve common PC problems and secure your computer º Microsoft Access 2010 – Advanced º Google Apps

Viewing new SCLP website through iPhone

º Adobe Flash – Introduction º Introduction to Windows 7 º Adobe Flash – Advanced • Many students showed interest in learning Adobe Photoshop • Quality of SCLP courses was good and instructors were very professional • Required different classes for different language speakers • Requested to provide online training and further exercises Based on survey results, the CSC has planned the following in year 20102011: • The duration of most training sessions will be 3 hours, but some quick courses may still be 2 hours • The training classes will be arranged on weekday evenings and Saturdays (both morning and afternoon) • Courses to be continued include: Introduction and Advanced courses on Microsoft Office 2010, computer security, Windows 7, Google Apps and MS Live • New courses to be included: Flash, Photoshop and Chinese Input Method (Chang Jie) • Working within resource limits to plan classes in different languages for students to choose

New Website

Viewing new SCLP website through MacBook Safari

At the same time, the SCLP website (http://literacy.cityu.edu.hk) has been rebuilt to satisfy the needs of students and meet the requirements of today’s website standard. To minimize the

Issue 1 • Oct 2010

problems frequently encountered in web browsing, frames, pop-up windows and Flash Shockwave are avoided.

In fact, various web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, are able to browse the new website without any difficulties. In addition, the new website not only supports the Windows environment, but also works well on Macintosh machine, iPhone and other smartphones.

Web 2.0 components are added into the new website. An “AddThis” link is included to facilitate the sharing of information, and there is a link to the SCLP FaceBook group where users can discuss and subscribe SCLP news.

Training Team The User Services section of the CSC is responsible for the management of SCLP including course planning and administration, recruitment and coaching of student helpers, coordination of instructors and helpers, update of website, quality control, and other related activities.

At the moment, course instructors and training materials are provided by contracted professional training companies which are appointed to deliver IT training courses to University staff. As the class size can be as large as 80, some student helpers will provide assistance in the classes to ensure smoothness and effectiveness of course delivery. To equip student helpers with the required IT knowledge, internal training classes will be organized for the student

helpers before each SCLP of the semester starts.

Future Plan As mentioned above, student helpers play an important role in course delivery. As IT evolves quickly, the CSC is required to satisfy training need according to students’ feedbacks (received through emails, discussion forum, course evaluation and survey) and market trends. A strong training team with sufficient experienced student helpers can surely shorten the time required to introduce new courses and revise existing ones.

In fact, quality student helpers can perform more than simply as assistants in classes. In 1999-2006, the CSC established a strong training team.

Team members were capable of teaching most of the courses, training new student helpers to take up their tasks and compiling course materials (including course notes, exercises, and presentation slide shows) under proper supervision. Re-establishing such a strong training team is required.

Indeed, allowing students helpers involved in these activities also provides a good training opportunity for them as well.

Although SCLP courses are repeated several times a year, some students might still have difficulties in finding a

training session that fits their schedules.

In some occasions, the responses are too overwhelmed that there are not enough seats to accommodate all applications. For these reasons, the CSC put SCLP courses online in 2002-2004 so that students could easily attend SCLP courses any time, any place and, most importantly, at their own pace. These online courses were well received by students. However, it requires a strong training team to create online courses as it is necessary to develop course materials, capture and converting all computer screens, mouse movements and actions into computer videos, and finally arrange experienced instructors to add in proper narration. When the new training team is established, CSC can resume the publishing of online courses.

Conclusion As demand keeps increasing, more training courses and classes are expected in the near future. In this academic year, 16 training sessions before the start of Semester A and 13 training sessions in the first 3 weeks of Semester A have been organized, and over a thousand applications from students have already been received. Re-launching the SCLP is not easy. The most important step is to recruit sufficient potential student helpers, coach them patiently and build up a strong training team. When this goal is achieved, the rest will be taken care of automatically.

BRIEF UPDATES

New Time-out Feature in AIMS Louisa Tang The AIMS service has recently been enhanced with a new timeout mechanism. Most web applications perform timeout checking between two consecutive submits (or clicks). Time used for normal typing (or keystrokes) in between clicks is not counted. That means, if users have spent time longer than the timeout limit in preparing/typing their information, they will be timeout when they finally submit their information.

By making use of modern AJAX technology, the timeout limit of AIMS is now enhanced to be true 15 minutes “idle” time. So normal typing is also counted. Moreover, if timeout does happen, users are allowed to re-connect the AIMS session again simply by reentering their EID and password so that their works will not be lost.

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OCIO NEWSLETTER

FEATURE

Business Continuity Plan for IT Systems Louisa Tang The University is heavily relying on the Central IT systems to keep and manage student, staff and alumni information.

A crisis or a disaster that destroys or severely cripples the Central IT systems for a prolonged period will have great impact on the normal business operation of the University.

Therefore a well designed Business Continuity Plan for IT Systems (BCP) must be available with the following objectives : • Identify the mission critical services of the University.

• Define manual processes that can be implemented and to keep the mission critical services continued during a disaster until the technical infrastructure resumes normal.

• Develop and test a well-structured and coherent plan which will enable the University to recover as quickly and effectively as possible • Establish cohesive emergency response and crisis management plan.

• Develop a communications plan to notify teams, activate the plan, assemble personnel, assess damages, and declare a disaster.

A Crisis Management Team (CMT) is established and chaired by the Chief Information Officer. The CMT will carry out the important tasks to examine and assess the impact of the failure on the University level, activate Business Continuity Plan(s) of relevant offices, manage the business recovery and resumption efforts, communicate with both internal and external campus constituencies and make public announcements when necessary.

For each mission critical service, an Incident Working Team is established normally chaired by the Head of the Department who is the custodian office of the service. This team will oversee the

Business Continuity Plan of the service that they are managing, recruiting members from various offices, mobilize work force to respond to a disaster and reporting directly to the CMT. Up to now, the Business Continuity Plans for several mission critical services have been developed. They include : • University Communications for contacting students and staff • Students Record System for handling the important processes such as

enrolment, course registration, examination arrangement, assessment and graduation.

• Payoll System for making salary payments to staff • Blackboard System for e-Learning Details of the BCP can be found under the e-Portal which is accessible by all staff and students. (link: https://eportal.cityu.edu.hk/ bbcswebdav/institution/APPL/BCP/ index.htm)

BRIEF UPDATES

Bb 9 Maria Chin CityU has adopted Blackboard Learn (Bb) as the unified e-learning and e-portal platform since 2005. The e-Learning Support Team in the Office of the CIO has worked closely with the CSC to persistently upgrade and expand the IT platform for learning and teaching to facilitate a technologically advanced and pedagogically rich e-learning environment for our modern educators and learners.

We started with Blackboard Release 6 in 2005, and in mid August 2010 we successfully deployed Blackboard Learn (Release 9.1) for our 4,700 active course and organization sites, and bringing new social learning and teaching tools to foster active learning opportunities for our students.

New features like Mashups ease integration of rich media learning content using Web 2.0 resources, e.g. on-line news, YouTube, Flickr, for the building of current and engaging course content. Instant Messaging, Wiki, and voice tool promote active collaboration; moreover, professors can see and participate in the process of their students’ learning as they progress through the course. Recording of lecture allows students to revise parts of the lecture at their own pace and time. The Web 2.0-featured course management tools, e.g. Learning Modules, Course Files, Assessment Manager, ease course delivery and assessment. Plug-ins in the form of Building Blocks provide seamless connections to external communication, collaboration applications, and plagiarism prevention tools, e.g. Google Apps Education Edition (CityU GApps), turnitin, SafeAssign.

Various workshops and presentations which focus on the different applications of the above features are organized for staff to ease their transition from the earlier Blackboard version to Blackboard Learn.

(Courtesy of Dr. Crusher Wong of the e-Learning Support Team of the OCIO)

Issue 1 • Oct 2010

FEATURE

BRIEF UPDATES

OCIO Knowledge Sharing Forum

GSA

Andy Chun

Maria Chin

Since 2009, the OCIO has been organizing several experience/ knowledge sharing sessions that are opened to all IT staff, both central and departmental, as well as any interested students.

These sessions provide rare opportunities for IT staff across departments and units to meet and share their valuable experiences.

In November 2009, Mr. CM Hui (CS) shared their experiences at the CS Lab in setting up a departmental “cloud” and how that saved much needed space, provided a greener IT environment, and also improved service for the users. In the same month, Mr. Adam Chan (CB) shared their experiences at the College of Business in creating several highly effective applications to support CB and departmental use and the general IT infrastructure of the CB network.

To make the ICT sharing a concerted event, we organized our first “ICT Knowledge Sharing Forum” in January 2010. These ICT forums are designed so that different IT staff from same/ different departments and units can contribute to experience sharing around a selected theme.

In the January forum, the topic was “IT Security.” Kevin Chan (CSC) gave a talk on how to protect data in portable storage devices, such as USB “fingers,” within a Windows 7 environment using BitLocker.

In the same forum, Wilson Wong (CSC) gave a talk on how CSC provides a “Web Application

Security Scanning” service to check for any potential security leaks in central/departmental Web applications prior to deployment and as needed on request.

In April 2010, we held our second “ICT Knowledge Sharing Forum.” This time the theme was “Open Source” and we had 5 different speakers. Dr. Crusher Wong (OCIO) and Tomson Xu (OCIO) talked about Bboogle (an open source tool to connect Blackboard with Google Apps) and our experience in implementing and deploying it for CityU’s Blackboard environment. Mr. L.Y. Lam (ESU) gave an overview of Perl, an open source scripting language, traditionally popular among systems administrators but is now also used for Web-based services. Mr. C.M. Hui (CS) gave a related talk on using Perl to implement REST web services and how the CS Department is benefiting from productivity gains through the use of these services. Dr. Andy Chun (OCIO) gave an overview of the Python open source programming language and a quick programming tutorial. Mr. Alex Lam (CSC) gave a talk on how CSC is benefiting from the use of a collection of enterprise-grade open source tools for network management.

Please keep an eye out for our next ICT Forum where we will have more exciting talks.

Departmental and project websites are wealth of information which can be better harnessed with a good Search Engine in place. Google has made its Google Search Appliance (GSA) marketable in Asia-Pacific in mid 2010, and the CityU has acquired and successfully implemented the GSA for the entire CityU web (cityu.edu.hk).

The CityU’s GSA has replaced the existing externally hosted Google Custom Search on August 16th 2010. Departmental/ project websites are searchable from “CityU Web Search” on the CityU, or customized search interface on departmental/project homepages. The CityU GSA has greatly enhanced the user search experience on the CityU web. Below are some advantages of the GSA over Google Custom Search: • Quicker user search experience.

• Changes and newly posted web pages will be searchable within hours instead of days, even weeks.

• The refined search capabilities of GSA, namely “Narrow your search”, “Related Queries”, and “Advanced Search”, ease searches by narrowing search within searched result, and provides intelligent suggestions basis on a query.

• Upon authentication, students will be able to search protected web pages for students while staff will be able to search both protected web pages for staff and students. Likewise, staff with membership access will be able to search protected web pages for members besides protected pages for staff and student. This facilitates the role-base looking up of internal information e.g. administrative notes, regulations etc.

With this search ability in place, a talk was organized in August to discuss with Website Owners and Administrators on the content provision and access control in their websites, and a refresher is planned for coming October.

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OCIO NEWSLETTER

BRIEF UPDATES

Wiki Services Maria Chin The CityUWiki is introduced to department and staff in June 2008. It is a portal based collaboration and document management service based on Microsoft SharePoint which features blogs and wikis. There are two CityUWiki services: • wiki.cityu.edu.hk, sites hosted in this service is for closed group access e.g. members of committee, members of department, and members of research/project team. This service is shielded from external user and is a preferred platform for sharing of internal document and for project collaboration.

• wikisites.cityu.edu.hk, sites hosted in this service can be open for public view and add comment if individual site owner finds appropriate. Some sites on wikisites are: the President’s Blog - Way to Kuo, the NewsCentre, and several university event photo albums.

To access private sites on either CityUWiki service, a user will need to login with his/her EID and PC LAN password.

Training courses for Site Owners and Users are available, staff may look up from the “In-house Staff Development Course Catalogue” in AIMS for course schedule on “Windows SharePoint Services ...”.

Department and staff are welcome to contact the CSC (cc@cityu.edu.hk) to discuss their potential CityUWiki applications. Experienced users can apply for a site via a CSC Work Request with the following information: • Purpose of site • Require a Private Site, or Open Site (the public can view and add comment only, no user account will be provided to public/external user) • Preferred name of site • Name & EID of Site Owner (the person responsible for the site and its content) • Name & EID of Site Developer (the person responsible for the technical support) • Expiry date of site (all sites have to be renewed annually to avoid content left unattended) • Intended user

BRIEF UPDATES

IT Info Andy Chun “IT Info” (www.cityu.edu. hk/it/) is a new website that we launched over the past summer.

You can also access it through the CityU homepage under “My CityU.” It acts as a one-stop information source for anything related to ICT at CityU. The website has three different sections – one for students, staff, and alumni, covering all the typical questions a member of the CityU community might have on our IT. For example, there is information on our electronic ID and computer accounts, various online services (such as AIMS, e-Portal, e-Learning, email, etc), facilities (such as IP phone, Wifi, WAN, VPN, LAN, computer teaching studios, etc.), various IT training courses for student and staff, IT security issues, FAQs, etc. Handy contact numbers for all our offices are also listed.

We hope you will find this website useful. If there is anything you cannot find, simply contact our IT Help Desk at 3442-7658 or cc@ cityu.edu.hk. The IT Help Desk will be more than happy to help you or refer you to the proper channels.

BRIEF UPDATES

Short URL Andy Chun If you are using social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to share information, most likely you will need to share links. As you may have noticed, most links on these social media sites uses a shorten form of the URL instead of the original URL to save space. There are many free services on the Web that help shorten a URL for you, such as tinyurl.com or bit.ly.

At CityU, we created our own “URL shortening” service. You can find it here: http://www6.cityu.edu.hk/shorturl/studentlan/ or via the “Short URL” icon at the OCIO website (www.cityu.edu.hk/cio/). All shortened URL has the domain http://go.cityu.hk. The shortened URL can be a random symbol or you can custom-design your own keyword. Since our service has the “cityu” branding, it is restricted to shortening links within the cityu domain only. This is particularly useful if you need to pass long URL links of documents in the CityU wikisites to others.

Hope you will enjoy this new service. We would love to hear comments from you.

Issue 1 • Oct 2010

BRIEF UPDATES

Classified Personal Data in Central Administrative Systems and Good Practices Louisa Tang To protect data restored in the University database and maintained by the central administrative systems, access to the central systems is tightly controlled. Access must be for duty reasons and the approval must be endorsed by Head of Department.

All users must sign a Confidentiality Pledge to undertake that they use data in accordance with the provisions of the Personal Data Privacy Ordinance and according to the Policy on Use of IT Services and Facilities established by the University. (link: http://wikisites.cityu.edu.hk/sites/ upolicies/itpolicy/Wiki%20Pages/(3)%20 Electronic%20University%20Data%20 Regulations.aspx) Classified personal data have been identified. The primary classified personal data are those data which must be protected at all times which include HKID number, Date of Birth, Bank Account and Credit Card Number.

The secondary classified personal data are those data which are considered very sensitive which include Name, Passport ID, Address and Telephone Number.

To implement more stringent measures, all primary classified personal data are masked for display on web and for massive data extraction. Only under special conditions with legitimate justification, the primary classified personal data are displayed or extracted in full.

However, in handling personal data, all users also have the responsibilities to

safeguard the data. Below lists some of the good practices: • Protect password, change regularly • Never leave PC unattended with a session accessing data • Avoid making copies of sensitive data; destroy them after use • Protect mobile devices in which data are stored

• Protect PC from virus • Avoid using shareware to handle data • Encrypt sensitive data, especially for transmission • Report information breach to management

BRIEF UPDATES

CityU Web 2.0 Andy Chun Social media, such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc., are of course very popular and very important means to communicate in our modern world. Everyone is using them and so are we. A few months ago, we launched a new “CityU Web 2.0” (www.cityu.edu.hk/ web2.0/) website that consolidates all our official CityU social media sites into one place.

The “CityU Web 2.0” site lists all our official social networks, blogs, microblogs, interactive publications, photos, videos, feeds, etc. In addition, there is a social media “Search” function that allows you to conveniently find CityU-related social media content in either the English or Chinese language.

If you are using social media, you can make sure that our “search” can find your content by just following our simple CityU “tag convention.” The convention is simply to include “#cityu” and “#hk” hashtags in tweets as well as similar “cityu” and “hk” tags to mark content in other social media sites.

If we missed any social media sites that your department or unit has created, please let us know (cio@cityu.edu.hk).

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OCIO NEWSLETTER

FYI

Microsoft Office 2010 is Available Now! Joe Lee We are glad to inform you that the newly released Microsoft Office 2010 is available now for staff’s teaching and learning use.

The launch of Office 2010 is as follows:

Staff LAN Office 2010 is released for installation through the Staff LAN through the Work Desk menu.

This will directly replace the Office 2007 products. When a staff member clicks on any of the Office 2010 product option from the Work Desk menu, the upgrade program will check for available storage space of the staff’s machine, remove Office 2007 from the machine and then install Office 2010 there.

The whole process takes about 20 minutes, depending on the hardware configurations.

Teaching and learning In Semester A 2010-11, we will make available Office 2010 on computers in the CSC Teaching Studios, in Library Information Space and Learning Commons, and in all LTs & Classrooms to support teaching and learning.

Office 2010 will replace Office 2007 under the Windows 7 computing environment.

Apart from using Office 2010 in your office, you may exercise the Work at Home Rights to install Office 2010 to ONE of your home computers. Your department has already collected the DVDs of Office 2010 (Eng), Office 2010 (TC) and Office 2010 Multi-language Packs, and you may borrow the software media from your office for installation. You are reminded to read the Terms & Conditions of the Microsoft Campus Agreement. For details, please visit http://www.cityu.edu.hk/ csc/stafflan/ms-license.htm. We will arrange training courses shortly to help you get started using this new version which looks similar to Office 2007.

FYI

Campus-wide support of Windows 7 Joe Lee Windows 7 has gained momentum in deployment world-wide since its official launch in late October 2009. We are pleased to announce campus-wide support of Windows 7 after satisfactory production release on public access student computers, PCs at LTs and classrooms, and the successful pilot run with some staff LAN PCs of a few departments...

1. For computers running Windows Vista An automatic process has been set up to facilitate direct Windows 7 upgrade via the Work Desk menu. Users can simply click Upgrade to Windows 7 on the Software for Windows 7/Vista menu and follow the instructions there to perform the upgrade. The whole upgrade process is estimated to be about 2 hours, depending on the hardware and applications installed. Users are requested to carry out a compatibility test before the formal Windows 7 upgrade process can be started.

As good practice, users should back up their useful data before they start the upgrade. Individual department may submit a CSC Work Request for special arrangement of support if upgrading to Windows 7 in one go is preferred.

2. For computers running Windows XP Fresh installation of Windows 7 is required, implying that users must back up their data and re-install all applications currently running under Windows XP. Of course, this will take more time to complete.

As Windows 7 requires substantial resources to operate efficiently, the following minimum hardware configurations are recommended:

• A dual-core processor

• 2 GB RAM

• 30 GB free disk space Again, your department may raise a CSC Work Request to seek upgrade assistance.

Users should note that the default browser for Windows 7 is Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). For features of IE8, please visit the FAQ for IE8.

Although Windows 7 will become popular, we will continue to support Windows XP until Microsoft officially ceases its support or a newer Windows version is announced.

Various workshops and presentations which focus on the different applications of the above features are organized for staff to ease their transition from the earlier Blackboard version to Blackboard Learn.

Issue 1 • Oct 2010

FYI

Incoming Mail Gateway Servers Upgraded to Speed up Email Traffic Henry Wong 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.

To tackle the situation, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) has upgraded the existing email gateway servers

as well as installed a brand new high-powered email gateway server, employing a collection of newer stateof-the-art anti-spam technologies that include IP reputation, advanced keyword analysis, and MTA IP blocking etc. Many spam email, once identified to be originated from suspected spam source (in particular the Botnets, networks of virus-infected computers being used to send 80% of spam nowadays) by one or more of these technologies, will be rejected by our servers, hence much reducing the number of email queued up on the server for spam score calculation. This results in great saving of our network/ system resources and profound improvement in processing speed. Our observation shows that the delay time for delivering external incoming email to our users was significantly reduced from 1/2 hour -1 hour on average to 10 second - 1 minute.

The CSC will continue to monitor the server performance and to maintain an outstanding email service for the university community.

FYI

New Arrangement of OMR Service Joe Lee We are pleased to inform you that the over 10-year old Opscan 8/50 Optical Mark Reader is finally replaced by a new Sekonic SR-3500 machine. This machine supports all our existing standard forms and is bundled with a userfriendly application. In addition, another Sekonic SR-1800 machine has also been acquired as back-up to provide the scanning service in parallel. Both machines are installed in the CSC Printing & Plotting room. If you want to mark standard multiple-choice examination scripts or capture survey data from standard forms, you may reserve the machines through the online CSC Teaching Studio Booking System. (Login e-Portal, select Univ. Services (Staff ) and find CSC Teaching Studio Booking under FACILITIES BOOKING.)

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FYI

Free Email and Collaboration Services from Google and Microsoft Joe Lee Enterprise 2.0 is defined as “a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.” (Please visit http://www.aiim.org/Whatis-Web-2.0.aspx for details.) As technologies advance rapidly and become mature, the University has deployed Microsoft SharePoint to support many internal and public applications in various ways to support Enterprise 2.0 such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, ePortfolios and forums. (Please refer to “Microsoft Windows SharePoint: A Web 2.0 Environment in CityU” in Network Computing, Issue 55, March 2008.) The University has also made its presence in public social networking places such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc.

Google and Microsoft are two of the major providers of free Email and collaboration services in the world. Google’s Google Apps and Microsoft’s MS Live public social networking services are known to have greatly enhanced users’ communication, social networking and collaboration experiences.

Both Google and Microsoft have made special packaging based on these two public services for the educational institutions which are offered for free to education users under the service names of “Google Apps Education Edition” (GApps) [2] and “Live @ edu” (MSLive) [1] respectively. Apart from the email services, most of the other collaboration features available within GApps and

MSLive (e.g., calendar, personal blogs, messenger (or chat), web video conference, photo album, personal disk storage space, office applications, personal website, smart phone support, video hosting, etc ) are either not currently offered by or more sophisticated than those offered by the University. As such, the Committee on Information Services and Technology (CIST) approved the implementation of MSLive for staff and students in the 14th meeting on 24 September 2008 and subsequently approved both MSLive and GApps for all CityU members in the 17th meeting on 6 January 2010, filling up the gap of services offered in this area.

Actually, MSLive and GApps are not entirely new to our staff and students as some of them could have already obtained free accounts of the corresponding public services for their personal use. However, they are encouraged to register for these services through the University to gain distinct benefits, including the followings: • University domain name for email address (@mslive.cityu.edu. hk or @GApps.cityu.edu.hk) • No third-party ads for MSLive mail and GApps • Integrated with the University’s user account and the e-Learning system [4] Yet, another benefit of MSLive is that students can use the MSLive account to download some useful software tools for projects from the Microsoft Dreamspark website

[3], including Microsoft Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio and others.

Both MSLive and GApps are popular Internet services and very intuitive, and hence most staff and students who have been using Blackboard and other IT services in their teaching and learning should find them easy to use.

Nevertheless, the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) has planned to put together some recommendations and sharing sessions for instructors to help facilitate their exploitation. In addition, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) will provide courses on using MSLive and GApps for staff and students throughout the year.

Since the Email services bear the domain name of “cityu”, users must follow the University’s regulations on IT services when using it. The University’s “Regulations on IT Services and Facilities (1): CityU Electronic Mail” have been revised to reflect the changes.

All the Google and Microsoft services are provided as optional services to supplement the University’s own Email service, which shall remain the primary Email address. All official business correspondence from the University will be sent to the Email accounts provided by the University’s own Email service.

However, users may choose to forward mail to the MSLive and GApps Email accounts at their own discretion while taking care of the protection for sensitive information.

Issue 1 • Oct 2010

BRIEF UPDATES

CityU IT Acronyms Andy Chun With all the different IT services and systems at CityU, their names and the acronyms can sometimes be a bit overwhelming and confusing. We compiled some common ones for the benefit of new faculty and staff:

over the network. Video sessions of lectures, conferences, forums, seminars, demonstrations, course materials and so on can be viewed at users’ own pace from any location on campus or via ISP from home.

AIMS – Administrative Information Management System, a suite of university information systems allowing students, staff and alumni access to a variety of essential academic support and administrative services. Developed by CityU’s ESU, all AIMS functions are webbased and primarily developed for selfservice purposes.

CSC – Computing Services Centre.

Responsible for CityU’s IT infrastructure and central computing facilities as well as technical services and support services.

Banner – Our student information system (SIS) used to store all student, staff and alumni data using an Oracle Enterprise Database.

Blackboard – Our unified learning management system (LMS) for e-learning, integrated with tools such as turnitin, wimba voice tools, wikis and blogs, echo 360, iPhone, Google Apps, facebook, and other applications.

CAP – CityU Announcement Portal. This is the University’s official e-announcement service for both staff and students. It provides a centralized Web platform for any types of e-announcements at CityU. CityTV – CityU’s live TV broadcast service.

Through a Web browser, CityU users can select to view TV channels of inhouse TV broadcast and commercial TV programmes.

CityUWiki – This is our portalbased collaboration and document management system (DMS). Created

by CityU’s CSC, the portal is based on Microsoft SharePoint platform.

CityVOD – CityU’s Video-on-Demand service. Allows users to select and view video from a collection of archives

EID – Electronic ID. To access any IT services provided by the University, a user must have an EID. Once an EID is assigned to a user, it will be used by that person even when he/she changes his/her role in the University as a student or staff or alumnus.

EIS – CityU’s Executive Information System.

An integrated system for delivering timely and accurate management information to department heads and their delegates to facilitate their planning and decision making processes. Developed by CityU’s OCIO, the EIS application is built on top of Oracle Essbase, the industry-leading multidimensional online analytical processing (OLAP) server.

Eduroam – Education Roaming. A service that allows CityU staff and students to enjoy free-of-charge Internet WiFi access at any Eduroam-enabled institutions all over the world, using the same CityU username and password.

GApps – Google Apps. This is a suite of communication and collaboration applications designed for use by education institutions but hosted at Google. It includes email, calendars, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, instant messaging, voice calls, websites, etc., with mobile support. i-CMS – Internet-based Course Management System. Used by CityU staff to enter assessment results for courses and to communicate with students.

IRIS – Internet-based Research Information System. An interactive Web-based research information system that provides CityU staff members with up-to-date project and financial details, and the general public with research-related information including list of researchers, projects and publications.

MSLive – Microsoft Live @ edu service.

Hosted by Microsoft to enhance University staff’s and students’ personal messaging, social networking and collaboration experiences. It includes email, calendar, instant messaging, blogs, storage, photo sharing, etc., with mobile support.

ROL – CityU Research Online. A centralized database of research publications by CityU staff. A Web-based system to retrieve and update published research output of our researchers for internal and external reporting. The system collects research output and references from a number of databases eg ISI, Science Direct and IEEE Explore. It also caters for the University’s annual output reporting to the RGC and individual staff’s annual activity reporting.

e-Portal – e-Portal is the main gateway to all IT services at CityU. Built on top of Blackboard, e-Portal can be accessed by clicking on the “Student”, “Staff” or “Alumni” links at the top of the University home page.

SCLP – Student Computer Literacy Programme. Organized by CityU’s CSC, this programme provides IT courses to equip our students with these fundamental IT skills for their study, research and work after graduation. These courses are offered on a voluntary basis and do not carry any credit.

ESU – Enterprise Solutions Office.

Responsible for implementing and managing the University’s central information systems and to integrate IT into administrative processes.

SSO – Single-sign-on. A service that allows staff and students to move between applications such as Blackboard, AIMS, i-CMS, etc., without having to log in each time.

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BRIEF UPDATES

IT Concepts from Wikipedia Andy Chun (ed.)

Cloud Computing is Internet-based computing. Shared computing resources, software, and information are provided to users and devices on demand, very much like the electricity grid. The term “cloud” is used as a metaphor for the Internet; a cloud is commonly used drawing in computer network diagrams to represent the Internet and its underlying infrastructure.

web browser as if it was a program installed locally on their own computer. Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online that are accessed from another Web service or software like a Web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers. A key element of cloud computing is customization and the creation of a user-defined experience.

Cloud computing describes a new way to obtain IT services through the Internet, and it typically involves overthe-Internet provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources.

Cloud application services or “Software as a Service (SaaS)” deliver software as a service over the Internet, eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer’s own computers and simplifying maintenance and support.

It frequently takes the form of webbased tools or applications that users can access and use through a

Cloud platform services or “Platform as a Service (PaaS)” deliver a

computing platform and/or solution stack as a service, often consuming cloud infrastructure and sustaining cloud applications.

Cloud infrastructure services or “Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)”, deliver computer infrastructure – typically a platform virtualization environment – as a service. Rather than purchasing servers, software, data-center space or network equipment, clients instead buy those resources as a fully outsourced service.

This article uses material from Wikipedia. The Author(s) and Editor(s) listed with this article may have significantly modified the content derived from Wikipedia with original content or with content drawn from other sources. The current version of the cited Wikipedia article may differ from the version that existed on the date of access. Text in this article available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

Statistics at a Glance Blackboard Login Count Blackboard Login Count by Month (2009/2010)

Blackboard Login Count — past 4 years:

Issue 1 • Oct 2010

AIMS Login Counts

Internet Usage

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Spam Message Count

Glossary Corner

Phishing In the field of computer security, phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT administrators are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting public. Phishing is typically carried out by email or instant messaging, and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to fool users, and exploits the poor usability of current web security technologies.

Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical security measures.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing)

Editorial Box OCIO Newsletter Advisory Board Dr. Andy Chun (OCIO) Ms. Annie Ip (OCIO) Mr. Raymond Poon (CSC) Mr. Peter Mok (CSC) Mrs. W K Yu (ESU) Publishing Team Ms. Noel Laam (CSC) Ms. Annie Yu (CSC) Ms. Joyce Lam (CSC) Mr. Ng Kar Leong (CSC) Mrs. Louisa Tang (ESU) Ms. Doris Au (OCIO) For Enquiry Phone 3442 6284 Fax 3442 0366 Email cc@cityu.edu.hk

Photo Credit: Page 1 photo courtesy of Dennis Ho (CSC); Page 10 and 16 photos courtesy of Peter Mok (CSC).

OCIO Newsletter Online http://issuu.com/cityuhkocio