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.