IT Services

Software Licensing Programmes

To optimize resources centrally, achieve cost-effectiveness, ensure regulatory compliance, and maintain compatibility with the latest campus-wide updates, ITS coordinates various site licensing programmes and bulk purchase agreements for commonly used PC software and their distribution to departments. Software Licence Available for Departments’ Purchase Agreements have been made with software vendors for departments to purchase new licence and / or maintenance upgrade of the following PC software at prices lower than the regular packages: Adobe Software License Microsoft Products Statistical Software Package Respondus   Distribution Arrangements For the purpose of distributing the software purchased under site license arrangements, departments can: borrow the software from ITS for installation in their offices, Loan of Software Request Proforma has to be completed. download the software directly online if network distribution arrangements are made available by the software vendors. Click here for the software media available for on-loan purpose from ITS. Departments can call the ITS General Office at Extn 2413 for prior booking arrangements.  

Student Computer Centre

The Student Computer Centre (SCC) is located on the 4th floor of the Li Ka Shing Tower where over 200 PCs are accommodated for student and staff use. Apart from the computer labs, there are informal learning spaces for project discussion and group work and a relaxation area for users to take rest and relax. No prior booking arrangement is necessary in SCC. All users are requested to observe the Rules for Student Computer Centre Users (see the rules via the link below). Computers & Software Students are welcome to leverage the prevailing software installed in SCC for their study. For details of the computer hardware and software configuration in the Student Computer Centre, please refer to the list via the link below. TLIT Lab Teaching and Learning Information Technology (TLIT) lab, located at M401, provides workstations with graphics card installed to run multimedia applications. Software such as Unreal Engine for Augmented Reality (AR) / Virtual Reality (VR), gamification, level design and development; Renderforest for animation, DaVinci Resolve for video editing and Unity for game development are available for use in TLIT lab and/or via remote access. Virtual Access Computer Centre Software applications in SCC and TLIT lab are also made available through Virtual Student Computer Centre (vSCC) for students to remote access from home machine browser with their NetID and NetPassword. Classroom Booking for Teaching A number of designated PC rooms on the 4th floor of the SCC is available for class booking by departments via the Room Enquiry and Booking System on a first-come-first-served basis. Please contact your Departmental Timetabling Officer for booking arrangements. Printing & Scanning Printing and scanning services are provided in the SCC and octopus card is adopted for charging. A wireless printing service “SCC Mobile Print” via mobile application “Print Utility” has also been introduced. Users can easily print files from their mobile device or cloud storage at the SCC's printer such as Microsoft OneDrive for Business, Adobe Reader, Google Drive, Google Docs, iCloud Files and Dropbox, etc. For details, please refer to the SCC mobile print user guides.

Teaching & Learning Information Technology

Teaching & Learning Information Technology (TLIT) embraces technology to enhance the learning experience for students. All across the globe, education institutions are adopting gamification and Mixed Reality (MR) technologies in learning and teaching. These technologies create new horizon for next generation education and empower learners’ creativity as well as storytelling and collaboration skills. To equip our students with new knowledge to meet the challenges of the 21st century, a series of workshops will be organised regularly in each semester to cover areas as to creation of animated content, development of virtual reality /augmented reality applications and online games, etc. Recordings of the previous workshops are available online for revisit if students are not able to attend the class. Schedule of upcoming workshops will be posted on TLIT website, interested students are recommended to check it out and register for the workshop. TLIT Lab To support students in producing multimedia footages, pictures and apps for their assignments and projects, a Teaching & Learning Information Technology (TLIT) Laboratory providing 23 computers with high-end graphics cards has been set up in the M401 of Student Computer Centre (SCC). The multimedia applications installed on the computers including Unreal Engine for Augmented Reality (AR) / Virtual Reality (VR), gamification and level design and development; Renderforest for animation, DaVinci Resolve for video editing and Unity for game development. Students who want to leverage TLIT applications can either physically visit the lab or access remotely over internet via vSCC (click here for details to vSCC set up).

University Central Web Hosting Services

University central web hosting service provides a set of standard hosting solutions for centrally managed web hosting under Linux and Windows environments. Department users or developers are able to securely transfer site content using their NetID and NetPassword to access specific subsections of their website. This infrastructure provides daily backups, security standards compliance, Web Application Firewall (WAF) Protection as well as support multi-domain websites. Performance and web traffic is continually monitored to maintain high levels of quality and performance.

University Portal Service

The University Portal (https://my.polyu.edu.hk), named ‘myPolyU’, is PolyU’s intranet web portal customized for staff and students to support their work /study life at PolyU. It is a platform for users to locate essential systems and information for conducting different activities. Staff and students can also learn about important upcoming events hosted by different departments. They are advised to log on to ‘myPolyU’ frequently to keep up with the latest events and information such as learning, teaching, research, administration, student and staff wellbeing, and to use it as a handy tool for locating the systems / websites that they need.

URL Redirection Service

Hitting an error page is never a good experience for a website user. The URL redirection service helps users to ensure all their web links published on external websites / papers are redirected to the right places after the website revamp.

URL Shortener Service

The PolyU URL Shortener is a URL shortening tool dedicated for web addresses under the PolyU domain (‘polyu.edu.hk’) and PolyU Office 365 (O365) including URLs of SharePoint Sites, OneDrive documents, Microsoft Forms and other O365 services provided by PolyU. With this service, the shortened URLs with the prefix ‘https://polyu.hk’ can be created. As such, the shortened URLs can be used in promotional and marketing materials, social media, etc. to make them easier to remember, facilitate sharing, increase click through rate, etc.

Video and Web Conferencing Services

As an irresistible trend that more events and activities are held online, a range of video conferencing tools and applications have been introduced for faculty, staff, and administrators to conduct one-to-one and one-to-many audio and video communications such as large scale meetings, conferences over the Internet: Microsoft Teams Meeting (up to 1,000 participants) Microsoft Teams Live Event (up to 10,000 participants) Zoom (up to 300 participants) For support and details, please contact IT HelpCentre.

Virtual Assistant

The virtual assistant has adopted open-sourced software Mycroft to provide web chat function and response displayed on departments/offices’ website. It aims to address enquiries from staff and students and point to information on user guides and web page links on topics & services on a 7 x 24 basis.    Based on chat history with staff and students, the virtual assistant will continue to expand the knowledge base to improve contextual sensitive response for enhancing its usability and readability over time.  

Web Application Firewall Service

To ensure publicly accessible information systems of the University are well protected against cyberattacks, all publicly accessible systems shall be equipped the baseline security controls including: Server based endpoint security solution, i.e. Trend Micro Deep Security agent Security anomaly detection agent, i.e. Splunk agent The Web Application Firewall service is provided to departments/ offices to safeguard their publicly accessible web applications / websites against web attacks such as SQL injection, etc.