Information Technology Services Guide

Quick Links

Overview

Information Technology Services (ITS) provides comprehensive information technology services with a state-of-the-art IT environment to support teaching, learning, research and administration of the University.  Its facilities include an advanced campus network, powerful central servers, high performance computer (HPC) clusters, cloud computing and modern learning environment, and its services include portal services, learning management and lecture capture services, centrally coordinated software, user support service and web-based administrative applications.

This Guide provides a quick reference to help new staff and students get started in using the central IT services and facilities.

ITS Orientation

ITS is organizing orientation sessions to help new staff and students familiarize themselves with the variety of IT services supported by us.  Orientation sessions for the first semester will be held from late August to mid-September and those for the second semester will be conducted in January.  Check out the schedule and registration.  All new members are welcome to join.

HKU Portal

HKU Portal provides a user-friendly and easy-to-access interface for University members to access the centrally provided IT services including services offered under the Student Information System (SIS), Human Capital Management System (HCMS) (for staff only), electronic mail, learning management system, web-based administrative applications, and Library services.

All staff and students are given a computer account, uniquely identified by an HKU Portal UID (User Identification) and an associated PIN (Personal Identification Number), for accessing a wide range of network services and applications conveniently.

a. HKU Portal UID (User Identification)

For students:

The HKU Portal UID and PIN will be distributed to new students upon admission registration.  Thus, no application is required.  The pre-assigned UID begins with “h” or “u” followed by the 3rd to 9th digits of the HKU student number.  For example, if the student number is 3031234567, the pre-assigned UID will be u3123456 and the corresponding email address will be u3123456@connect.hku.hk.

Students can change their pre-assigned UID within 7 days after Master Registration.  Change of UID can be done once during the entire study at the University.  This change can be made via HKU Portal (type “UID” in the Search field > click the link “Change HKU Portal UID”).

For staff:

New staff members will receive an initial password and the procedure for the application of HKU Portal account from the Human Resource Section of Registry (HRS) together with the appointment letter.  Upon receipt, they can apply for the HKU Portal account and set their preferred UID and PIN.  For staff members without an initial password provided by HRS, they can apply for HKU Portal UID via here (accessible within HKU campus network only).

The chosen UID should resemble the applicant’s name.  ITS reserves the right to disapprove any chosen UID which is deemed inappropriate.  A fee of HK$200 will be charged for late or subsequent change requests to recover part of the administrative overhead.

b. HKU Portal PIN (Personal Identification Number)

Change of PIN can be done via HKU Portal (type “PIN” in the Search field and click the link “Change HKU Portal PIN”).  Staff and students can reset their PIN online whenever it is forgotten by making use of their mobile phone number and alternate email address provided during account creation (for staff) and change of initial password (for students).  They can simply click the link “Forgot your PIN/Passwords” at the login page of HKU Portal to get this done.

For more information about HKU Portal, please click here.

Connecting to HKU Network

ITS has installed a high-speed and sophisticated campus network based on 10-Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet technologies with over 57,000 network access points installed which links together all the computer servers, workstations and PCs in the main and remote campuses.

Wireless access to the campus network and Internet is provided by over 9,200 WiFi access points and is available in all centrally-administered classrooms, public areas in the main campus, department offices and halls of student residence.  Apart from the University’s WiFi network “HKU”, staff and students can also enjoy WiFi access off-campus at CSL and Y5Zone WiFi hotspots in town, and at other local and overseas universities using “eduroam”.

For making wifi and fixed network connection, a one-time configuration/network card registration is required by following the procedures.  

Staff and students can also use the HKU Virtual Private Network (HKUVPN) for accessing the campus network services outside the University network.  Access to HKUVPN requires 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) which means on top of HKU Portal UID/PIN, a one-time token code has to be provided to complete the login step.  New staff and students will have 2FA registered for them automatically.  They will receive a one-time token code every time when they make a VPN connection. Please refer to our HKUVPN 2FA user guide for the configuration and connection steps.

Email Service

a. HKU Connect Email Service for Students

Student email service is powered by Google. Students can keep using their accounts UID@connect.hku.hk for life. 

Students can check emails via the MyEmail tab of HKU Portal, webmail.hku.hk or other supported mail clients.  For more information about the student email service, please click here.

b. Central Email/Calendar Service for Staff

Staff email accounts are hosting on in-house email servers running Microsoft Exchange (hkucc1.hku.hk).  Each staff member is allocated with a default disk quota of 15GB and email archive is available for registration in case the disk quota exceeds. 

Staff’s email address is UID@hku.hk.  They can check emails via the MyEmail tab of HKU Portal, webmail.hku.hk, Microsoft Outlook or other supported mail clients.  Procedure to access the staff email on different supported platforms can be found here.

e-Learning

Learning Management System (LMS) – Moodle

Moodle is the central Learning Management System (LMS) which supports an online platform for teaching and learning.  Moodle courses are automatically created for all academic courses registered under the Student Information System (SIS).  For more information about Moodle, please visit here.

Lecture Capture Services (LCS) – Panopto

Panopto is the Lecture Capture Service (LCS) available for use by staff and students to record lectures and events for subsequent viewing by different users.  Having integrated with Moodle, recorded lectures will be uploaded and associated with the Moodle course automatically.  More details can be found here.

Learning Environment

ITS, through the Learning Environment Services (LES) Team, looks after the central learning environment of the University, comprising classrooms, lecture theatres and Chi Wah Learning Commons.  A wide variety of facilities is provided to support the technology-enabled learning experience.  For example, the Digital Literacy Laboratory (DLL) has powerful iMacs and well equipped production studios together with technical support for multimedia production.  Communal PCs come with the latest version of software packages, including word-processing, web page design, graphical and multimedia tools, and statistical analysis.  uPrint service (laser printing service) is available for both communal and personal laptop computers (click here for the configuration procedures) which are connected to the campus network through WiFi. 

For using the uPrint service, 100 free printing units are allocated to every new student upon new account creation.  For non-fresh undergraduates, they will also receive 100 free printing units before the start of a new academic year.  Additional printing units can be purchased using HKU uPrint app or Octopus Card at the Add Value Machines (AVM) in the Chi Wah Learning Commons and the Libraries.  The charge is HK$0.3/printing unit.  Any unused printing units will expire upon graduation. 

Centrally Coordinated Software

ITS coordinates a number of software for use by staff and students.  They can download and use these items by following the procedures below:

Please visit Centrally Provided Software for more details.

Computer and Research Support Facilities

ITS provides expertise and central support in high performance computing (HPC), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Grid Computing to facilitate compute-intensive research activities of the University.  An 804 Tera-FLOPS HPC system that equipped with the latest technologies, including fast multi-core processors, Nvidia Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and Lustre parallel file-system, and a 3,160-core HPC system (theoretical peak power of 130 Tera-FLOPS) are available for supporting compute-intensive and accelerated computing.  Two AI platforms (total 6.5 Peta-FLOPS Deep Learning Performance) are provided to facilitate AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning researches. Software packages for supporting engineering and scientific applications, biomolecular simulations, statistical analysis and data visualization are installed on these servers.  Please refer to the research computing services webpage for more details.

Protect Your PC from Computer Viruses and Network Attack

Staff and students must protect their PCs vigilantly against computer viruses, trojan horses and spyware because they affect not only the operation of their PCs but also the performance of the entire campus network and the Internet.  It is every user’s responsibility to arrange necessary measures to safeguard their PCs.  More details available here.

Mobile Applications

A variety of mobile applications supporting different services are available for use by staff and students.  Please click here for more details.

ITS Trainings Video

A variety of ITS training videos are available for self-learning. Please click here for the video list.

Getting Help

Policies and Guidelines

All staff and students are required to abide by the following policies and guidelines in using the University’s IT facilities and services.

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MFA

Multi-Factor Authentication

February 2024
February 2024

Mandatory for all staff accounts

May 2024
May 2024

Mandatory for all student accounts