Introduction
On first October our class went to industrial talk at CICT building, this talk mainly aims to introduce what is CICT to the new student. Especially to the school of computing student, they need to really know the actual purpose of the CICT. On that day, the talk held in one of the hall in CICT and we got some knowledge about CICT. The speaker, Mohd Zahari Bin Zainal Abidin himself is ex-student of University Technology Malaysia, and he studied in course networking and security. The first thing that the speaker tell us is the vision and mission of the CICT. The vision of CICT is for UTM to be a frontier digital university and for the mission is to lead the development of an entrepreneurial digital ecosystem by nurturing innovative digital professionals and promoting collaborative digital services. The function of CICT is a support unit that offers and delivers ICT services for the university especially in ICT infrastructure, system development and academic or administrative activities. Those are important thing that student and the staff in UTM should know. The services that ICT provide is student lab, UTMID, wifi and VPN. They also provide student management service and ICT instructional service. There is some software that CICT provide which are MyUTM portal, Microsoft Dreamspark and Microsoft Office 365 and the software provided are free for all student in UTM. During the talk, the speaker also teaches us how to use UTMID and what type software we need to use, some of the software like crack software may not be preferred by the CICT staff. The CICT can detect whether the student using the real software or the crack one. So for the student they should use the real software.
CICT SERVICES AND ACHIEVEMENT
Centre of Information and Communication Technology (CICT) are providing services in term of infrastructure and security, application development, software and facilities in University of Technology Malaysia.
INFRASTRUCTURE & SECURITY
- ID Account & Access
ACID is a unique ID of the user through the authentication server to login to the university systems. All students compulsory to have their own user ID after they register in UTM. Meanwhile, UTM’s staff must have an official UTM mail account before applying ACID account.
- Official UTM Email
Starting from 28th June 2015, UTM was officially migrated from Desknow to Gmail in order to enhance their email service to all UTM community. Example link for UTM mails is nani@utm.my. There are a few reasons why UTM move to Gmail (powered by Google):
- Unlimited Mailbox Quota
- Reliable services
- 99.99% availability
- Integrated with all Google Cloud Tools such as Google Docs and Google Drive
- Google calendar including free SMS for sending reminder
- Link to Google Scholar Citation to keep track citations of academic articles
- Can be accessed anywhere
- UTM Hosting
CICT offer hosting services to UTM community for conference, association, club activities or any special events with affordable price. Their hosting services include web hosting, server hosting and colocation server hosting.
- UTM Ads
UTM Advertising platform will injecting digital advertiser banner direct into the user browsing session via campus Hotspot Wi-Fi network (UTMJB and UTMKL). They also promoting the product brands and contents and as long as the users are using campus Wi-Fi network, the banner appear and continuously repeated during the browsing session even they change website page. The key features for this ads are including location based, analytic and reporting provided, supporting through any operating systems and many more.
- ICT Security
ICT Security were provided and managed by using Next Generation Firewell with reducing complexity and total cost of ownership. The key features are including Firewall Policy, URL Filtering and Application Control.
- High Performance Computing
High Performance Computing or known HPC are computers with great processing capabilities terms of CPU speeds, large memory and disks space. These are needed for large complex computation and large data sets. HPC involves computation that use parallel processing which decompose of computation into smaller computation tasks that can be executed in parallel. The main purpose of parallel processing is to reduce computing time.
- Video Conferencing & Streaming
Video Conferencing (VC) is conducting by a set of telecommunication technologies which allow two or more locations to communicate by simultaneous two-way video and audio transmissions. The quality of services depends on the use of VC network traffic on a network link. In most cases, good quality can be achieved in the off-peak hours.
- Wi-Fi
- VPN
A virtual private network, also known as a VPN, is a private network that extends across a public network or internet. It enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network.
APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
- System Development
CICT were build and managing Administrative, Support, Multimedia, Teaching and Learning Applications to improve the university’s service delivery efficiency and quality. They also develop new application (web base and mobile) and maintain the current UTM application base on request by PTJ in term of data requirement. Example tools are PHP, JavaScript and Ionic Framework.
- Mobile Apps
A mobile apps is a software application designed to run on mobile devices such as smartphones and computers. Most of devices are sold with several apps bundled as pre-installed software, such as a web browser, calendar and mapping program. Some pre-installed apps can be removed by an ordinary uninstall process, thus leaving more storage space for desired ones. Where the software does not allow this, some devices can be rooted to eliminate the undesired apps.
- Multimedia Development
Multimedia development such as montage, corporate video, promo video and quality video editing, graphics design for logo, presentation slide, web, bunting and banner.
4 . Web Development
Scope for website development includes building domain name or URL, theme or template design, content architecture and organization, website development and implementation by using PHP, CSS, Adobe Photoshop or others.
- Crowd Finding
UTM Crowd Fund helps community, departments and other creators to find the resources and support their need to make their ideas a reality.
SOFTWARE
- Antivirus
- Wi-fi Hotspot @ UTM Antivirus
- Software License by UTM
- Microsoft Product
- Microsoft Office
- Research
FACILITIES
- CICT Galerium
- Training Lab
Some achievement that CICT had accomplish are “PENGANUGERAHAN SIJIL PEMATUHAN SAGA” and “PTJ PALING CERIA & GEMPAK SENAMROBIK PERDANA”
Reflection
After hearing the talk, it open up our mind about the important to have a goal for the future. So we set our goal in order to be more competitive in the computer industry. We aim to encourage more people to become expert in Information Technology. We found that Malaysia’s technology still can’t compete with other modern country and the reason of this problem is because there is lack of expert in IT in our country. So, education is seen capable to solve this problem. For that, our method in encourage the people is by using our skills in using computer that we achieved from our study during the class. So that is the motive behind our goal.
What triggered us to have this kind of goal is the lack of technology that we found during the CICT visit. For instance, Malaysia’s internet speed is still not comparable with other country. Even Singapore has beat us. The speaker also said that there are more than hundred users try to hacked UTM system every day. So what will happen if there is no expert to handle it? Fortunately in UTM there are many expert in IT. Although Malaysia still can’t compete with other modern country, our IT is still good in average. Our internet speed is still fast in certain location and also more technology is still in planning by our government.
CICT visit had motivate us to have a necessary plan or action so that we can improve our potential in the industry. There is no doubt that the competition nowadays is hard as there are too many students like us. So after discussing among ourselves, we conclude that to be potential in the industry, we need to become a professional in handling computer especially in our field of study. To do so, the first action that we plan is we will try to master all the programming language first because from what we see programming language play the most important role in computer industry.
Next thing is, we agree that every one of us should be a freelancer, but start with a simple or part time job first to gain experience before enter the computer industry. From that, we will know how the industry work and can overcome any problems that we face as we already have an experience before.