Purchasing Guideline

General Purchasing Guideline

All hardware/software requests charged to the departmental accounts should be approved by the Facilities Committee (FC).
Requests of more than HK$20,000, will have to be announced to all faculty members for comment.
Faculty members are strongly recommended to discuss with CS System about the support level should they want to buy any non-standard equipment, as not all types of equipment are fully supported by CS System.

For faculty specific purchasing guidelines, please refer to: Budget Allocation in the "Restricted Area".

Every PG student is entitled to a machine (but not necessarily new). Upgrades of PG machines will be discussed on a case-by-base basis.
IA, Postdoc, RA, PG (except the first year) will have his/her own machine, depending on what spare machine available at that time. The supervisors will have to request a new machine if such need arises.
New PG (PhD or Mhil) will be provided a PC (not necessarily new).
New PG without supervisor may have to share machine.
There will be no automatic individual screen display upgrade for PG students, the display upgrade should couple with the machine upgrade. (decision made in Jan 30, 2004 FC meeting)
Each PG office will have one laser printer.
The supervisor should send request for PG machine upgrade to FC for approval. Justification is needed for upgrading machine less than four years old.
Machines provided to IA/Demonstrator may be reviewed for upgrade when they are four years old.

PGs assigned to a special Lab outside CS (HLTC, CyberSpace, MTREC, etc) should be provided with the same equipment. However the equipment will have to move back to the Department when they graduate.
For faculty advising PGs from other departments, there will be no equipment provision.

The hardware of four teaching labs will be upgraded once every four year in this order Lab1 → Lab2 → Lab4 → Lab3.
Lab2 was upgraded in the summer of 2009.
The projector in the teaching lab will be considered for possible upgrade together with the teaching lab hardware upgrade.
At least one laser printer is installed in each teaching lab.

The FYP Lab contains ~20 machines with removable disk trays. FYP groups can loan out disk for their projects.
Each faculty can request up to $3,000 for FYP equipment per year by default (no need to go through FC for approval). Request beyond the $3,000 limit will need approval from the FC. This policy has been reviewed and sustained. You may fill in the form to proceed to purchase/reimburse.
Each request for FYP funding should specify the specific FYP project for which the equipment is being requested.
FYP allocation will be approved based on guidelines and the specific project noted down upon approval.
FYP allocation should not be used to purchase general equipment, e.g. PC.
Charging year will be determined by the FYP project specified.
No charge back or carry forward in general
Cannot be combined with other equipment funding
Equipment belonged to FYP, will be claimed back and reset default settings at the end of the FYP year
For any purchase request above $3,000, the special request should be sent to FC for discussion.
Clarification about FYP allocation/equipment by FC (Faculty access only)

The Department supports mainly the following software requests:
- Softwares for teaching or infrastructure.
- Maintenance of softwares purchased by Department before.
The department has been providing many commonly used softwares as standard for faculty to use, e.g. Acrobat, Microsoft Offices, X-Win32, etc.
Many additional softwares are available through the Windows Terminal Server, w2kts.cse.ust.hk, such as WinEdt, Photoshop, Dreamweaver.
Sometimes, faculty request for special software. As a fule, faculty are encouraged to buy such software thorugh their research funds.
The FC will review the list of commonly used software from time to time.

Updated: Jun 20 2011

Any request not cover in the guideline can be sent to FC (email: ) for discussion/approval.