ITS Maintenance Digest - Week of October 22nd to October 28th

ITS Maintenance/Information for this week:

This is your weekly digest of system maintenance/information and downtime. All notices are also posted on the myUNBC Student Portal (Ellucian Experience), gounbc.sharepoint.com for Employees, support.unbc.ca and on unbc.ca /its. Please see one of these locations for maintenance notices.

ITS Maintenance Notice: Data Centre Upgrade || Saturday, October 28th || Time: 8:00am to 5:00pm

UNBC ITS will be performing upgrades to the network that will affect multiple systems on campus. This upgrade will involve taking down several systems, and will also impact other systems with service interruptions throughout the day.

The following systems will be unavailable
  • Email (on-campus to off campus email)
  • RecTrac (Northern Sports Centre)
  • Bomgar (Remote Support Tool)
  • VPN – Virtual Private Network (Global Protect)
  • Library Website
  • VDI –  Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (All desktop pools)
  • Phone System (Avaya Deskphones & Softphones, including voicemail)
  • WIFI - UNBC & EduRoam will be unavailable
  • Papercut & Print servers (Printing, Copying & Scanning)

Banner will be unavailable
  • Argos
  • Self-Service Banner (ssb.unbc.ca)
  • Banner Admin Pages – BANPROD, BPREPROD, BQAWEEK
  • UNBC Online Phone List
  • Banner Document Management
  • UNBC Online Services (Student, Alumni and Employee)
  • Ellucian Experience/Student Portal
  • UNBC Password Management Services
  • FAST

Software License Servers that will be unavailable
  • AutoDesk
  • Per3D 8
  • Ansys
  • SIMULA
  • CSiBrADR
  • Simcenter TestLab (Engineering)
  • ETabUL
  • RFEM
  • GaBi
  • Rocscience
  • Maple 
  • RSTAB
  • MATLAB
  • RX-TIMBER
  • MathCAD
  • SAPUL

The following systems will have service interruptions during the day
  • Computer Logins will be interrupted or unavailable for certain times during the day
  • WIFI – UNBC Guest & ResNet will be available
  • G:\ Drive & H:\ Drive will have interruptions in service
  • Wired Networks will have service interruptions
  • Research Storage Cluster

The following systems are expected to have limited or no noticeable impact
  • Email (Exchange Online)
  • Moodle
  • Hard-Wired internet access (ethernet)
  • OneDrive
  • Library Catalog
  • SharePoint Online
  • Main UNBC website (unbc.ca)
  • CRM (Client Relationship Management)
  • Microsoft Teams

ITS Maintenance Notice: Thursday, November 2nd  || Time: 8:00pm – 12:00am

Oracle Upgrade - Systems Unavailable during this maintenance:

  • Banner Admin Pages/Banner Access Management - banner.unbc.ca
  • Self-Service Banner - ssb.unbc.ca
  • Argos Reports - reports.unbc.ca
  • FAST - fast.unbc.ca
  • ARC - arc.unbc.ca
  • Infosilem
  • Ellucian Experience (Student Portal)
  • Ellucian Workflow (Leave Requests)

ITS Information Notice: Restricting additional storage providers in Outlook on the Web || Thursday, October 26th

As of October 26th, UNBC ITS will be restricting additional storage providers in Outlook on the Web, as recommend by Microsoft to protect the UNBC community from security risks.

Why are we making this change?

Third-party storage can make our Microsoft environment more vulnerable to attacks such as data loss, increased virus risks and unauthorized access. This change will block the ability to add external cloud storage accounts directly to Outlook interface, to provide additional storage capacity for attachments and allow sending/accessing/modifying documents within cloud storage directly from within Outlook.

Examples of Thirty-Party storage providers: Box, Dropbox, Facebook, Google Drive, OneDrive Personal, etc.

Important Note: This change should have no impact on sending or receiving emails containing links to third-party storage providers.

ITS Information Notice: Changes to the Safe link Policy – Wait for URL scanning to complete before delivering the message || Tuesday, October 31st

As of October 31st, UNBC ITS will be enabling a new feature to the Safe Links policy as recommend by Microsoft to further enhance the protection from malicious links.

What is Safe Links?

Safe Links is a feature of Microsoft’s Defender for Office 365, which is designed to protect students, faculty, and staff from phishing attempts and malicious software. Safe Links works by analyzing hyperlinks for known malicious sites.

What is changing?

When you hover over a link with your mouse pointer, you will see a URL displayed with something like: "https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url . . .".  This indicates that Safe Links will attempt to protect you in the event the URL leads to a malicious site.

With this new feature, whenever you are sent a message that contains URL(s), Safe Links will delay the message delivery until it has scanned the URL(s). With this new feature email delivery may be slightly delayed, depending on how long it takes for the scanning to complete.

Please note that Safe Links is not guaranteed to catch 100% of malicious URL(s). Continue to use your best judgement, and exercise caution when you receive emails from unknown senders, or even unusual-looking emails from known senders.

ITS Information Notice: G:Drive Folders & H:Drive will be decommissioned as of September 2025

What is happening?

The Shared on-campus storage (G: Drive folders) & Personal on-campus storage (H: Drive) for file storage, will be decommissioned as of September 2025. As a best practice for modernizing and safeguarding our file storage infrastructure, UNBC ITS is continuing its shift towards cloud-based file storage.

Moving data into the cloud makes campus files easier to access due to the increase in people who require remote access to their files and the difficulties with VPN-based file shares. With the increasing use of OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint, it is no longer viable to use an older & less secure shared space for file storage.

How to prepare?

To prepare for this change, UNBC ITS recommends that Faculty & Staff begin migrating their files over to the preferred location.

Files

Preferred location

Personal UNBC- related documents & files

One Drive

University files for all employees & Department documents and files

SharePoint Online

Department documents and files

Microsoft Teams
  • OneDrive offers seamless collaboration capabilities, online and offline document editing and syncing, and editing and syncing files across web, mobile, and desktop.
  • SharePoint Online is a Microsoft Office 365 cloud-based service that helps users share and mange content, knowledge and applications, encourage teamwork and facilitate seamless collaboration across the organization. It provides a secure location to store, exchange and access data from virtually any device and all major online browsers. 
  • Microsoft Teams offers a workspace for real-time communication and collaboration (text chat and video), file and app sharing. Teams and Channels can be used for tracking projects, conversations, files, meetings, etc. A Team is essentially extra functionally and features added on top of a SharePoint Online site. This means that every Team has a corresponding SharePoint Online site, which stores all the Team content.

Resources

Please visit our knowledge base article, available on our support portal for further information.

UNBC employees have access to LinkedIn Learning, an online professional development portal. To start, click on the link below and use your UNBC username (in the format username@unbc.ca)  

    Contact Information

    Thank you for your assistance while we keep our systems maintained and secure. If there are any questions, please contact the IT Service Desk using the information below.

     IT Service Desk Contact Information:

    • Telephone: 250-960-5321
    • Toll Free: 866-960-5321
    • Email: support@unbc.ca
    • Web: unbc.ca/its
    • Customer Support Portal:  support.unbc.ca
    • Service Desk hours: Monday - Friday 8:00am to 4:00pm
      • Closed daily from 12:00pm to 12:30pm
    • Located on the second floor of the Teaching Lab, room 8-264.