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: Thursday, September 28th  || Time: 10:00pm – 11:00pm

Papercut Upgrade: During this maintenance, printing/scanning/copying will be unavailable.

ITS Maintenance Notice: Saturday, October 7^th  || Time: 7:00am – 11:00pm 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Banner Upgrade - Systems Unavailable during this maintenance:

• Banner Admin Pages – BANPROD, BPREPROD, BQAWEEK
• UNBC Online Services (Student, Alumni and Employee)
• Ellucian Experience/Student Portal
• UNBC Password Management Services
• UNBC Online Phone List
• FAST
• Argos

ITS Information Notice: Idle Session Timeout for Microsoft 365 Web Applications

UNBC ITS will be enabling ‘Idle Session Timeout’ to Microsoft 365 Web Applications on October 3^rd, 2023. Idle Session Timeout signs users out automatically of ‎Microsoft 365‎ web applications after a period of inactivity. The user will receive a notification that they are about to be signed out when they approach the idle timeout session limit of 24 hours.

Why are we making this change?

Microsoft will be replacing the current "Activity-Based Authentication Timeout" with a new "Idle Session Timeout" by the end of December 2023.

Important Note: This will not affect desktop or mobile applications, only web applications.

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.

• 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.

• Best Practices for Data Storage & Management
• SharePoint Online Document Libraries

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)  

• LinkedIn Learning