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: Tuesday, October 10^th  || Time: 8:00pm to 11:00pm

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

ITS Maintenance Notice:Thursday, October 12^th  || Time: 10:30pm

Windows Workstation patching (all desktops and laptops running Windows)

• Windows Workstation Patching - Important information regarding the release and install of Software Security Updates for UNBC Workstations
• Security Updates are available to install from Tuesday, October 10^th  at 12:30pm
• Please follow restart instructions prior to the Thursday, October 12^th  at 10:30pm, when restarts will occur automatically

ITS Maintenance Notice: Thursday, October 12^th || 10:00pm to 10:30pm

Reboot Office Phone Systems: During this maintenance period all Avayadesk phones & soft phones, and analog phones (emergency phones, elevator phones, parking lot phones & campus fax lines) will be unavailable.

Important Note: The primary phone server will restart; phones may experience a brief interruption while registering to the secondary server. Active calls during this reboot may be dropped.

• Please submit a ticket if your phone does not reboot properly as of Friday, October 13^th.

ITS Information Notice: UNBC’s Upgraded Phonebook Directory

UNBC now has a New Phonebook Directory that has been redesigned with a more accurate and mobile-friendly website, including new features.

Old Link - https://ssb.unbc.ca/ssb/dev_web.phone_list.phone_list

New Link - https://tools.unbc.ca/phonelist

ITS is asking the UNBC Community to help make continuous improvements on our systems by taking a few moments to test the new system. At this time the old phone list will still be accessible alongside the new phone list, but in the near future we will be turning off the old phone list.

Important Note: This is a new system which may have issues, please report any problems to support@unbc.ca.

Accessing the Phone Directory

The UNBC Phone Directory can be accessed publicly or with your UNBC credentials, when logging in please remember to use your username@unbc.ca.

Important Note: If you are not logged in, some results may be restricted when accessed publicly.

Managing your profile

When you are logged into the Phone Directory, under your profile you will be able to control the visibility & display of your contact information.

Important Note: Changing your visibility settings will only update the new phone list link; the old phone list will remain unchanged.

You can also modify how much of your contact information you want shown on the website, such as:

• Phone Number
• Email
• Room Number
• Status

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

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.