ITS Maintenance Digest - Week of October 1st to October 7th

ITS Maintenance/Information for this week:

This is your weekly digest of system maintenance/information and downtime. All notices are also posted on the myÂÜÀòÉäÇø 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: Saturday, October 7th  || Time: 7:00am – 11:00pm  

Banner Upgrade - Systems Unavailable during this maintenance:

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

ITS Information Notice: MailTips enabled for Outlook

ÂÜÀòÉäÇø ITS has enabled MailTips for Outlook to help users when composing emails.

MailTips are informative messages displayed to users while they're typing a message. Exchange analyzes the message, including recipients. Prior to sending the message, the user is alerted with a MailTip if a potential issue is found. MailTips alerts can be set off by several actions, such as clicking Reply All to a large recipient list, sending sensitive/private information to a third party outside your organization, or messaging an employee who is out of office.

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

ÂÜÀòÉäÇø ITS will be enabling ‘Idle Session Timeout’ to Microsoft 365 Web Applications on October 3rd, 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, unless they select to stay logged in.

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, ÂÜÀòÉäÇø 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, ÂÜÀòÉäÇø ITS recommends that Faculty & Staff begin migrating their files over to the preferred location.

Files

Preferred location

Personal ÂÜÀòÉäÇø- related documents & files

One Drive

University files for all employees

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.

ÂÜÀòÉäÇø employees have access to LinkedIn Learning, an online professional development portal. To start, click on the link below and use your ÂÜÀòÉäÇø 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.