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

ÂÜÀòÉäÇø 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 - ÂÜÀòÉäÇø & 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	ÂÜÀòÉäÇø Online Phone List
Banner Document Management	ÂÜÀòÉäÇø Online Services (Student, Alumni and Employee)
Ellucian Experience/Student Portal	ÂÜÀòÉäÇø 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 – ÂÜÀòÉäÇø 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 ÂÜÀòÉäÇø website (unbc.ca)	CRM (Client Relationship Management)
Microsoft Teams

ITS Maintenance Notice: Thursday, November 2^nd  || 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 26^th

As of October 26^th, ÂÜÀòÉäÇø ITS will be restricting additional storage providers in Outlook on the Web, as recommend by Microsoft to protect the ÂÜÀòÉäÇø 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 31^st

As of October 31^st, ÂÜÀòÉäÇø 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: "".  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, 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 & 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.

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.