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: Wednesday, February 21^st || 6:00am

Building 8 & 10 Network Maintenance: ITS will be performing maintenance on the network that will affect Building 8 (Teaching Laboratory) & Building 10 (Teaching & Learning Centre). Any active calls during this maintenance may be dropped and desk phones will not be able to make or receive calls for 2-3 minutes.

ITS Maintenance Notice: Wednesday, February 21^st || 6:30am

Building 17 & 18 Network Maintenance: ITS will be performing maintenance on the network in Building 17 & 18 (Residence 1 & Residence 2) at 6:30am, users may experience connection interruptions during this maintenance period.

ITS Maintenance Notice: Wednesday, February 21^st || 9:00am – 5:00pm

FAST Test Environment: During this maintenance window, the FAST Test Environment will be unavailable (fasttest.unbc.ca).

ITS Maintenance Notice: Thursday, February 22^nd || Time: 5:30am

Network Migration: All buildings on the UNBC campus will have a short network outage of up to 15 minutes.

ITS Maintenance Notice: Thursday, February 22^nd || Time: 10:00pm – 4:00am

Windows Server Maintenance

 All Windows Servers are impacted – FAST access may be intermittent during this window.

 Linux Host Maintenance

 All Linux hosts are impacted

ITS Advanced Maintenance Notice: Monday, February 26^th || Time: 10:00pm – 12:00am

Network Maintenance: During this maintenance window, users may experience service interruptions when accessing UNBC resources.

ITS Information Notice: Changes to the sign-in experience in Global Protect

Starting on February 21^st, your sign-in page to global protect is going to look different!

When you connect to the VPN (Virtual Private Network) through our Global Protect client you will now have a different experience. When you select connect, a new browser page from Palo Alto will appear with a pop up that says ‘This site is trying to open GlobalProtect’, please select open. Note: This may take up to 1-2 times for the new experience to reflect for your account.

Important Note: If you close out the pop up and the browser page, your global protect will stay in ‘connecting’ but you won’t be able to finish connecting to the VPN. If this happens please click on the three lines in the top right hand corner of the GlobalProtect client and select cancel and repeat the process.

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.

• 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.