ITS Maintenance Digest - Week of May 5 to 11
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 here on the IT Services web page. Please see one of these locations for maintenance notices.
ITS maintenance notice - Tuesday, May 7 (5:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.)
Palo Alto patching
Updates to the firewall on VPN3 will require a complete network outage at 5:00 p.m. of approximately 1 hour. Limited amount of users that have been notified.
Updates to the firewall on VPN2 will require a complete network outage at 10:00 p.m. up to 4 hours. This is the rest of campus.
Important note: During an outage of the firewall the network is functionally offline. All access to UNBC resources will be unavailable.
ITS maintenance notice: Saturday, May 11 (9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.)
Phone system maintenance
ITS will be performing maintenance on the phone system that will result in multiple interruptions to desk phones, elevator phones, fax machines and emergency phones.
ITS information notice: G: drive folders and H: drive will be decommissioned in September 2025
What is happening
The shared on-campus storage (G: drive) and 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 and less secure shared space for file storage.
How to prepare
To prepare for this change, UNBC ITS recommends that faculty and staff begin migrating their files over to the preferred location.
| Files | Preferred location |
|---|---|
| Personal UNBC-related documents and files | OneDrive |
| University files for all employees and 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.
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).
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.
Contact information
Phone: 250-960-5321
Toll-free: 866-960-5321
Email: support@unbc.ca
Location: Teaching Lab, room 8-264 (2nd floor)
IT Service Desk hours
Monday to Friday - 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Closed daily from 12:00 p.m. to 12:30 p.m.