Notices & Bulletins

The legacy student email system has reached the end of its support life and will be decommissioned on February 28, 2023.

We’re excited to announce that Microsoft 365 accounts will be provisioned for all students by September 2, 2022. The Microsoft 365 collaboration suite will give you access to Microsoft Office, including Microsoft Teams for courses or clubs, OneDrive to store or share coursework, and a feature-packed email service. As part of these changes, Microsoft 365 email will become the email service provider for all students and your UVic email will be automatically upgraded by September 2022.

A bug in an update for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint may have caused Microsoft Office to be removed from your computer.

Microsoft is making changes in mid-January 2023 to the types of services Office 365 desktop applications can connect to. The centrally hosted service Connect (SharePoint 2013) will be affected by this change. University Systems is taking steps to ensure access to Connect from Office 365 desktop applications is not impacted for Office 365 installations acquired through UVic.

The University's central administrative system (Banner) used for student records, payroll, and finance will be unavailable on Wednesday, December 21, 2022, from 5:30 p.m. until 9:00 p.m. to perform planned system maintenance and year-end updates.

The legacy student email system, webmail.uvic.ca has reached the end of its support life and will be decommissioned in January 2023.

Apple introduced a new operating system (Ventura/macOS 13) on October 24. Ventura is the latest release of the Apple operating system for Macintosh computers such as iMacs, MacBooks and Mac Pros. For more details on Ventura see https://www.apple.com/macos/ventura/. A thorough test and review of the current version of Ventura has been performed.

University Systems is upgrading the UVic Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to use the new Duo Universal Prompt on Wednesday 19 October 2022. This update provides a better experience for users with trusted devices and multiple authentication methods.

The university’s internet supplier will be performing maintenance on Sunday Oct 16 at 6:00AM – 8:00AM PDT. All campus internet access will experience interruptions for a two-hour period beginning Sunday October 16 6:00AM PDT. Services will be fully restored by 8:00AM PDT. All UVic online services will be unavailable from on and off campus during this maintenance window.

Connect (SharePoint) Will be Restricted to On-Campus and VPN connections only on September 2.

Beginning May 15, 2022, UVic MFA will be required in order to access critical information systems including Banner Admin Pages, FAST, and Exchange email & calendar, and the Virtual Private Network (VPN).

We are upgrading our Exchange email server in order to better serve UVic faculty and staff. University Systems will start upgrading email accounts on June 1, 2022. This migration process will complete by end of August 2022 to reduce impact on faculty and staff. The migrations are scheduled outside of regular business hours.

To better protect your NetLink account and enhance secure access to the campus network, University Systems will be adding support for UVic Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to the Virtual Private Network (VPN) service.

University Systems will be changing the login process for UVic’s Outlook Web Access for Exchange email effective January 31, 2022.

University Systems will be upgrading the Spectrum Protect (formerly TSM) backup server to a new version. This version will require all users of the Spectrum Protect backup service to be running client version 8.1 or newer to maintain compatibility with the service. We recommend Spectrum Protection version 8.1.13.2 for Windows and version 8.1.13.0 for Mac.

Until a more thorough test and review of the release version of Windows 11 can be performed to ensure compatibility with UVic specific applications and services, University Systems does not recommend upgrading to Windows 11 at this time.