News

Resolved (April 20, 8:42 a.m.): Wireless calls, SMS and data services are now restored for the majority of Rogers and Fido customers. A small number of services with other carriers are continuing to come back online. The service outage was caused by a software update of network equipment that led to intermittent congestion and service impacts for customers across the country.

Questions or concerns? Please contact the IST Service Desk, helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca or ext. 44357.

Update (April 19, 3:38 p.m.): The Rogers network teams are working diligently to resolve the outage but the issues are still ongoing.

Questions or concerns? Please contact the IST Service Desk, helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca or ext. 44357.

What is happening? Some Rogers and Fido wireless customers are experiencing an intermittent service interruption for wireless voice and data services. Rogers is working on restoring these services.

What is the impact? Rogers and Fido customers may be unable to access cellular data and wireless services on their mobile devices. Incoming, outgoing calls, and text messages are impacted nationally.

Questions or concerns? Please contact the IST Service Desk, helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca or ext. 44357.

What is happening? Annual licenses for National Instruments Labview purchased before 2021 will expire and stop working on May 1, 2021. Licenses purchased after December 2020 will remain active until April 2022. 

What do users need to do? For uninterrupted access to the software, users who purchased a license before 2021 must renew their Labview license before May 1. If you have already purchased a license in 2021, no action is required.

How to renew: To renew your Labview license, visit the IST Webstore. License renewal is a two-step process: you will need to purchase the new license, then assign the license to a machine.

For graduate students: All graduate student purchasers must obtain permission from the account holder (supervisor/principal investigator) and specify the account holder's user ID in the “Who authorized use of this account” field. 
 
Questions or concerns? Submit a request using the Jira Service Desk Portal.

What is happening? Webex recordings issue that was noted yesterday has been resolved.

Why is this happening? Webex recording service is back to normal operation, any recordings made during this service disruption period and after is safe and will be posted within 24 hours.

Questions or concerns? Please contact the IST Service Desk, helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca or ext. 44357.

What is happening? Webex recordings may not be saving to the Webex portal as expected. Webex Live Meetings should remain unaffected. IST is investigating with the vendor. 

Why is this happening? A bug was found in the latest Webex updates which prevents Webex recordings from being produced.

Questions or concerns? Please contact the IST Service Desk, helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca or ext. 44357.

What is happening? Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and license servers will be restarted to apply updates.

When is this happening? Sunday, April 18 from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

What is the impact? Remoteapps and licensed app VDI environments will be unavailable during the maintenance window. Users of the following applications might experience short outages while the servers are rebooting:

• SPSS
• SAS
• Quest
• MATLAB
• COMSOL Multiphysics
• ArcGIS

Work should be saved frequently to avoid data loss.

Additional resources:

• VDI: https://uwaterloo.ca/information-systems-technology/services/virtual-desktop-infrastructure-vdi
• Licensed servers: https://uwaterloo.ca/information-systems-technology/services/scientific-computing-software-support

Questions or concerns? Please contact the IST Service Desk, helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca or ext. 44357.

What is happening? The University of Waterloo has signed an agreement with Piazza. Piazza was adopted independently by instructors before and during the pandemic; procuring this software centrally will allow instructors to continue using this tool for teaching and learning. 

When is this happening? The new agreement will allow for uninterrupted use of Piazza to the end of the Winter 2021 term and beyond, expiring on April 28, 2022. At the end of 2021, IST and partners will conduct another review to determine whether Piazza is the most suitable Q&A tool and to investigate if it should be permanently added to the University’s educational technology suite.

What is Piazza? Piazza is a Q&A platform for students and instructors. Students can interact with each other to work towards solutions for problems while instructors can ‘endorse’ or ‘up-vote’ the best proposed answer. In this aspect, Piazza differs from a traditional discussion forum such as in LEARN, which may be more suitable for structured class discussions.

Questions or concerns? For licensing-related questions, please contact Pam Fluttert, fluttert@uwaterloo.ca. For Piazza help and support,please contact team@piazza.com. 

What is happening? The Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways site is now available for all Waterloo faculty, staff, and students.

What is Microsoft 365Learning Pathways?Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways is an on-demand, self-service solution designed to provide learning resources and videos for common Microsoft (Office) 365 applications and services including Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and more! It also provides quick links to other IT support resources, including the IST Service Desk and Knowledge Base.

How do I access the learning pathways site? Bookmark the Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways site, or look for links to the appropriate training resources from the Office 365 website and IST Service Catalogue.

This site can be customized to address the MS Office 365 learning needs of our campus community. Please let us know of additional content that would be helpful. Check the site for changes as the content evolves to meet our needs. 

Questions or concerns? Please contact the IST Service Desk, helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca or ext. 44357. 

What is happening? The IST Service Desk will be piloting Social Intents as a replacement for the existing service desk live chat tool.

Why is this happening? The end-of-life date for the existing live chat tool, PHP Live, is August 1, 2021. More information about migrating from PHP Live to Social Intents will be provided to PHP Live users once the pilot is complete.

When  is  this  happening? The IST Service Desk will be piloting Social Intents from April 5, 2021 to April 30, 2021.

What will change for users? On April 5, links to the IST Service Desk live chat on the IST website will be redirected to go to the Social Intents chat widget.

• Users who contact the IST Service Desk via live chat will see a different chat interface.

• Users will be prompted to provide their name, email, and a description of their issue before being connected to a live chat agent.

To learn more about Social Intents, visit the IST Knowledge Base.
 

Questions or concerns? Please contact Matt Harford, mharford@uwaterloo.ca.

Resolved (March 25, 1:57 p.m.): Users should be able to send and receive Microsoft Teams chat messages again.  

Questions or concerns? Please contact the IST Service Desk, helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca or ext. 44357.

What is happening? Users may be unable to send and receive Microsoft Teams chat messages. Microsoft is investigating the issue; updates will be provided when available.

Questions or concerns? Please contact the IST Service Desk, helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca or ext. 44357.

What is happening? Configuration changes will be made to O365 inbound and outbound email routing. 

When is this happening? Saturday, March 27 from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.

What is the impact to users? Users will be mostly unaffected by this change, however in certain circumstances emails may receive a bounce message during the maintenance time above. If this happens, users will need to resend the email after the maintenance time has ended.

Questions or concerns? Please contact the IST Service Desk, helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca or ext. 44357. 

Resolved (March 16, 9:22 a.m.): Microsoft has closed the service alert and services have been restored. Users should have access to Microsoft 365 services again.

Persisting issues? Please contact the IST Service Desk, helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca, ext. 44357.

Update (March 15, 8:30 p.m.): While service health has improved and many users are no longer experiencing problems, Microsoft is taking further steps to identify and remediate isolated residual impact for all Microsoft 365 services including Teams, Exchange services, SharePoint Online, Intune, Outlook.com, and the admin portal.

Questions or concerns? Please contact the IST Service Desk, helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca, ext. 44357.   

What is happening? Users may be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services including Teams, Exchange Online, and Yammer. Microsoft is aware of the issue and is investigating.

Questions or concerns? Please contact the IST Service Desk, helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca, ext. 44357.