News

Two-factor authentication will be required for many central services including Workday, Unit4, and Office 365 effective November 3rd, 2020.

Good afternoon Campus IT,

It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and there’s no better way to participate than to protect your Waterloo computing account with two-factor authentication (2FA). We're less than one month away from requiring 2FA for many central services. Thanks to those who have stepped-up as 2FA Change Champions, our enrolment numbers are looking good, as we only have about a quarter of employees remaining to get signed-up for 2FA. If you have not done so already, I encourage you to act now to enrol, and encourage those in the areas you support to do so as well!

What is happening? LinkedIn Learning (LiL, formerly known as Lynda.com) has been in use on campus since approximately 2014. The University of Waterloo has committed to a new three-year agreement with LiL to continue our full access to the content our campus has come to rely upon and benefit from. In May 2018, the provincial government provided funding to extend access to all students and employees at Ontario colleges and universities. The provincial agreement ends on September 25, 2020, and the new Waterloo agreement replaces it.

• Effective November 3, 2020 (previously November 1), two-factor authentication (2FA) will be required to access supported systems, including Office 365, Workday, Quest, LEARN, and other applications/websites
• Enrol with the Duo Mobile App for the most secure and convenient 2FA experience

As announced in a memo shared on June 10, 2020, effective November 3, 2020, two-factor authentication (2FA) will be required to access a number of campus systems, including Office 365, Workday, Quest, LEARN, Concur, Unit4, and other systems supporting single sign-on authentication.

What is happening? The email below was sent to University of Waterloo members this morning. If you have received this email, do not click any links and do not reply.
What should I do if I have received this email? Suspected fraud attempts should be reported to the Security Operations Centre at soc@uwaterloo.ca. Reports of successful fraud should be directed to UW Police Services at uwpolice@uwaterloo.ca.

What is happening? As part of the broader roll out of Microsoft Office 365 products across campus and in preparation for SharePoint 2016 on-premises retirement, Information Systems & Technology (IST) is initiating a Move to SharePoint Online project. The project will support stakeholders in creating and implementing a plan for migrating existing SharePoint 2016 sites to SharePoint Online, or another campus platform dependent on how the current SharePoint site is being used.

The free temporary campus license for MATLAB expires on August 31, 2020. The Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Math have agreed to fund an expanded campus license until September 2021.

New features of the expanded campus license include:

• Unlimited access all new and future add-on “toolboxes” at no additional cost
• Software available to all UW faculty, staff, and students for non-commercial research and academic use
• Accelerator & Startup Program provides UW start-up businesses with one year of free access to MATLAB
• Use of MATLAB is extended to high performance computing clusters
• Courseware for instructors, including MATLAB Grader service for evaluating students’ code
• Extensive training materials through the UW portal on Mathworks’ web site.

Effective November 1, 2020, two-factor authentication (2FA) will be required to log in to the below campus systems. All University employees and students will be required to enrol in Duo 2FA before they will be able to log in to these systems.

• Campus virtual private network (VPN)
• Office 365 (including email)
• Quest, Workday, LEARN
• Unit4, Concur