In an effort to try to help prevent the exposure of sensitive data the University is moving on several fronts, including defining a new data classification policy:

https://isea.utoronto.ca/policies-procedures/standards/data-classification/

which will help people determine how sensitive their data is. There is a Draft FAQ at the bottom of that webpage which may answer some of your questions.

It is likely that access for research and/or administration to any personal health records as defined by PHIPA, the Personal Health Information Protection Act:

https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/04p03

will require some form of MFA (multi-factor authentication), likely a two-factor authentication, and the University has started the MFA application assessment. This will apply to any such data that is accessed or stored on departmental or faculty-owned systems.

If you do any research and/or administration that needs access to personal health records please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu so that we will try to let you know more details when the new MFA policy is put into effect.  Of course this IT Status site is a good resource for finding out about updates and you should check back here if this affects you.

Departmental faculty and staff can now access an online letter (using LaTeX for the body) generator that will use our departmental letterhead.

Please visit

https://services.math.toronto.edu/services/letterhead

and login with your coxeter credentials if you would like to use this service.

If you use a “@utoronto.ca” or “@mail.utoronto.ca” email address then please be aware that UofT moved all email to Microsoft and that changed the way that anti-spam works for those accounts; incoming mail is now scanned by Exchange Online Protection (EOP).

There have been sporadic reports of EOP generating spam false positives (legitimate messages marked as spam and delivered to the “Junk Email” folder instead of “Inbox” folder) .

Please check your “Junk Email” folder regularly to see if this has happened to you.  Email in the “Junk Email” is permanently deleted (with no possibility of being restored) after a deletion period.  That period was 30 days but due to this problem they have temporarily extended that period to 90 days.

Instructions for minimizing the impact of the email move are supposedly available on https://office365.utoronto.ca however no direct link was given.

People receiving email on our departmental mail server at addresses “@math.toronto.edu” and “@math.utoronto.ca” are not affected by the UofT email change.

This morning we moved another 51 Bell Centrex lines to VoIP.  There are still a few lines in the department that need to be moved but it may take some time before that will be scheduled by the central people.

Please see the Departmental VoIP Information Page for more information.

We will be testing a replacement network switch for VoIP for 215 Huron on Wednesday June 5 from 3:30pm-4:00pm.  Users in 215 Huron may experience short wired network outages during that time.  If all goes well then on Thursday June 6 from 3-4:30pm we plan to move everyone to the new switch.

The UofT wireless network will not be affected by our switch upgrade.

The Departmental VoIP Information Page is now available.

In order to be ready for VoIP, we will be upgrading the network switches in PGB on Monday, June 3, 2019 from 11am to 1pm.  Network connections will be temporarily unavailable while we do the upgrades.  If all goes smoothly we expect to have just two 10-15 minute outages to complete the transition.