Dear Campus Community,

First of all we want to thank you for all of your flexibility and your help with the start of the Winter Quarter. We know that it is incredibly frustrating to be without many of the systems we rely on, but we are so appreciative of everyone’s willingness to jump in and think of creative solutions to help our students.

Tonight we share some important updates with you, so please take a moment and read carefully:

Microsoft Outage Update and Background:

On Tuesday 12/30 midday, we experienced an unforeseen configuration issue with Microsoft that impacted all of our user accounts and locked out our Microsoft platform which also affected many other programs including Starfish, the website editor, AIM, email, phone etc.

We immediately reached out to Microsoft but were unable to reach online support as we were also locked out of the online support system.  We then initiated phone calls and contacted multiple vendors to connect with Microsoft, which included having a TSS employee on the phone throughout the night trying to get a response.

We believe that the New Year’s holiday and the days surrounding it severely impacted response times this past week, which has not helped matters.  When we did receive responses from Microsoft we were bounced around from support team to support team and escalation queue to escalation queue, finally landing on an engineering team that we have since learned has a history of being slow to respond.

We did receive a response from our sales vendor, escalation assistance from the IT Team at Bellevue College, as well as assistance from one of our Board of Trustee members who is connected with Microsoft, which we are very appreciative of.  We have even reached out to multiple Microsoft employees across the globe via LinkedIn and social media to try to connect further.  Today we received a response that seems promising and we are hopeful that we will have more information to share soon.

Student Support: Zoom Room Support Extended and Temporary Emails

Zoom Room Support: We have received a lot of positive feedback about the Zoom support and will be continuing it through the end of the week, instead of ending it tomorrow as we originally planned.  As a reminder, Zoom support hours are between 9:30-4:00pm.

Temporary Student Support Emails: We have set up some temporary emails that can be shared with students should they have questions, and will have staff monitoring the gmail inboxes for as long as we need until we are fully up and running with Microsoft again.

• For general student support you may share: sa.shoreline@gmail.com
• For general IE student support you may share: ie.shoreline@gmail.com

Faculty Support

If you are a faculty member and you require any support or triage questions, we will be monitoring a temporary email account for you as well.  You can email questions to academics.Shoreline@gmail.com and you can also check your Canvas account for more information, or touch base with your Academic Dean.

Employee Update from HR

The ongoing College-wide efforts  to adjust and adapt work in a “Microsoft-free” environment are noted and appreciated! A big thank you to each and every employee working through this unusual situation.

Supervisors should continue to coordinate alternate work assignments directly with unit staff utilizing increased communication and collaboration amongst team members wherever possible.  

While many units have already identified work that can continue without the use of Microsoft products, HR will be publishing a list of alternate options for staff work on DAAG tomorrow (Tuesday, Jan 6). Stay tuned!

Need additional support? The HR Office remains open to walk-in traffic across College business hours of 8am – 5pm Monday through Thursday, and 8am – 4:30pm on Fridays. Come see us anytime for questions or support!

Conclusion

Please share this information with your teams and we will continue to update you with more information as we have it. A Rave alert will also be going out in the morning to encourage people to read this post.

Thank you!

Public Information Office