The Dolphin Gmail project just kicked off yesterday with the first team meeting.

Although the meeting was short, we covered a lot of ground, including:

  • why we're going with Gmail (more storage, better features, reducing cost)
  • who will be involved in the project, and their roles (to make sure we're not missing anyone important!)
  • scheduling a good recurring meeting time (we'll probably meet every week, at least to begin)
  • choosing our domain names
This project will likely have an intense implementation schedule; the goal is to roll out Gmail for students for the start of the fall 2010 semester. Fortunately Google has provided a fairly comprehensive technical and marketing roadmaps on which we will base our project plan and timeline.  

Choosing domain names: this seems to be pretty easy. We're creating a few DNS entries today and setting up a test domain for our pilot group. It's likely we will use "@my.csuci.edu" as the production domain. The only gotcha is that the domain my.csuci.edu is currently in use by our quasi-portal, myCI. We're going to check with our Google account rep to see if this will cause any conflicts (hopefully it won't!)

We're on our way to Gmail!