We're racing towards the finish line now!

The new Dolphin Email powered by Google will launch on Monday, August 23. The team is putting the finishing touches on its launch preparations.

A lot of messaging has been going out in the last few weeks: emails to current students, alumni, and others impacted by this change.

We've also been dialing in our provisioning process. When it's complete, email addresses for new students and new alumni will be created 2x per day in the new Dolphin Email.

This project has had some interesting side effects on processes and systems at the University. For example, before we started this project, there was no formal definition for what an alumnus/alumna was. Once this was developed, it was implemented programmatically within our system of record (CI Records) to generate a list of alumni that the Gmail provisioning system could use.

Another side-effect was that we worked out some new processes for our identity management. This was important for all the new users (alumni) that we would have in the system. For example, if an alumni didn't know their user name to logon to myCI (our campus portal/single-sign-on), how could they obtain it? They need to have it in order to logon or to reset their myCI password. Who would provide their Dolphin Name to them, and how would the organization verify the identity of an alumnus/alumna requesting their user name?

Fortunately, these and other issues have been worked out during the course of our weekly meetings (since March), email correspondence and many informal conversations.

In any case, we're very excited about the launch, and look forward to this new service.