Just over 1 week to go

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.

Project updates

We've had lots of activity on the Dolphin Email Migration Project over the past two months!

A survey was published in April to gauge current students' satisfaction with the existing Dolphin Email system. We learned that most students that responded are using it weekly, and that they don't forward to other email addresses! Also, a little over half of the respondents already have a Gmail account.

Two test domains have been configured in Google Apps for Education by our email system administrator: one domain for current students, one domain for alumni, to replicate our proposed production configuration.

The rules for who will get accounts accounts is about 80% complete:

• Current CI students will be provisioned with new accounts in Dolphin Email powered by Google according to existing business rules.
  
• Alumni will be provisioned in the Alumni Dolphin Email system according to a new set of rules which answer the question "who is an alum"? 

 A group of current students and alumni have been identified and contacted about helping to test the system before roll-out. The testing plan 80% complete. The test group participants will be notified in the coming weeks, and testing is expected to begin on Wednesday, June 2nd.

Single-sign on (SSO) and provisioning configuration is in progress, and is expected to be 80% (or more) complete for the beginning of testing on June 2nd.

A marketing meeting is planned for 5/25 to discuss further marketing for the project. Students were sent an email this week to notify them of the upcoming changes. Updates to brochures and signage, as well as further email and Web marketing will be discussed.

Updates to the project Web site, including a detailed FAQ, are in progress. Student Affairs has also drafted a policy and procedure (currently under review) for what kind of content the University should send to students using this system.

Stay tuned! If you have any questions, please contact IT Project Supervisor Peter Mosinskis at peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu.