Email

Display Name Changes

As you are hopefully aware, Friday May 19th at 5pm the campus will begin the transition to our new identity management system called Account Center. This process will require us to sync up data from multiple systems that have been managed manually for many years. There are many relatively subtle effects of this synchronization process, but two of them will be highly visible as early as Saturday morning:

  1. You may see changes to your first and/or last name. Your updated name will be copied from the Preferred Name fields in PeopleSoft or if you do not have a preferred name in PeopleSoft, your name will be copied from the Legal Name fields in PeopleSoft. Your name will also include your middle initial (if you have one).
    1. After the new Account Center system is available in early June, you will be able to update the way your name is displayed and these changes will be reflected in other campus systems (email, Blackboard Learn, and Google Apps).
  2. First and last names will be re-ordered in the email system. Names have historically been displayed as LastName, FirstName (e.g. Kodai, Scott).  Beginning on 5/20, the ordering will change to FirstName MiddleInitial LastName (e.g. Scott R Kodai). Since I’ve been involved in early testing of the system, you’ll notice that my name has already been changed (you’ll also notice that my middle initial has already been removed… sometimes it’s good to have connections).
    1. This change will impact the way that you find people in the Global Address List (i.e. when searching for people while sending email). When you search for a user’s name, the default search will now be first name (e.g. Scott) instead of last name (e.g. Kodai). Advanced search options will still allow searching by last name.
    2. Sorting email by “From” in your email client (e.g. Outlook) will result in email from the same person sorting to different parts of the list. For example, email sent by me before the change will sort with the K’s (Kodai, Scott) and email sent after the change will sort with the S’s (Scott Kodai). Of course, searching for email by typing from:”Kodai” will still list all emails sent from me, regardless of the order of my name.

We know this is a significant change and it will likely be frustrating for many of you. I’m sorry for that, but unfortunately there’s no way to make this major implementation completely seamless.

ITSS and the Account Center implementation team are actively working on documentation to assist with the transition and we will be sharing that with you as soon as it’s complete (most likely the middle of next week). Stay tuned!

For a general explanation of the University’s Identity Management Initiative and the Account Center implementation, please see the Enterprise Applications and Data Services website at http://www.csuchico.edu/eads/iam/index.shtml.

If you have questions or concerns, please submit a request at https://support.csuchico.edu or contact IT Support Services at x4357 (HELP).