GApps update: Student email notifier

Eric has worked his magic yet again.  It looks like we will now have a student email notifier that is automatically configured at student login.  The original Open Source project that we found to do email notification wouldn’t work with the single sign-on login that we’re using.  Eric dug into the Source and tweaked it to work with a custom Profile generation web app that he wrote to generate student notifier profiles.  This way, when the app is launched at student login, it gets it’s profile from the web server (encrypted) and logs the student into the correct Gmail account.

For those unfamiliar with notifiers, basically they are little applications that live in the system tray (next to the windows clock) that let you know when you receive new mail. 

Jesse is hard at work ‘skinning’ the notification interface.  Our goal is to make the notifier visually consistant with the Gmail interface.

We will most likely provide the notifier as an application that can be assigned to staff computers as well.  This will allow the ‘Software manager’ at each school to determine which computers it should be assigned to (if any).

For those students/staff that would like to use a notifier at home, we will be providing a download link on the sign-in page.