We’ve recently been rolling out a new internal application. At our organisation, users have an email address which is generally firstname.lastname@company.com, or something like that. When a user logs in to the application, the app will look them up using their email address and figure out what parts of the application the user should be able to use.

The problem

One day we got a ticket for a user who was adamant that they had access but when we looked in the application, we couldn’t even find them in the system! Probing a bit further, it turns out that they had recently changed their name, and as a result, their email had changed.