City College could be jumping on the Google bandwagon by phasing out the Pipeline e-mail system for students.

That’s part of a recommendation made to the Associated Student Body March 26 by the college’s Director of Information Technology, Daniel Watkins.

He and a work group that has been formed to investigate the plan to replace the Pipeline and Groupwise systems with Google are hoping students can motivate faculty and staff to follow along with the switch.

“My hope is that students can offer input that can be shared with faculty,” Watkins said. “That will get them to move in this direction.”

Watkins helped to introduce the college to Pipeline about a decade ago. He said the system was aging and costing the college thousands of dollars a year in support.

“When we first started we had an on-call support person from Novell, which brought operating costs to $180,000 a year,” Watkins said. “We reduced that coverage two years ago and saved about $100,000.”

But there are still costs for licensing the servers through Microsoft for example. Moving to Google would reduce all of that as well as making it easier to expand storage space.

“We spend extra money through Postini for spam and virus software that would be free with Google,” Watkins said. “As we’re in a budget crunch we’re losing people and not filling these positions.”

Student senators were receptive to a change.

“Most students use their own e-mail accounts rather than Pipeline,” senator Dano Pagenkopf said.

Students use services such as Google’s Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Microsoft’s Hotmail.

The Google application package uses systems including Gmail to handle messages, word processing software Google Docs and Google Calendar.

Watkins said some instructors already use the calendar software to help students keep track of assignments and due dates.

He also said he is looking to make the move to Google sometime in summer or fall for students. The company offers a six-week transition schedule, a plan that he has forwarded to the Academic Senate.

A move for faculty will continue to be evaluated based on feedback from instructors, staff members and students. While Watkins would like the whole school on the same system, he said he’s open to either finding a new system just for faculty and staff or upgrading the existing Groupwise.

Student senate adviser Dr. Ben Partee, who is also the dean of educational programs, responded favorably to Watkins’ proposal and said he would welcome a campus-wide shift to Google’s platform.

“I truly believe Google apps is the way forward,” he said.

Watkins said Google is undergoing a major push toward colleges, and now high schools.

“Google said one of the things they want to do is introduce people to their software,” he said. “When they go on to businesses they are either already familiar with it or get the businesses they’re in to migrate to Google. They don’t charge for it and they have no plans to for schools for this reason.”

The college discussed using Gmail for campus e-mails in 2008.