In a move that will save the school about $100,000 by some accounts, Binghamton University is switching its e-mail management to Google.

The switch is part of a SUNY-wide contract with Google for the use of its free Google Apps Education Edition service.

“We will save about $100,000 a year on this,” said Mark Reed, associate vice president of ITS. He said that the savings would come from eliminating software maintenance and hardware cost.

At BU, Google Apps will replace Mirapoint WebMail, the school’s previous e-mail client. The transfer to Google, which began in December and will continue until mid-March, will allow BU to do away with the primary on-site hardware and software costs of WebMail.

“Given the budget situation, it kind of makes sense,” said Frank Saraceno, associate director and chief architect at BU’s Information Technology Services and leader of the Google Apps implementation team.

The decision to switch to Google Apps was the end result of a months-long review process. In March 2009, the University’s Academic Computing & Educational Technology (ACET) charged a special subcommittee of ITS professionals, faculty and students to evaluate the then-current e-mail system.

The subcommittee made its recommendations to ACET, who approved the recommendations in May 2009. University officials then began contract negotiations with Google.

Josh Berk, a senior majoring in philosophy, politics and law, was on the subcommittee during the review process. He said that rising costs in technology across the University were leading University officials to consider raising the tech fee, which all students pay.

He said it was prudent to try to find a way to reduce spending, and that moving away from WebMail was a way of doing so.

But savings were not the only factor that led to the decision, according to Reed.

“We didn’t switch to Gmail because of the cost,” he said. “It just seems like a much more complete package.”

Along with Binghamton Gmail, termed “BMail,” students will have access to the Google Apps Suite, namely, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Chat and Google Sites, a tool for building Web sites.

Saraceno was similarly optimistic. Google Apps, he said, provides a “better suite of applications that we couldn’t offer before.” He also cited WebMail’s clunky interface, insufficient per-user storage and message size limitations as reasons the University wanted to make the switch.

With WebMail, student accounts were deleted six months after gradutation. BMail will allow students to keep their accounts active for life.

But Binghamton was not the first SUNY school to start dialogue with Google, Saraceno said. The University at Buffalo had already negotiated and signed a contract with Google to use Google Apps.

SUNY Central Administration took notice, and decided it would be best for all the schools to sign a single overarching contract, Saraceno said.

“It made sense for SUNY to take this approach and made sense for Google to negotiate with SUNY Central instead of negotiating up to 64 individual contracts with each campus,” he said.

This delayed BU’s own initiatives by a couple of months, but the SUNY-wide contract with Google was signed in early December, and implementation is already under way.

But in some ways, the switch to Google began long before contract negotiations. According to Saraceno, who’s been using BMail since Oct. 2009, more than 5,000 people forward their BU e-mail to a Gmail account.

The ITS department offers assistance to individuals who would like help making the switch to BMail.