Preliminary studies into switching the college’s current email system from elcamino.edu to Gmail may soon be underway, John Wagstaff, director of information technology services, said.

Wagstaff said that although this is not actively being pursued at the present time, he is aware of other colleges  pursuing this course of action.

“They (the state) are cutting our budgets, so we are always looking for ways to do things more efficiently,” Wagstaff said. “At the same time you do not want to sacrifice services.”

Wagstaff noted that some area community colleges such as Santa Monica College, Santa Barbara City College and the North Orange Community College district are looking at outsourcing or have already outsourced some of their services, like email.

A reason that the switch at EC is still in its preliminary stages is that the current services provided like; MyECC, MOX and the college email were systematically connected into a very mature and stable platform.

“The one thing we don’t want to disrupt or change drastically is the portal (MyECC),” Wagstaff said.

Wagstaff added that any final decisions whether to go ahead would be “collaborative, systematic and data driven.”

Recent graduate, Will Salazar, 26, said that he has already taken advantage of Gmail access after transferring to UCLA.

“I like that it will automatically integrate existing Gmail accounts into your school Gmail,” Salazar said. “It makes it seamless to work on other Google products as well.”