Brown University is launching a pilot program as it considers switching its university e-mail system to Google Inc. ’s Gmail product, The Brown Daily Herald reported.

About 200 Brown students have been trying out the Google Apps Education Edition since June 30 and will provide feedback to campus administrators, Donald Tom, Brown ’s director of IT support, told the newspaper.

Tom said Brown has been considering the switch for about a year because of Google ’s more robust storage space and popular application interfaces. The university has not decided when the entire campus would switch if the pilot is successful, he said. More than 60 percent of Brown students already forward their messages to Gmail accounts, Tom told Time magazine.