Little Miss Enviro Geek : Unified Communications

Some personal news...

biwirth — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:24:00 GMT

Hello Dear Blog Readers,

(hmmm....that kinda sounds like the beginning of one of those SPAM emails)

I wanted to let you all know I am moving on from Microsoft and shall no longer be blogging here. I'll be moving an archive of these posts to my website http://www.greenitstrategy.com and shall continue blogging there on Green IT.

So what will I be doing now?

Well, I have decided to take some time off, write a book and maybe look into starting my own business. Regardless, you can always catch me through my website and please do feel free to visit me there.

Thank you to everyone who contacted me with their Green IT questions over the past two years and gave me feedback. I really appreciate your support and good luck with your own Green IT initiatives.

Kind Regards,

Bianca AKA Little Miss Enviro Geek

Green IT: New Power & Unified Comms whitepapers

biwirth — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:10:00 GMT

There are a few new whitepapers on power savings & telework that have been released recently (some replacing older whitepapers and some brand new):

Reducing PC Power Consumption and Costs with Windows Vista - targeted at business and technical decision makers, this whitepaper replaces the old 'Windows Energy Conservation' whitepaper (2007). Its a nice succinct paper that gives a good overview of what exactly makes Windows Vista more energy efficient, provides data on Energy Star analysis and covers two specific customer examples and the savings they have made with Windows Vista.

IT Administrator's Guide to Using Windows Vista for Sustainable IT Success - more targeted at the IT Pro, this whitepaper covers a few of the bits from the above whitepaper, then extends out to cover 7 core recommendations including goal setting, education of users and hardware considerations.

Addressing the challenges facing the distributed, 21st Century Business Through Telework - this one is a Wainhouse Research report sponsored by Microsoft and was released in June 2008. Its about 20 pages and covers off the definition of telework, business issues & impacts related to telework, technologies and three different telework scenarios. Overall it has some good background statistics & info that can contribute to your internal business case for telework / telecommuting / remote working programs. In the technologies section they are generic but do have a Microsoft Technologies box outlining what can be used from our perspective - its not particularly specific but just wanted to make a note that OCS R2 was recently released (Feb 09) which provides enhanced telephony features if you are considering this technology. Check out the latest features of OCS R2 or this link for the detailed technical guides.

Telework and the US Federal Government: At the Tipping Point - and finally, for those readers of mine in the US, this whitepaper (by the same research group as the one above) takes a specific look at the US government related issues, impacts and case studies. Although parts of it are obviously very US-government-centric (and repeat elements of the previous whitepaper), it still makes a good reference for other global governments' teleworking strategy development.

Unified Communications: How we saved 160 staff-hours & 4 tonnes of carbon

biwirth — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 13:11:00 GMT

Need to start reducing travel and slashing operational costs? Got a Green IT strategy but need some further business case info? Wanting to build a UC business case?

This month we have published a great case study on how Microsoft Australia ran a trial on changing the delivery model of our monthly manager meeting, which 130 people attend from across Australia. Instead of having all those people travel to the meeting, Microsoft utilised Roundtable devices in meeting rooms across Australia. It is quite a good overview on how the meeting was approached, how they setup the room, some recommended best practices on how to handle the human aspects of future meetings and what the dollar and environmental benefits were. The three graphs below from the paper show the estimated productivity, Co2 & travel dollar savings:

Estimated Productivity Savings

These savings were based on 160 staff-hours being saved through a reduction in travel.

Estimated Carbon Savings

Estimated T&E Savings

The travel and entertainment savings above show an estimated $18k saving in cold hard cash across Australia.

In this calculation, what isn't considered are the soft costs - always a hard one to quantify! But just to get the ball rolling, one of these soft benefits is the time given back to staff as a result of not having to travel i.e. facilitating a work-life balance: for example: think about how much more time these staff get to spend with their families by not staying overnight in hotels.

Check out the full paper here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd126738.aspx

The sociology of UC

One of the interesting aspects of this mini-study, was the fact that they organised (for the first meeting) to have an IT specialist and a training co-coordinator on hand to ensure the setup was correct and any issues could be resolved ASAP.

One of our UC specialists here in Australia, Sandra, is a big supporter of the sociology aspects of UC. Whenever we visit customers together there are a couple of recurring themes we discuss with customers. One of those is when you are planning a UC deployment, realise that realistically not all meetings will or can be changed to video conferences. If you are starting out with Live Meeting and Roundtable, Sandra suggests selecting:

"A Group of people that need to work together (always the best as it is about mapping to not just the way a team meets but the way they do 1:1 discussions and leverage resources whilst in front of a customer or citizen to resolve issues with colleagues in and out of your organisation) OR
A particular team meeting (weekly team or project update meeting) OR
An Event (perhaps someone has to fly in for a conference to do a presentation)
...OR a combination of all"

Below are the example business process and metrics Sandra uses when developing PoCs for customers around UC:

Business Process	Process Description	Sample Metrics
*Access to Experts*	End Users need solutions or answers and often the solution requires expertise or contextual knowledge which has to be made available at the point of need. The expertise may often not be available locally but the information needs to be readily available.	Improved Productivity Faster Project Completion Shorten Sales cycle time
*Remote Meeting And Collaboration*	Conducting meetings with team members working out of another location or from home.	Reduce Travel Reduce Co2 Enhance Staff Engagement Faster Project Completion
*Staff Learning and Development*	Staff training in outlying areas is expensive and logistically difficult. Sending managers and trainers out to remote branches or getting remote staff together at a central facility for training is challenging and expensive.	Reduce Training Costs Improve Staff Engagement
*Flexible Workforce - Access to Mail and Enterprise VOIP*	Anywhere access to Mail and Communications through better access to key infrastructure remotely.	Improve ability to retain employees Reduce Telephony costs
*IT Project: Exchange Consolidation with Unified Messaging*	An organisations email system today is still fundamental to the way many people communicate. A system that is faster, more reliable and cheaper to run is still core to the Unified Communications strategy.	Improve Availability and business Continuity Reduce the cost of compliance

For more detailed UC blogging, also check out: Johann Kruse, Aussie UC Guru: http://blogs.technet.com/jkruse

And if you are interested in User Groups in Oz, check out:

Melbourne UCG: http://melbuc.org

Sydney UCG: http://sydneyuc.org

Little Miss Enviro Geek : Unified Communications

Some personal news...

***Green IT: New Power & Unified Comms whitepapers***

Unified Communications: How we saved 160 staff-hours & 4 tonnes of carbon

Green IT: New Power & Unified Comms whitepapers