SharePoint is Green
I've been listening to a lot of NPR (National Public Radio) lately. Seems like every morning on my way to work the radio is talking about gas and emissions and green house gasses. It got me thinking about what I'm doing to contribute to the problem or the solution. I'm not going to go into politics here. I think both sides of the isle should try to save the planet. Ironically it's amazing how people think they have to go backward in time to reduce our consumption. We were there, but I think our efficiencies are worth something.
This list below may help you with some "out of the box thinking" ROI thoughts. Sometimes these are going to be more qualitative than quantitative methods.
So all this thinking made me think about how green SharePoint technology is...
1. Reduces Printing by having documents, directories, profiles, lists and items dynamic and viewable in soft copy online and offline and most even in mobile views - I was at a company earlier this week that had a printed out and laminated copy of an employee or department directory. I thought I'd gone back in time. Amazing. I hope they can quickly take advantage of the contact list in WSS or profiles in MOSS to have a much more rich and dynamic directory. So you'd save a few trees here. Forms are a huge one I hear about. Faxing too. How much of this could be done over email with a link to a form or a form that is sent over email. When forms are online they can be TONS better with form validation, direct entry into the repository (doesn't have to be a SharePoint list). A lot of the time you're paying someone to do the data entry into some clunky UI anyway. Why not have the person with the info put it in a nice online form and reduce the paper form that will be hard to read and will be extremely prone to mistakes. If you've seen my handwriting, you'd wish you had an online form!
2. Promotes Server and Platform Consolidation - Having Search, Content Management, Collaboration/File Sharing, Portals, Dashboards, KPIs, Reports, Email enabled lists, Surveys, Doc Mgmt, Records, Team Calendars, Forms, etc... all on a common platform it is much easier to shut down many old systems that are no longer needed.
3. Reduces Travel - being able to quickly and efficiently communicate over long distances more and more people can get their jobs done remotely and on the go. Partners can collaborate with partners, business to consumer, CEO to the employees, teams and v-teams all can more efficiently communicate with each other. Obvious integration with Live Communication Server and Office communicator/Windows or MSN Communicator even real time presence is available. Without contacting a person you can understand what meetings they have (with Exchange integration) and when they are available. Out of a group of people you can quickly view who is available and reduce the amount of time it would take to get information saving power. Reaching out and using Live Meeting obviously reduces the travel by having the meeting online, but getting connected and sharing the files, team calendar, reports and information over SharePoint is a major part of that exchange. It's awesome as well how much you can find where otherwise you'd be looking through filing cabinets on the other side of the world. I know that's a stretch, but it truly is amazing what we can do now.
4. Reduces Energy Consumption - Think how much time you save by finding documents and information via search. Search itself reduces a ton of work that would otherwise be duplicated. So much of our time is spend looking for resources and references. The time we save here is energy even lights in our office we otherwise would spend looking for data. This time we save would be wonderful if it meant we spent less time in the office, it may mean a shorter weekend and less time in the office, but otherwise, it simply means you get more work done in the same time it would have taken. You don't spend less time at work, you're simply more efficient. That energy may reduce the time the company would have spent and reduce the amount of employees the company would have to have thus reducing the amount of office space and hence power, heat, light, etc... so by making employees more efficient they can either reduce the employees or simply get more done with less which is likely closer to reality. Hopefully nobody is going to riff one employee cause nine others have discovered empowerment through SharePoint. That hurts morale... don't do that.
5. Reduced Emissions Remote Employees & Telecomuting - One key scenario for reducing emissions and not burning fossil fuels is simply not to come to work. I like that idea. In fact I would like to see us move to 1 day a week with no meetings period. Don't even try to have meetings on one day a week where the employees can work from home, do email, blog, surf the web, and search for cool stuff on the intranet. A day that helps clear the head. One company we're all familar with let's the employees come up with fun interesting projects for some percentage of time. How much more familiar with our intranets and what cool stuff on the internet that relates to our job like reading blogs on our topics would we become more familiar with if we were part of a community and participated in that community by both asking and responding to questions. I'm a big advocate of flex time, but I also like the idea of meeting free fridays where you have freedoms where you are encouraged to relax in a workish kind of way. Having SharePoint accessible over the internet in a remote way such as employee remote portal with alternate access mappings, extranets, and other https accessible paths is a great way to encourage remote access. VPN isn't the more secure or best option when they can remotely access SharePoint over SSL and get to just the data they need to. Remote employee access to SharePoint and OWA reduce VPN usage.
Hopefully these 5 help you start to understand that hey yeah... SharePoint is doing it's part too. Save the planet!
