Five Advanced Resolutions for Greening Your Technology

Were last week’s resolutions too easy or basic for you? For those who are more ambitious or have more IT resources, consider these resolutions to green your technology in 2009:

1. Setup for and allow your staff and volunteers to telecommute. Whether allowing people to occasionally work at home or permanently work from home, this can be a green policy. The big green benefit is fewer people commuting, which means fewer cars on the road emitting CO2. Consider using technologies like virtual private networks (VPN), email, ReadyTalk, and Internet-based faxing to enable your employees to work remotely.

2. Virtualize your servers. While you should expect the initial implementation to be costly, your organization can save energy and money by buying and maintaining fewer servers. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is Microsoft's virtualization product and is included in Windows Server 2008 64-bit version. VMware got high marks from other nonprofits at last year's Nonprofit Technology Conference. Check out their free version to give it a demo.

3. Begin using thin-clients. They use less power and require fewer materials to make. Given that a thin-client network doesn’t require high-powered computers, consider using refurbished computers, which will not only save you money, but will help extend the life of older computers, which is environmentally beneficial. Check out this amazingly small solution from Pano Logic. It uses only 5 watts to power the box.

4. Select a greener hosting provider. Ask if they have solar or wind power, virtualized servers, carbon offsets, adaptive power (PDF), etc. If you find them, consider posting them in our forums so others can find them too. TreeHugger has a few recommendations.

5. Install projectors in conference rooms. This will encourage staff to project agenda and slides instead of printing handouts. If you don’t have a way to share slides internally, consider using SlideShare, ReadyTalk, or WebEx.

Do you have green technology resolutions you would like to share, please either post them on our forums or send us an email at YourTips (AT) techsoup.org.