All in a Day’s Work: Day Trips to London, Our Global Footprints, and Cool Software

Evaluating our impacts on the environment is taking less imagination these days with the help of software measurements.

I remember thinking this a few weeks ago when I was taking a day trip from Orlando Florida to London for an important customer meeting. Yes, I did say day trip as you know you are soon going to experience the fog of jet lag when you check-in at the flight counter in Orlando and they hand you your return boarding pass at the same time!

Nine hours later the British customs official Heathrow quizzing me about my in-and-out venture asked me “Haven’t you ever heard of video conferencing”?

Well, yes, of course. How delightfully ironic! Microsoft is the world leader in providing solution suites for unified communications, allow us MS and a significant and growing number of worldwide customers to work and collaborate from just about anywhere.

But, there are times when you just have to be face to face to conclude a deal!

Nonetheless, for the majority of work that does not require face-to-face transaction, most companies are seeking greater efficiencies by saving time and money through online collaboration and reducing their carbon footprint along the way.

Time and money savings can be easily measured, but one question that’s often posed is what impact are online collaboration tools having on our carbon footprint? This is a question that is coming to the fore as the carbon-restricted economy is instituted.

One answer comes from Navantis, our Gold Certified partner out of Canada. Their solution is called Green Meeting and it is an extension to Microsoft Unified Communications

Infrastructure that tracks carbon and cost savings as your information workers collaborate online. If your company has made commitments to reduce carbon footprints - or even if you want to save money - Green Meeting provides a user-friendly way to collect enterprise-wide metrics and meet your commitments. It’s a pretty cool tool and you should check out the video description here. – Jon C. Arnold