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Carbon Control Software (CCS) is an energy usage monitoring tool which regulates your IT systems to help reduce energy wastage, CO2 emissions, and energy costs via the utilisation of set policies. Specifically aimed at creating a greener working environment, CCS will record all PC activity types from Active to Offline recording the energy consumption and when energy policies were applied to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This data can then be retrieved and viewed through the Report Monitor component of the software in a graphical representation form.
CCS is aimed primarily at reducing carbon dioxide emissions, reducing organisation energy consumption and creating a reduction in energy costs. An additional positive point about implementing this software is the carbon offset generated by each individual licence purchased. Not only will the energy savings generated by the organisation provide additional revenue to put back into the company but Carbon Control Software pledges to donate a percentage of each licence to R&D into renewable energy sources.
The great part is the customer gets to decide which area to put this money into and publicise that they are helping to provide a greener environment.
Currently CCS is supported on Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Millennium, and Windows 98. Other operating systems are currently being worked on such as Windows Vista, Mac, and Linux.
CCS would be installed on a PC where the owner has access to the entire network infrastructure, such as the domain administrator. From there the Administrator module can be initiated, locate all PC’s on the target network, and then deploy CCS to all computers on that network without users being aware of its installation. IT administrators can either send out a message to all effected users that a restart is required to initialise new software or they can wait until the following day and allow execution to occur when users switch their PC on in the morning.
A Health and Safety Policy can also be included in the use of CCS. An organisation might have a H&S directive that stipulates a 15 minute break every 2 hours away from your PC. CCS will monitor an employee’s active status and when that PC reaches a cumulative 2 active working hours in total, it does not take into account time spent away from the PC, it will notify the employee of their right to a break. The option to accept or decline this is presented to the employee in a pop-up window. By accepting this, the PC will go into either a Standby or Hibernate state deemed by the Domain Administrator. Should the user decline this or come back to their PC and start working again before the 15 minute break is over then CCS will record this information in an employee log file and can be viewed if needed.
CCS offers the ability to enforce a policy specifically setup to shutdown all PC’s after a certain predetermined time. All PC’s which are not being used but still powered on will receive a pop-up message stating that it is past the aforementioned time period and that it is either going to be shutdown or put into standby/hibernate. If an employee is still working they will remain unaffected.
The Administrator module will allow for Standby or Hibernate policies to be created. These can be set to be performed after a given time. The default setting recommended by CCS is 5 minutes.
The user can also action standby or shutdown by right-clicking on the CCS icon in the systems tray, i.e. if they are called into a meeting etc. This will initiate the required action immediately.
One off shutdowns can be enforced from the Administrator module. From here the Domain Administrator can notify the individual at the targeted PC that they are about to be shutdown and to save their work. It will then perform a count down timer on that PC leading up to its shutdown phase. It is possible to create the shutdown request in a manner that it will restart the PC or just power it off completely.
We advise that it would be good working ethics for the Domain Administrator to contact the individual(s) before hand using our built-in messaging service, or by some other means.
CCS provides the client the ability to set policies to their working needs. By entering the time you want CCS to monitor a PC for an inactive state before taking action and then what that action should be then the volume of dead energy can be minimised.
CCS can be turned off via the Administrator module. This can only be done by the Domain Administrator.
CCS is designed to be non-intrusive software which is completely transparent to users in a typical working environment.
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