This week we are kicking off an educational campaign to help social benefit organizations reduce their travel by using technology to collaborate online. Hopefully, a lot of these recommendations will also help the organizations save money since they won't have to pay for the travel. Our ultimate goal is to get organizations to make changes so their green house gas (ghg) emissions from commuting and other travel will be reduced.

I know that a lot of you out there have great collaborative technology solutions that have worked for you. If you have short suggestions that would benefit others, please write about them here.

Check out our campaign intro blog post - Ten Tips to TeleGreen Your Work and let us know what you think.

Hi Anna,

You may have an error in your link.

When I try to get to Ten Tips to TeleGreen Your Work I get the following error:

You are not authorized to access this page.

Dave

Oops, sorry. That was my fault. I could see the post, so I thought everyone could. It should be live now. Please try again.-Anna

Greetings!

Concerning the section on "9.    Encourage staff to telecommute.", I am not a big fan of PCAnywhere, it is more difficult to configure and setting up remote printers is more difficult. But PCA IS a good product with a good reputation.

I highly recommend Administrators take a look at LogMeIn Pro, or LogMeIn IT Reach. I use LogMeIn IT Reach to access as many of my IT clients as possible. IT Reach allows me to totally control the PC and do anything you could do if you were sitting in front of the PC. IT Reach provides helpful diagnostics and scripting that makes an Admin's job easier and more effective. In addition, I can set up "Secondary User Accounts" that give select users and groups that I create to access any of the PCs that I access. The secondary users have the LogMeIn "Pro" account features which is essentially the same as I have minus the diagnostics and scripting capablilties. And setting up remote printing (where you print to the local printer where you are operating from) is practically automatic.

Other products that I have used and/or researched that also might fill your needs are GoToAssist, WebEx, VNC (Many varieties for Mac & PC), GoToMyPC, TeamViewer.

I have found the logmein products to be easy to deploy, and they have good response times vs the sluggishness you sometimes see with products such as VNC. Also, it is highly secure and I have yet to deal with the configuration of a router.

The ability to connect to the office used to be something you have to purchase software and in larger applications hardware as well.  Those days are gone.  Most routers will configure at least a couple VPN (Virtual Private Network) connections which would allow you to access your network securely from your home PC.  You then can access network files or even use software already on your PC to remote control an office PC where this is allowed.  If you are using a Windows server it has Terminal server capabilities which allow you a virtual desktop environment to operate in.  TechSoup even offers the licensing for Windows Server and the terminal server if you wish to expand the capabilities beyond what is FREE.

If all this sounds to complicated consider www.MyIVO.com  It provides a FREE, yes FREE, client that securely runs on your PC and allows you to remote control it from virtually anywhere you can access the Internet with a web browser. It operates like the service GoToMyPC or LogMeIn but is FREE.  It also have a method to send someone an email so you can share your desktop like you would with WebEx.  This is also a very helpful tool when you have someone working from home and your Technical people need to support them.

LogMeIn has a Free version, FYI.  It always has, as far as I know (I've been using it for years).  And worried network administrators can install Windows Active Directory GPO templates (scroll to the bottom, there are .adm, .admi, and a PDF how-to file for download) to manage how LogMeIn operates on their network computers in one place.  :)

LogMeIn free is very nice, but there is one real catch- you can't print locally if you need to. However, if you don't need that, it is quite useful, and it's hard to beat the price. A nice this is that it seems to work reasonably well with Linux as well.

If you are thinking in terms of telecommuting and green-house gases, it's worth thinking about a consolidated solution, such as Terminal Services.  If your staff are primarily in the office it may not give you any real advantage, but for staff that are primarily NOT in the office, something like this allows you to not have to have a computer for each person who needs to log in. In other words, if you have three people who are going to need to log in during the same window, a PCA/LogMeIn/other desktop based product is going to require three idle, but running PCS going during that Window. If that Window is the same as the time that in- office staff are normally there, that means three EXTRA idling computers. With TS, you have one computer going. The more users you have the better your economy of scale turns out.

Printing is not much of a catch when you can work around it.  Install a PDF Printer object on that computer (like CutePDF Writer).  This will result in a PDF file that you might be able to email to yourself (and print locally) as long as its not confidential information.  If it is, look into some sort of encrypted file transfer solution (like SecureZIP, DropBox (the only problem I have with DropBox is that its not at a 1.0 release yet which traditionally indicates its not done, but user experience on this forum has been positive), or GPG) - or just get LogMeIn Pro which is about $70 / yr (deep discounts on multiple machines).

The printing issue definitely is something you can work around, but it definitely does get in the way of workflow if you do a lot of printing.

I agree, though, if you need it, pay for it. It really is not that expensive, nor are many of the other very usable solutions out there. For what I do, I don't need it, so it would be a waste to pay for it, but we have some staff for whom not being able to print directly would create real issues. We are using a server based solution anyway, so we have that covered, but if not I would definitely make sure we paid for that capability.

Before anyone jumps on me about the economy, I'm well aware of the budget constraints we all work under, but at the end of the day, you need to find the budget for whatever tools will make a real difference to your staff. You don't tell people they can't have pens and paper, the same should hold true of whatever other items people need. In my experience, organizations that do NOT make it their business to get their people the tools they need, either wind up overspending in many areas, or going under.

I recently set up a VPN using a Netgeat Prosafe router, and their VPN client software for about $120 for both. The NetgearProsafe line has FREE tech support for their line for as long as you own it. It was easy to install and I could even send the emplyee home with the proper VPN CD, yes Vista requires a different version than XP and a thumb drive with the policies already set for them. They install the client software and import the policy from the drive connect and type in their IP to their PC and log in using Remote Desktop.$120 is worth the time saved.