Companies really seem to be stepping up their effort to make technology greener. With new government regulations, it may just be the cheaper alternative. Carbon footprint seems to be a major consideration these days.

To aid in this effort Microsoft has released a new tool called the ‘Environment Sustainability Dashboard’, available for free, nonetheless, for customers of Dynamics AX 2009. Dynamics AX is an Enterprise Resource Planning software solution, part of the larger Microsoft Dynamics Family. The new dashboardintegrates with Dynamics AX, and gathers and displays information gathered from the system in easy to read reports.

It aims to reduce the effort required in assessing the impact that the company’s activities have on the environment. In provides inbuilt tools for tracking the company’s expenditure on energy sources such as oil, gas, electricity, etc.; and greenhouse emissions, and as such makes it much easier for the company to assess its carbon footprint. This enables the company to easily evaluate exactly how much money is being spent on energy, and provide them with possible avenues to cut costs on the same. The companies can even save costs on hiring auditing consultants, as the information is auditable.

The gathered information is displayed in the form of graphs, and charts making the information even more accessible. It is also compatible with other Microsoft products such as SharePoint Server 2007, and SharePoint Services 3.0 for easier access to the data and collaboration.

It is nice so see some consideration finally being given to our suffering environment by the software industry. Not only that, with the economy on the slide, it is nice to see measures available to cut company costs without the loss of jobs. So whether they just want to save cost on energy expenditures, or what to save the environment from being plundered by human-kind, this seems to be the way to go.

Source: betanews