Green Office Week 2012

Posted on by March 20, 2013

Avery is sponsoring Green Office Week 2012, which runs all this week, 14th-18th May. Wouldn’t it be lovely if the eco-fairy could wave her magic wand and make every office an environmentally-aware green and lovely space? It ain’t gonna happen, but if a few little green balls get rolling, a small but significant difference can be made to people’s thinking, and in time that might translate into action.

The week has a different theme for every day of the week. Today’s theme is energy, so here is a link to our presentation from last year’s Energy Efficiency in IT workshop at The Courtyard. We have a variety of ways to reduce your IT-related energy consumption, and it reaches much further than putting your machine on stand-by at the end of the day. It might just make you think.

Tomorrow we’ll be blogging on Tuesday’s theme of transport. In the meantime you can follow @GreenOfficeWeek on Twitter.

Ouch

Posted on by March 20, 2013

This IT Donut post is one in the eye for the average IT department: “The trouble with geeks”. It looks at the “contempt” in which “IT people” hold users. We’ve all seen and heard it in action, whether as hideously embarrassed member of staff overhearing a colleague or a user feeling a complete twit because you don’t understand something someone else – far more experienced than you – thinks you should.

The author Lee Wrall makes a very good point towards the end of this brief article:

Business owners must find outsourced IT providers or IT managers that encourage the right attitude.

Don’t be afraid to outsource. Don’t be at the mercy of inflated egos in the IT department. Don’t allow your business to be held back by fear, or ignorance, or both. Talk to a friendly, open company that genuinely wants to understand your business and provide a top notch service. Okay, talk to us. There, I said it. Pick us! Pick us!

Who??

Posted on by March 20, 2013

I received an email recently that had in the From field the equivalent of ‘John S’ and a Subject field with such cryptic and unhelpful content that I almost deleted the email as spam, before a faint stirring at the back of my mind prompted me to decode the Subject field. It turned out to be some proofs I needed to approve, so a pretty important email. If the From field had contained the sender’s full name and/or company name, and the Subject field had been along the lines of ‘Advert proofs for your approval’, all would have dropped into place without narrowly averted mishap.

I groan when emails arrive with a From showing something like Admin, Accounts, Enquiries etc. It’s not helpful. People delete this stuff. We all get three billion emails a day – to stand out we need to know that we want yours. By all means use a generic From, but at least make it MegaCorp Account Team or Acme Widgets Enquiry Response, so we know that it’s something we do actually want. Similarly the Subject field has to contain something meaningful: a ticket number, a product name, an event title or reference to the subject such as Menu for John’s leaving do, Minutes of 23rd April’s Sales Meeting or Advert proofs for your approval. Please do this, and fewer useful emails will be deleted, fewer useless ones will be opened, and we’ll all save a few nanoseconds.