Tip of the day, August 12 Review Your License Agreements

You don’t buy software, you license it. This means that usually once a year or so and certainly with every upgrade you need to relicense or renew your agreement.  A license also means you don’t get to sue the vendor if your software causes your business to crash.  In any case, treat your license for software like motor vehicle insurance. Have your driving habits changed, do you have fewer vehicles on the road? You can save money by reading your license and asking for changes rather than just writing a check.

Three Easy Steps For Tech To Save Energy And Money

1.  Turn off your computers, monitors and printers. This sounds like common sense but the vendors have not made this easy. If you are a small company you can do this with a powerstrip. Users won’t use powerstrips? Try this. Have the boss walk around with two types of stickies in the evening. One stickie says thanks for turning off the computer and one says hey you forgot to shut the thing down. You’ll be surprised how fast this helps. If you want you can buy those automatic on and off switches to turn things off. This may not be great for computers that get shut down this way.

2. Make it a pain to print stuff. Remember when you used to have to print to a central printer? What a pain. Renew this practice and you’ll see  a rapid drop off in printer usage and supply costs.

3. Have a plan to let employees work at home one day a week. This may not sound easy, but you’ll get happier employees and if you can shut the place down one day a week, there is a lot of money to be saved