Transforming your office can lead to more money in your pocket too

Running an ecologically friendly business is not only a good investment for us and our community but also a simple way to conserve energy and save money. After a long day at the office who really remembers to turn off their computers anymore? Unfortunately, most of us aren’t aware of the consequences in our routine behavior and the disastrous affects it has on others. Regardless of whether you’re the boss or an employee, everyone can help save energy, recycle waste, and create a friendlier environment. Below are several tips to help you save energy around the office and support any green efforts you have started:

1) Optimizing the energy settings on all the computers in your workplace can save you a tremendous amount of electricity, and money. Simply changing computers to energy-saving settings and remembering to put them on sleep mode when you leave the room will improve energy efficiency in the workplace. After a hard day of work, take a moment and remember to unplug all the appliances that will drain energy while you’re away. For instance, your cell phone charger uses electricity even when it isn’t charging your phone. Keep in mind that most gadgets still use up energy in low power mode, so you’ll need a powerstrip that cuts idle current , such as the Smart Power Strip in order to power only specific devices when the rest are off.

2) Switching to energy efficient light bulbs is also another great way to conserve electricity. Only 8 percent of the energy consumed by an incandescent light bulb is actually used to produce light. The rest just creates useless heat. Light bulbs such as compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) use 75 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs and last ten times longer. LED desk lamps and other energy-saving light fixtures could be implemented all around the office. As well as utilizing natural daylight in large windowed offices to preserve heat and electricity. There are even simpler tasks we can work into our daily routine such as turning off lights in the kitchen and restroom when they aren’t being used. Raising awareness and remembering to do what our parents told us – turn off those lights – helps protect our environment and saves money.

3) One polystyrene cup contains one billion chlorofluorocarbons which contain elements of chlorine that can potentially harm a large amount of the ozone layer. To avoid using Styrofoam cups at the office, ask everyone to bring their own personal coffee mug and keep spare ones for guests. To avoid excess waste provide real towels in the kitchen and restrooms. Don’t use paper napkins! Rather than keeping cabinets full of paper, store things electronically and switch to editing and organizing digitally.

4) If you must keep paper items in stock, at least make sure they are recycled! Recycled paper saves 55 percent of water compared to freshly made paper. But simply having the nice recycler’s logo on the front package is not enough. When you buy recycled paper check the labels to make sure you’re buying paper with a high percentage of post-consumer content and little to no chlorine bleach. This paper has far less toxic chemicals that are harmful for the environment and will help make your office more eco-friendly. To help your recycling efforts, reuse boxes from your office and use shredded paper as packaging material. These small little changes will help conserve supplies and eliminate unnecessary waste.

5) Another hazardous part of our daily routine is commuting to work every morning. For every gallon of gas we use in our cars, 19 pounds of CO2 are released into the atmosphere. Public transport, biking, or even carpooling would help reduce your gas emissions tremendously. The best way to commute, however, is not to commute at all- or to telecommute. Telecommuting could potentially help save millions of dollars in gas mileage and best of all- it allows you to work from your own home! If people drive about 1,000 miles a month, they are producing around 120 tons of carbon dioxide a year. Imagine how much of our environment we could all save by telecommuting even once-twice a week.

Though we might not be saving the planet all at once, helping the environment and raising awareness is important in the work place and at home. Every little bit counts.

Has your office gone green? If so, share your tips with us below.

So you’ve finally ditched your bulky fax machine in favor of online faxing in order to save on paper and ink. In these tough economic times, a paperless office seems like a wise idea especially when you have so many digital tools at your disposal. However, there are times when documents need signatures, and if you don’t know how to sign documents electronically, this may mean having to print, sign, and scan every document before faxing it back.

In only four simple steps, you can create an electronic signature for any document:

In a nutshell, all you need to do is:

1. Sign a blank sheet of paper.
2. Scan or fax the signature to yourself in order to digitize it.
3. Create a bitmap using a simple graphic editing program like Microsoft Paint or Photoshop.
4. Open the RingCentral Call Controller, add the signature to the stamp gallery and start adding your electronic signature to any document with a simple click.

More detailed information can be found here.

Pretty simple instructions, but what happens if you’ve already gotten rid of your fax machine and scanner or simply don’t have one? Digital Inspiration made some great suggestions on a recent blog post that include downloading apps to your iPhone like “Fountain Pen” or “Sketch Pad” in order to draw your signature, making a digital copy using your digital camera, or using a web-based program like Live Signature to get your John Hancock digitized. It all may sound a little daunting, but keep in mind that digitizing your signature is a one time event that puts that much closer to a true paperless office.

As always, we welcome your suggestions, so do tell us in the comments section how you’ve digitized your signature. I’m sure you all have plenty of recommendations, and we can’t wait to hear about them.

It’s hard to miss these days. Virtualization is the biggest trend, topic and force in information technology. Amazon’s virtual compute cloud services called AWS have taken the world by storm as even enterprise buyers line up to consume virtual compute power on the fly. IT consumers are focused less and less on the hardware and stack supporting the service and more and more on simply consuming the value delivered over the internet on demand.

Yet despite this revolution, some of us still don’t have an online fax service (you know who you are). Instead of using an e-mail fax (or electronic fax) solution, they continue to receive paper faxes available only in one physical location in the world. The irony? Some of them are sipping coffee reading the latest best seller on their Kindle electronic reader while waiting for a proposal to drop out of their paper fax machine. Its 2009 and it’s information’s job to find us, not the other way around.

So for those numerous hangers-on, I thought I’d make a list of the top reasons it is absolutely time to adopt an online fax service.

1. Travel is a reality: The simple argument for directing all faxes to an electronic fax–you probably travel. Why deal with the hassle of asking someone to pick up a fax for you while you’re gone or tolerate the risk an important fax will be overlooked while you are gone? You carry that smart phone for a reason, use it. Read your faxes instantly in e-mail as soon as you receive them anywhere in the world.
2. Let information follow you: Point one is so important, I want to say it again a different way. Its 2009 and information serves us now. It finds us through RSS feeds and status updates. We no longer have to wait for the physical TV to spit out the shows we want, we watch them electronically on Tivo or, for the truly advanced, Hulu.com. Don’t rush home from soccer practice to receive a fax. Read it wherever you are in the wold and stop for a tasty smoothie with the kids. There… isn’t that better?
3. Speed: Forwarding simplicity: It’s easier to forward an electronic fax. You just hit forward in your e-mail and it’s on its way. Why waste your time typing in five phone numbers of other people who need to see the document? You can also fire off a quick acknowledgement with notes to the sender. Internet fax is a faster fax.
4. Reliability: Unlike some fax machines, the internet is almost always on and working. There is no toner to run out or a line for the cat to pull out of the back. Have you ever hassled with a fax machine? If you own one, the answer is probably yes.
5. Green savings: E-mail based fax services are more affordable than ever. They deliver all of the above benefits, push you into 21st century thinking, and are still cheaper than a dedicated phone line approach to faxing. They are also greener–no paper or toner unless you decide its important enough to print. Everyone loves trees, so lets try to keep them around. Faxing accounts for 5% of office paper use! Want to be 5% greener tomorrow? Switch to an e-mail fax solution today.

Photos by Abhisek Sarda and geishaboy500

Even after over a decade of fighting for the paperless office, the faxes remain. There are simply too many things that require a signature, too many hand-written notes, and too many hand-filled forms. So the fax endures, but not so much the fax machine. Online faxing, that uses your internet connection rather than a separate physical device, is growing in popularity. Dedicated internet fax services now boast millions of subscribers. Here are the top five reasons to reassign your fax machine to door-stop duty.

1.One less physical hunk of iron in your office. Even if desk-space isn’t scarce, you’ll appreciate not having to feed it toner and paper, deal with it jamming, or having to get it serviced.

2.Send and receive from anywhere. If you can get a ‘net connection, you can send a fax. Fax from the coffee shop or from home in your pajamas. There’s no need to make a special trip to the office or the copy store just to send a single page.

3.Alerts let you know when a document has arrived. You can be told via email or text message to your cellphone that you’ve received a fax. Know right away, wherever you are, that the document you’re waiting on has finally arrived.

4.Maintain electronic copies. Need a copy of that contract you signed three months ago? Internet faxes can be stored and retrieved just like your other digital documents. And with fax logs, you’ll be able to see who sent them, what their phone number is, and the result of the transaction.

5.Fax directly from your word processor. There’s no need to print out a document you want faxed. If your faxing service supports your word processing or number crunching software, you can send it right from your computer without even having to get up. It might not get you the paperless office of your dreams, but it will reduce the amount of time you spend shuffling papers back and forth.

Photo credits: Abhisek Sarda, anomalous4