SharePoint is GREEN!

Joel Oleson is very active in the SharePoint community, and he posted an article called "SharePoint is Green" a little while back. Since today is Earth Day 2009, it made me remember his article and want to bring it back. His article is located here..."SharePoint is GREEN!"

No matter what your beliefs are when it comes to Global Warming, there are plenty of other benefits included in the 'green' package that even an organization as large as the Marine Corps can appreciate.

As any organization that uses a 'Share Drive' knows, it is next to impossible to find a document you are looking for. Actually, it is not hard to find a document 'like' the one you are looking for, but to find the exact one is a bit more problematic. This is because people are afraid of losing information that they do not have control over. When a file is sent out to an organization (for instance, the Marine Corps Ball LOI to put it in Marine terms)...that document is expected to change multiple times before the event. EVERY section then takes that document and saves it to their folder on the Share Drive. If that file was 1MB large, and it was sent out to 25 sections, you now have 25MB of space being used for one document. But that document is also stored on their desktop because they do not trust the Share Drive either.

Now make a change to the document and resend the file to everyone. What I didn't mention is that your EXCHANGE e-mail server is also storing a copy of that file in your e-mail until it is PERMANENTLY deleted, AND a temp copy is also stored in your Outlook on every computer you logged in on.

With that new change, everyone is going to resave the new version to the Share Drive...and usually change the name because you may not trust that you can overwrite the old copy.

What does all of this have to do with green? You probably thought I was going to talk about all the trees being saved by SharePoint, but it goes a bit further.

If you originally sent a LINK to the Marine Corps Ball LOI instead of the file, you have saved a lot of server space. First, everyone will ALWAYS have the most current information no matter how many times you change the original file. They will not have to save their own copy of the file because all the links point to the same location. Your EXCHANGE server will not copy the file in everyone's mailbox, and another benefit there is that your network overall will move faster without all the downloading.

End result: all of saved server space means less servers using energy, less servers to keep cool, less servers to maintain.

Just remember this mantra: SEND A LINK, NOT A FILE. SEND A LIST (EXCEL) OF LINKS, NOT A ZIP FILE!! Pass that around, and you will find your network speed up while you accidentally are using Microsoft to save the world one server at a time!