Happy Earth Day!  

GreeNTUG/SustaiNTUG Earth Day Report On Green & Sustainability & Microsoft Technology-Looking Back and Forward

Another year has come & gone, with successes even in the midst of a challenging economy.

Green and Sustainability are becoming more and more mainstream, with less disparagement all the time. 

Virtualization, a huge energy saver in technology, truly went mainstream, to the extent that IT Pros are now told "you need this tool in your toolkit to be marketable". 

In the Microsoft developer stack, THEY LISTENED!  Microsoft started talking publicly about Green and Sustainability in 2008 (TechEd Sustainability Panel 2008 is my personal benchmark of the "real" start of the "interaction with the community" effort).  Visual Studio 2010, the first release of developer tools actually built since then, has incorporated LOTS of features that result in fewer keystrokes (and arguably fewer  electrons as well), and even more other subtle but even more substantial changes.

On the Opportunity side, you hear more and more about the SmartGrid, which will require a LOT of software (as well as hardware) to make it run successfully.  Start a company, join BizSpark or WebSiteSpark, build the software tools, and make your fortune.

Also on the Opportunity side, there is a Y2K going on in the chemical data management side of ERP LOB systems and the Supply Chain.  The 2nd wave of that, which requires extensive software to really work well, has a November 30, 2010 deadline in the EU (hard deadline), for which the final requirements will be out Late May/Early June 2010 (for real!). (Can you say Agile and Opportunity in the same sentence?).  In the USA, similar requirements have now been published by OSHA, so the final regulations could be expected sometime around Feb 2011, with implementation 6-24 months later. EVERY COMPANY THAT MANAGES MATERIAL SAFETY DATA SHEETS (MSDS'S) WILL NEED TO CHANGE THEIR COMPUTER SYSTEM TO ACCOMMODATE THE NEW CHANGES!  Can you say "Y2K All Over Again"?

And what about the Phone?  Phones are typically a much lighter "touch" than traditional aps, both from an energy and from a keystroke design.  Look for phone aps to be both part of the "Be It" (data collection for LOB systems) and "Build It" portions of Green and Sustainability (the "Live It" piece of it is up to you...).

All of this, just as we get a whole new set of tools to make it easier and  more efficient to build the software needed to support these activities.

Happy Earth Day 2010! 

It appears we can look forward to even more progress in the upcoming year... 

Please join us and be part of the community around this topic that supports implementing and sharing it!  Join GreeNTUG/SustaiNTUG today....(free, of course)  http://greentug.groups.live.com