30 Jan 2009

Stroud District Council's IT department

I read that an IT infrastructure planning analyst from Staffordshire county set up a programme that scans all the council's 7,500 computers and automatically switches them off if any have been left on after the user has gone home. The saving is £40,000 a year - I have passed it onto a councillor who has raised it with our IT department.

Let us hope that will help make some savings...meanwhile I thought it was worth a mention that Sitemorse look at all local authority websites on a monthly basis, awarding marks out of 10 for 4 major categories, namely function (broken links), accessibility , code quality and performance (speed of response, etc.). Stroud is typically in the top 50 but last month have been ranked as number 17 out of 460 authorities, scoring 8.72 out of 10. This apparently would have been higher still had it not been for a PDF document containing broken links. Congrats to the team there - go see it here.

3 comments:

Simon said...

Hmm. No scanning software needed. Remote shutdown can be done through the shutdown command:

http://www.wikihow.com/Do-a-Remote-Shutdown-for-a-PC-on-a-LAN

Just stick it in a batch file and schedule it to run at a certain time.

I wish all companies would do this. Nothing irritates me more than computers being left on all night. At the previous company I worked for this was suggested but then we had all the moaning from people who either couldn't be bothered to wait 5 minutes in the morning for it to switch on or that they were in the middle of some important work that had to be left running overnight.

Philip said...

Thanks for this - I'll pass to the IT department - agree there is no real excuse for not turning computer off.

Anonymous said...

I know it sounds goood on the face of it but what about the monitors? How do you get them switched off? Also what about patching, when would this happen? Lastly, if this is not managed properly then you could face issues with critical machines being affected if you start to use tools to roll out commands and the planning is less than satisfactory. Stuart