Shutting down idle computers can reduce your carbon footprint and energy cost significantly.

First, there is the integrated Windows power management from Microsoft which is a good approach but still offers a lot room for technical improvements, especially in networked environments - in which some machines are dependent on others – and in complex work routines that require a flexible and intelligent power management control way beyond the standards.

 

The Windows solution is based on direct interactivity with the PC. This applies for many different tasks such as overnight Backup processes, TV-recording, live kiosk Power-Point-presentations, defragmentation of hard drives, maintenance work, machine controlling and many others.

 

Considering the hundreds of thousands of Display-PCs in retail windows and at trade shows that would usually need to run 12-14 hours a day instead of 24 hours - you soon get an idea how much energy is wasted needlessly and transformed in heat.

 

According to latest research, 90% of all users do not enable the power management functionality of their computers - understandably due to the reasons mentioned above.

 

Many enterprises, schools, universities and public institutions going green already raise awareness for their carbon footprint and electric bill and call for energy saving and energy policies. Users are asked to shut down their computers before going home for the day, leaving for the weekend, during lunch hours and longer absences from their desks.

 

Reality is different - employees are often too busy, meetings last too long, are under deadline constraints, need to catch a train on the evening and therefore night after night, weekend after weekend thousands of computers are running and waste vast quantities of energy for useless operation and its air conditioning.

 

Using Windows Power Management prohibits enterprises to run update or backup jobs during off-hours. And while this only requires few minutes, computers are often running during many nights and over weekends.

 

Starting with Release 4, Auto Shutdown Manager supports Central Management via it’s build in Management Console.

 

The Management Console allows configuration, updates, management and deployment of settings and policies from one central place to the all network clients or specified client groups.

 

It also supports daily administration tasks such as remote wake up, remote shutdown, remote logoff users and remote restart single PCs or selected PC groups, enabling enterprises to deploy updates during off hours and run backups without wasting energy or interfering with end-users productivity waiting for pathces and backups to finish.

 

  Central Administration Console

 

 

 

The Management Console provides five management categories:

 

Client Manager See a Screenshot

 

Auto Shutdown Manager allows the central administration of power management options for networked computers. Intelligent group policies maximize energy savings by placing machines into a lower power states without interfering with end-user productivity, desktop maintenance or upgrades.

 

The Client Manager allows creating of groups of power saving policies, setting security options and assigning Client PCs to them.  For example different settings can be defined for office PCs, support staff, sales or marketing.  The number of groups is unlimited. Clients are assigned to their appropriate groups very easily via drag and drop. Furthermore the Client Manager also supports remote wake up and remote shutdown commands such as reboot, standby, hibernate, log off users or power off. 

 

License Manager See a Screenshot

 

The License Manager is used to manage the licensing system.
There are two possible ways of licensing. Each client can have its own permanent license – or can lease a license from the server. If clients lease licenses from servers –there is no need to enter licenses manually to each client, which makes the overall licensing process very easy and transparent. The lease time for client licenses is 90 days – so outdated or inactive clients are removed automatically after 90 days and their licenses are reused for other clients. Each time when a client connects the server, the lease time is updated. The timeframe of 90 days is long enough to cover occasionally connected clients such as laptops and to bridge longer out of office times. Unused clients can also be removed manually, which releases their licenses immediately.

 

Update Manager See a Screenshot

 

The Update Manager helps to keep Auto Shutdown Manager agents on client computers up-to-date on the entire client base without touching the clients. The process work fully automatic and transparent – even if no users are logged on to their PC.

 

Maintenance Manager See a Screenshot

 

The Maintenance Manager helps to automatically power up clients for maintenance tasks, keep them running as long as needed and power them down after the administration task is done. The wake up process can be planed via a timer or executed immediately via Wake On Lan.

 

Client Monitor See a Screenshot

 

The Client Monitor is used to display an overview of recent events.
Events such as initializations, update status or issues, shutdown or the status of remote shutdown commands are displayed.