14 DAY TRIAL // If you can control the amount of energy used by a single computer, then you may spare a small amount of money from going down the drain, by being able to control and manage energy throughout an enterprise, that's what I can really call "power saving"!
Today, a company called Faronics announced version 1.5 of its Power Save Mac software application, a handy tool that enables system administrators to create and manage energy usage schedules, enhancing the Energy Saver built in the Mac OS X System Preferences area.
Power Save Mac is able to seamlessly integrate with Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) or any other third party management utility to allow the deployment of a single power saving configuration package to multiple computers, while the configuration screen allows the intelligent control of inactive workstations between regularly scheduled action items.
The features of this program allow you to define inactivity settings based on CPU usage, network usage, hard disk usage and the status of important applications, customizable user warning times, while users can choose to design a customized installation package to suit the need of their specific environment.
When creating such customized installation packages, you can choose the actions to perform, schedule them as one time events, daily events or on a specific day of the week, choose the time of the day for this action to occur, choose a number of minutes of computer inactivity before log out, restart or shut down, as well as enabling auto-cancel to override scheduled events if computer is active or choose to enable users to override scheduled actions to avoid unwanted data loss.
Priced at 12$, Power Save Mac is an Universal Binary application that requires Mac OS X 10.3 or later, while ARD integration needs Apple Remote Desktop 2.2 to run properly, and a demo version is available on Softpedia here.