Appendix B
Links and Resources
The following are some resources that we used in writing this book. We’ve tried to address
terms and concepts that will be relevant to developing your knowledge base for energy manage-
ment. In addition, we’ve included useful tools that will serve as ready references and self-study
resources.
Useful Software
Both authors are Mac users and wrote this book using Microsoft Word for Mac. Graphics were
created with a combination of Google SketchUp, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft PowerPoint, and
Apple OS X applications. We tried where possible to use existing tools that are free and open
source. To that end, we’ve compiled a list by chapter topic of the tools we’ve used in building the
key elements of an energy management program.
Chapter 1: A Stake in the Ground The usual professional office packages available from
Microsoft and more recently from Google will help to create your analytics:
http://office.microsoft.com
http://docs.google.com
Chapter 2: Benchmarking The usual professional office packages should suffice. For more-
complex modeling on larger data sets, the free database MySQL is very helpful:
www.mysql.com
Chapter 3: Assessing Value Tools from the first two chapters will apply here, but some
additional planning and collaboration tools might be useful.
For organizing your plans and notes, MindMeister is a useful application:
www.mindmeister.com
For collaboration, document sharing, and conferencing, Cisco WebEx is a valuable resource:
www.webex.com
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Appendix B Links and ResouRces
Chapter 4: Managing Your Project Where possible, use the existing project management
tools for your organization, as we recommended in this chapter. If you want to explore other
systems, we found Basecamp and 5pm to be helpful:
http://basecamphq.com
www.5pmweb.com
Chapter 5: Building a Pilot Deployment The focus of this chapter is on creating a pilot
team and pilot root system. The best tools to use are the ones with which your team is com-
fortable. In our pilot deployment, we found that using virtual machines was a key to rapid
development for the base platform of the pilot system.
For operating systems and bundled applications, we used LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL,
and PHP) virtual appliances so that we had basic services and reporting already available.
Although there are many free tools, we used the ones offered from VMware:
www.vmware.com/appliances
Chapter 6: Pilot to Production The focus of this chapter is defining and populating your
pilot with energy-management-related data from your enterprise. We found that the most
useful way to perform this exercise was to create simple Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to pre-
pare information for use in MySQL:
http://office.microsoft.com
www.mysql.com
Chapter 7: Reporting The focus of this chapter is creating reports from your pilot data.
Most databases come with reporting tools. Having reports that are interactive and attractive
will help in presenting your pilot to stakeholders. We relied heavily on Adobe Flex:
www.adobe.com/products/flex/
We also became big fans of the work done by the BirdEye group. They created a lot of useful
open source reporting widgets for Adobe Flex that helped us in representing information in
an intuitive and professional way:
http://birdeye.googlecode.com/
Chapter 8: Administering Energy Domains The focus of this chapter is on partitioning
and organizing your enterprise so that you can classify and manage your energy-consuming
devices. As in Chapter 6, the simplest way to get a handle on this information is to use
spreadsheets to model it:
http://office.microsoft.com
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