 I'm going to introduce our speaker today, Shruti Ramaswamy. She is the director of Microsoft programs and the vice president of strategy and strategic relations here at TechSoup. She's responsible for all of our Microsoft offerings and she worked closely with both nonprofits and Microsoft to ensure that the sector around the world is able to derive the most impact from the program offerings. Prior to her work here at TechSoup, Shruti was a technology consultant with IBM, so you know she is a smart girl and so I'm excited for her to share with you today more about the program offerings. So Shruti, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you for that kind introduction, Aretha. We'll see. I don't know about smart, but definitely hopefully a helpful session today and so I'm really excited that we have so many attendees here today and really appreciate you taking time out of your day to tune in and to learn more about the programs that we have. As most of you know, TechSoup is a global nonprofit ourselves. Our mission, our goal is to make sure that we can work on behalf of charities and nonprofits around the world to make sure we all have access to the technology that we need to further our own missions. So we work with over 400 corporate partners and foundations and providers around the world to make sure that we can bring that access to the nonprofit community at large. We try to help organizations no matter where you are in your digital life cycle. We know that it's an evolving process. There's new technology that's coming out all of the time and we're here to help support wherever you are and wherever you want to be. So we have programs that allow us to support installed software if you have traditional desktops. We have hardware programs that include new and refurbished hardware. We have cloud software, which we'll talk a little bit about today as well. And we have technology support services to help you throughout that adoption. We have courses, we have services, we're here to help and events like this and content to really make sure that you can get the most out of the technology that you have. Today what we're going to be focused on is talking a little bit more about the Microsoft program offerings. You may have heard there is a lot of change in the air this year where it comes to Microsoft. Microsoft has made a series of changes in their program. A lot of them only coming into impact later on in this year, but we wanted to make sure that everybody was aware of that because we know that a lot of the solutions that Microsoft offers are critical to the nonprofits that we serve and to all of us in terms of our productivity and our softwares that we use. And we want to make sure everybody is aware so you can make the best decisions for your own budgets and planning and we're here to help. So what we'll do today, I will try to speak for as little time as possible, I promise. So probably 15 or 20 minutes just to provide an overview of what solutions we have to offer and what solutions Microsoft provides to the nonprofit sector. And then really the goal there will after that to be to open it up for questions. And hopefully we can spend primarily most of our time today answering and hearing from you about what's confusing, where you need help, and how we can provide that support to you. So feel free, as Aretha said, to use that question and answer tab within our right-hand side panel to ask your questions. We will save plenty of time to go over them and to talk through that in a little bit more detail. The slides I provide up front hopefully can answer some of those questions, but as you hear them, please feel free to kind of put those in there. So I'll get started today by talking a little bit about some key terms. There are a lot of different offers that Microsoft makes available to the nonprofit sector, which is amazing, but it can be a little bit overwhelming because there's a lot of language, a lot of different types of tools that are available and so I thought it would be easiest to level set a little bit and make sure we were all on the same page to start. So there's two primary types of programs that Microsoft offers to nonprofits. The first solution set is the on-premises solutions. On-premises solutions are those products and software that you request, you download to your device, and then you can use that moving forward. They don't necessarily need an online internet connection for you to continually use it. Your license is per device itself, and then once you download it and install it to your desktop, you can use that as long as you want. Typically there are about new products available about every two years. You may have heard Office 2021 was just released last month and is now available to the greater public as well as nonprofits, and these products that are available are also things that include and have a lot of the different software underneath Office and some of the programs. So a lot of these are sweeted solutions that have many different applications in them, but you are downloading one product onto your device. Those on-premises products are available in two different ways for nonprofits. One is purely a donation, and those are typically donations that are made available from Microsoft. There is still a small administrative fee that's associated with those donations just to help TechSoup be able to sustain ourselves and put on programs like this and support the distribution of those products. On the donation front, there are limitations in terms of quantity. So Microsoft has about 50 licenses per organization available to the nonprofit sector, and the products that are available within that donation offering are usually standard level products. So Office 2021 standard, Windows standard, all of that is available as a donation. And typically the donation offers also include software assurance benefits, which allows organizations to then request newer products within a two-year cycle. There are also on-premises products that are available as a discount. Those discounts are really meant for people who need higher-level products that might not be available in the donation program, like professional products or premium products. It will also allow us to have more licenses. So if you need more than 50 licenses for anything, you can get those as a discount as well. There's also a little bit more flexibility for discounted products because you can choose to get software assurance bundled products or you can choose to just get license-only products. And those discounts are typically about 60 to 75% off for charities on the retail price that's available for other organizations. The other kind of program offering that Microsoft makes available are cloud offers. And these cloud offers are things like Office 365, Microsoft 365, which many of you probably are using as well today. Cloud subscriptions are just that, are subscriptions. They're ongoing subscriptions that you either pay for or you get donated, but it is something that you're signing up for either at a monthly or annual commitment. Those include regular feature updates. So you basically just have to be logged in and you're going to get the latest and greatest security patches, features, releases that are available. And most of the development work that Microsoft does goes straight to the cloud solutions first. And then every couple of years we'll get packaged and released as an on-premises product as well. But the cloud is kind of the latest and greatest. And it allows some of the more feature-rich offers about collaboration, communication, so that people around, you know, your nonprofit can work from wherever, access those and work together a little bit more in real time. Cloud solutions from Microsoft are also available both on a donation and a discounted basis. I'll spend a little bit more time here, but there are many, many, many different licenses of cloud solutions that are available. And so some of those are available as donations. Others are available as discounted products. There are some license limitations based off of the licenses themselves. And I can go through those in a few minutes. One thing I wanted to highlight here was that you can mix and match. So not everybody in your organization has to have the same license to be working on things together. So you might feel like there are certain people in your organization, maybe your board members or your IT staff or your program administrators that need more feature-rich programs and licenses so you can give them that. There might be volunteers or other staff members that you don't feel they just need a few applications that you might be able to use different licensing for as well. So you can definitely mix and match, which kind of provides a little bit of benefit for flexibility as well. With both of these options, there are definitely pros and cons. And we can talk a little bit about any questions you might have here. But on a very high level basis, I would just say on-premises solutions are really, they have the advantages, particularly for device-based licensing. So if you have one computer or one shared device that many people are using or you're in an environment where you have multiple people log on or use something for an application, that device-based licenses really works well with on-premises licensing. There's also just a one-time expense. You guys, you can own that afterwards and you don't have to think about funding on an ongoing basis. Some of the disadvantages, though, is it's not going to be as feature-rich. It's not going to have some of those collaboration features that are inherent in Cloud. And it's just going to provide you like some of the basic applications that are available, whereas some of the Cloud subscriptions have a lot of different applications that are available within it as well. On the Cloud side, it can be really advantageous for organizations for multiple reasons. One is that that's really where Microsoft and many organizations and companies are going in terms of their software suites. So it's helpful to kind of start working and adopting some of the solutions that we know is going to be the future of some of the technology offerings that are available. But it also provides a lot of flexibility. The cost can be spread out over time if there are costs because there are still donations available. The features and updates are automatic, so you don't have to think about it. You don't have to think about security settings and things. Those are things that are automatically updated so you don't have to patch it yourself. And you can access it anywhere. So the difference between the device-based licensing and the Cloud licensing, Cloud licensing is really going to be user-based licensing. So a user can use that same license on up to five devices. So I'm using my Office 365 account on my laptop. I also use it on my mobile phone. And if I had any other devices, I could use it there as well. Or if I got a new device, I could use it on that as well. So there's a lot of flexibility there. But some of the disadvantages are you need to have sometimes a stable internet connection in order to get some of those rich features of collaboration. And the payment itself, if you are using a discounted, is ongoing. And so we know with funding at nonprofits, that's not always consistent. So it's just another consideration as you make your decisions and choices. So what's changing and what we wanted to highlight a little bit more so everybody was aware about it is after April 4th, Microsoft has provided some guidance about how they're going to be moving forward in their own donation strategy for nonprofits. And what will be changing is that the on-premises offers, so those device-based licenses, are really only going to be available as discounted licenses. So those will be still available, still able to purchase, still able to use, but it will be at a discounted price, so not at a fully donated price, which means that it'll be close to 60 to 75% off retail pricing. But there will be some adjustment of cost that you might want to be considering. There are no changes to any of the cloud licensing or the cloud pricing at this time. So the Microsoft 365, Office 365 solutions, that's not necessarily changing in terms of having donations available. It's really focused on the on-premises side. And there are a few caveats in there and a few exceptions that have been carved out, including Windows Professional, which will still remain as a donation offer since that's not really well available on the cloud side. And for organizations that really need device-based licensing, so for computer labs and training centers, there will still be a small program available for organizations that are eligible. And we'll have more information about that as we move into April, but we wanted to make sure that you were aware of these changes to come. To just provide an example of what I'm talking about in this kind of chart that we had talked about before, really the only change is all of the products, everything can still be accessed. It's just that that donation piece goes away. And so everything that you would want to get on on-premises would be requested at a discounted rate. You will still have the cloud donation and discounted offers as before. And if you think about an example of some of the highest requested on-premises offers that we have, which is Windows Office Standard and maybe Windows Server Standard, you see that currently you have an ability to get those as a donation or a discount. And really after April 4th, you can still get those products, but those donation offers kind of go away and you can only get those as a discount moving forward. And I've seen a couple of questions. All of these slides will be available and will be sent out to everybody who RSVP'd, so feel free to just note that for later. The other thing I wanted to highlight here is that all of the features or many of the features that are within these products are already available in the donation offer of Microsoft 365 Business Premium, which is the subscription and cloud license that is available to nonprofits. So the same way that we have those features that are available within the on-premises solutions, those exist within many of the cloud solutions. And just because you have a cloud subscription or service doesn't mean you cannot use them offline. So many of the licenses actually include desktop applications, which means you can download it to your desktop and you don't require an internet connection to continue to use them. You will need to log on or be connected if you want to save it to the cloud or if you want to share it to other members or collaborate on it or to get updates on the applications themselves, but you can still use it just like you would use an office standard today. I also wanted to talk a little bit about the cloud licenses themselves. As I mentioned, there are not changes in terms of none of these are going to go away, but there are solutions that are available here on the cloud side as well that can provide some of those features we were talking about. So on the Microsoft 365 front, which is typically licensing that Microsoft recommends for organizations that have less than 300 users, there are three main options. There's a Microsoft 365 Business Basic that provides the apps that you see here, which are all cloud services apps. So you have to be using an internet connection to be able to access and use it, but you are able to use it through any browser or setting and use all the collaboration functions on there. There's a Microsoft 365 Business Standard, which is available for $3 per license per month. That includes everything that's in the cloud services and the business basic, but it also includes the ability to download them and have them on your desktop as well. So it's very similar to an office standard and actually an office professional because it provides you access as well. And then the most feature rich Microsoft 365 solution that Microsoft offers to nonprofits is the business premium licenses. Those have everything, the desktop applications, the cloud services applications as the business standard, but it also includes a lot of advanced security functions. So you'll see that on that last row at the bottom, but it includes things for device management, for user management and provides a much higher level of security for your organization and for the management of the licenses that you have. This is available for free for up to 10 users, completely for free. And then any additional license is $5 a month, but like I said before, you can mix and match. So you might wanna get the free 10 users here and then mix and match it with lower priced or lower cost solutions as well, depending on what your needs are. Microsoft also makes available office 365 solutions, typically office 365 and Microsoft 365 are distinguished because office 365 licenses are enterprise licenses. So they're typically meant for organizations that are over 300 users. That's not like a hard and fast rule. If you need something in an office enterprise license, that's fine. You don't have to have 300 users to get it, but that's typically how they've been designed for. And so many organizations, including TechSoup, have office 365 E1 licenses, which provide all of the online availability of cloud services. That was previously available as a donation, but earlier this year, Microsoft changed that so that anybody who wants that as a new license would have to pay $2 per license per month. That's a discount now. For those organizations that already have the donation, that's not changing. You can continue to use that donation, continue to add to that donation for up to 2000 users, but for anybody who's new to the office 365 environment, if you wanted an E1 license now, it would be at a discounted rate. There's also an E3 and E5 option and similar to the Microsoft 365, they just have added levels of benefits and added level of security that's available to organizations. So like I mentioned, none of those things that I just talked about on the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 are changing after April 4th. So those are still available and we can talk about those if you have questions. What is changing is really just the on-premises availability for the donation program. So what we wanna get to now are your questions and I think there's plenty of questions popping up in the Q and A. I will get us started on a few just because we have actually done this webinar a few times now and we've gotten some consistent questions from organizations and we've also received lots of emails and questions about these. So I thought I would kick us off here first. The first one is what does this mean for my existing licenses? So if you have a current office 2016, 2019 license, what does that mean? You can still use any of the licenses that you have for your on-premises products. Those are perpetual licenses, you have those licenses and so this change really only impacts any new licenses that you want to purchase or request or get. It does not impact the functionality of any existing licenses that you currently have. That's the same for cloud licenses. So the other question that we have is what does this mean for my Office 365 or Microsoft 365 subscription? Again, this change does not impact any of the cloud licenses and you're still going to be able to use your cloud subscriptions that you have. If you have questions on that because there have been other changes that Microsoft has been kind of talking about, feel free to ask us and we're happy to go through that a little bit more. A big question we get too is what about if I don't have dependable internet connectivity? And this is a real problem in the United States, definitely around the world. We know that there are rural places or just environments where nonprofits are operating where it doesn't make sense or we don't have access to connectivity. So what's the right solution for them? So I would say two things here. One is that on-premises solutions will still be available. None of the products are just going away and enter entirety. There will just be kind of something that you would have to think of in terms of your budget planning for those because they're probably going to be a little higher in cost than you have normally spent on them. Or the second one is that like I mentioned, many of those cloud subscription products include downloadable desktop applications. To download them is the same connectivity that you would need to download any of the on-premises licenses. And when you do have internet connectivity, you can get the updates and you can be able to use some of the more feature-rich components of cloud but it's not necessary that you have to have an internet connection to use the desktop applications. And the last item is about libraries. Libraries are really interesting because libraries have traditionally been served by TechSoup, particularly for your public access computers. And that's been a huge program at TechSoup and we are passionate about serving the library population for the mission that you guys have as well as the mission that it has in helping so many people in different communities around the world. The cloud offers that Microsoft has though have always been offered by Microsoft's education licensing and not through the current charity licensing. So we are actually working actively with Microsoft right now to see how we can make sure that we can continue to offer support to libraries and that's an ongoing conversation and we are hoping that we will have a finalization of being able to offer those education licensing both for on-premises and for cloud licensing directly from TechSoup to all libraries and we're gonna be scheduling and I think it should be up soon an event in early December, primarily focused on libraries and figuring out and talking a little bit more about the options available for libraries as we move forward. So I will end with that on these questions and stop sharing and start answering your questions. All right. Aretha, did you have anything that you wanted to say or should I go ahead and get started? Yeah, go ahead because there were a lot of questions that... I'm sure. Yes. So we have... Okay, so the first question I have is actually about libraries. So Debra asked, do libraries that do not have a 501c3 status qualify for discounted Microsoft Office standard licenses for their public patron computers? And so Debra, we have our eligibility provided on our site and right now I think there is an opportunity for public access computers, but I do believe the 501c3 is necessary but I can reach back out to you or maybe if one of our team members knows that offhand you can put that answer in chat. But I will say that there are opportunities particularly for libraries and for public access computers to make sure that you have access to those standard licenses. David from the on-premises software will Office 21 actually install? We could never get 2019 to install successfully. We even use tech support vendor from TechSoup with no success. I am very sorry to hear about that. I will say the 2019 installation process was new. It was a click-to-run feature that Microsoft started and actually the 2021 install process is very similar to that same installation process and it is confusing, it's harder and it is not as click-to-run as the statement would say. So we do have a service, a help desk solution offering of help to install those products. David, if you still had problems with that please do feel free to reach out. I think you may have already reached out via email and we are looking to see if we can get some support because it is a little confusing and if there is support you need we're happy to help with them. There's a question from Ed about libraries. So can libraries not purchase on-premises office licenses until April 4th, 2022? So Ed, right now there are a few changes that are happening on the Microsoft side. As of right now starting in January all licenses has to be provided and provisioned for only things that are charity approved and unfortunately right now libraries are kind of treated as charities for public access and as education for a lot of the other solutions. So what we would recommend is if you know and if you have budget and you have needs that you have to make to try to make those as quickly as possible so you can get the licenses you need. If you request it now you can still use it whenever you need to so you don't necessarily have to use it tomorrow if you wanna request and get those licenses. But like I said, we will have a lot more information and our hope and our goal is that within January you will still be able to get all of the access to licenses that you currently have today. There might be some differences, slight differences in pricing but we're hoping to bring that down with Microsoft as well to make sure that we can serve and provide education licenses to libraries as well. There is a question from Mercy. Are there any features available in the desktop on-premises products that are not available in the 365 products? It's a great question, Mercy. We've heard it, there's a lot more features that are available in the cloud that are not available in the desktop but I will say that I know that there are certain features that are available in the desktop applications that are more robust, particularly in Excel and PowerPoint that are a little bit more feature robust but those are the same, you will get the same functionality when you download that desktop application from the cloud solution. So what I'm really talking about is the difference between if you're using the cloud version or the browser version of those tools. The other thing I would mention there is access. If you use access for databases or if you're still using access for different things in your own organization, access is only a device-based license and it has to be on, they don't have a really good cloud solution for that. So you can get that through access by itself or you can get that through Office Professional. Access is also included in some of the cloud subscription licenses as well. Gary asks, are Mac Office packages available if so, is there a new 2021 version? Absolutely, so Office 2021 is available both for Windows and for Mac operating systems. There are two links on our product pages. There's one that says Office Standard and then one that says Office Standard for Mac. Hopefully we can provide that link to you in the chat and you should be able to get that and the Office 2021 version is available on both operating systems. So Shruti, Tara, do you have to update to Office 21? No, absolutely not. Yeah, that's a good question. You do not have to update at all. You can continue to use the product that you have. Microsoft typically provides support and like ongoing support for a product for about five to 10 years depending on the product itself. But unless there's a need for you to switch, you don't necessarily have to change, your product will still work. Okay, thank you. And I just popped into chat the link for the Office for Mac. So if anybody needs that, you can get that there. Okay, there was a question from Ken. Was there ever an explanation about the bizarre installation process for Office 2019? I hesitate to upgrade because of the 2019 experience. I completely understand that. The installation process, I will say from Microsoft, I think mirrors a lot of the installation process that they have for some of their cloud solutions. So I think what Microsoft is trying to do when I'm speaking on the half base off of my thought about them, so I'm not sure if that's what they would say as well, is that they're really trying to consolidate that installation process and have less and less of that variability. So wherever you're buying it from, whether or not, it's a cloud license or whether it's not on premise, they have kind of a standard way of installation. Obviously, I think that works a little bit better sometimes on the cloud solutions than it has in 2019 and 2021. But that's kind of where they've gone there. Like I said, we do have some installation guides and some extra help that we can provide there. We have a help desk service and a one-time kind of help desk service that can support there. And if you do have ongoing struggles with that, please let us know and we can try to help you with that. And I just wanna let everybody know that I am going through all of the Q and A tab questions here, there are a lot going on here. So I'm doing my best to kind of do that. Thanks. Where are you looking at that, Gary? I'm sorry, Gary just updated us. C3, libraries that do not have the 501 C3, they are eligible. Okay, thank you. There was a question from Gary. The definition of software assurance seems to maybe have changed a bit over the years. Can you define what this is right now? Sure. So software assurance is a suite of benefits that an organization gets once you get a donation or if you purchase software assurance. What it really boils down to is that you can get an opportunity to upgrade your products within a two-year period, as long as your software assurance is valid. And that is a two-year period. So that if another version comes out, you can upgrade for free. So for example, if you got 2019 last year and you want the 2021 because it's available now, you don't have to purchase another 2021 license if you have a software assurance that's already valid. You can use that benefit to get yourself the upgrade there. There are a few other benefits, but that's the primary benefit that organizations have used software assurance for. Okay, so there's some questions here about some of the cloud solutions that I'll move on to. So Kevin asked, can you mix and match on-premises and cloud options? Absolutely. You can mix and match all of the license offerings that you need and most of the newer on-premises solutions integrate really well. So once you save something, you can use a desktop application from your office, 2021 on-premises and save that to cloud. So definitely you can mix and match those licenses. And for like Windows and things like that, many people have on-premises Windows solutions and then they're using cloud solutions on top of that. Jane asked, is there a limit on the number of Microsoft 365 business premium licenses that are offered at a discount of $5 each? No, there are not any limitations on the discount themselves. So an organization only has a limit on the donation licenses. So for Microsoft 365 business premium, you can get $10 for free and then everything else would be $5 per user per license, but there's no cap on how many you can get as many as you need. Richie asked, what's the difference between E3 and business premium? Is there a breakdown that compares business to the E options? Yes, there's a lot in that question. So there's a lot to go over probably here, but we do actually have an article and that we've published that provides like a table and breakdown of what the features are available in each of those. Hopefully we can pop that into chat right now, the link there. I would definitely suggest that you can take a look at that as it provides like a little bit more of a comparison based off of security and storage and different features available so that you can kind of get a comparison between the E3 license and the business premium license. At a very high level, like I mentioned, enterprise suites were really made for larger organizations, but they do have interesting features in it. So E3 comes with a lot of the security licenses, a lot of the kind of features that you would want for managing many users. And some of the functions of like legal holds and stuff that you would want for email retention as well. Business premium offers that too, but it has some different types of security features as well. So I would definitely take a look at that comparison document. Kai asks, when the legacy Microsoft enterprise mobility and security, which was EMS three grant expires next year, is the intent that we move all 50 licenses to the $2.70 per month version or is that going away as well? That's a great question, Kai. And just to provide everybody a little bit of background. Microsoft, I think in 2018, 2019, had a donation available called EMS, which was the enterprise mobility and security suite. That was available for up to 50 licenses for free as a donation. Recently, Microsoft made a decision to remove that as a donation offering. So after April, any organization that has a renewal date coming after that, that'll be their last year of that being able to be available as a donation. At that time, there are a few options available. One is like you said, Kai, to transition that to a discounted version, which would be $2.70. The other option is that is already included in the Microsoft 365 business premium licenses. So you can use some of that for the 10 users for free, depending on how many licenses that you have. Richard asked, we've been using E2 licenses donated for a lot of users that are doing work on our behalf. Do I now need to get the business licenses instead so that there's no cost? These users only need email addresses and online capabilities. Great question, Richard. A couple of answers here, so I hope this is helpful. One is that the current licenses that you are using right now can still be used. You don't have to necessarily shift them. E2 is not necessarily available for new organizations or anybody to newly sign up for, but TechSoup still uses E2 licenses as well. You can still continue to use those licenses. If you do wanna switch those out, I would suggest moving to the Microsoft 365 business basic license that has pretty much the same functionality as the E2 and it would give you the email and that's free for up to 300 users. So you can still kind of get that benefit of the cost savings and still get the usage that you want, which is email. Next question is from Brian about nonprofit staff pricing. Haven't been able to find a definition of nonprofit staff pricing. Our nonprofit has no paid positions. They're all volunteers. Some hold elected positions such as board and executive and some are appointed. Who falls under the staff definition? That is a really good question and something that's a little bit confusing. So I'm going to share my screen really quickly and hopefully you guys can see this. I'm sharing my full screen. So hopefully this works. You can probably see me now, huh? Okay, so if you guys can see here, this is what Microsoft has on their site as what they consider paid employees or what they considered paid staff that is eligible for the donation products. So they say paid staff includes employees on mandatory unpaid leave, but really are people who are paid employees or unpaid executive staff. So that unpaid executive staff might be some of the resources that you have that are managing the nonprofit who would be considered as executive staff but are there for volunteer basis. Those are the user types that are eligible for the donated offers. For volunteers for temporary team members, those are the ones that Microsoft would have under the discounted offers. And then there are some volunteer specific SKUs that are available or volunteer specific licenses that are available that organizations can take into consideration as well. So it's not like totally black and white and very clear, but that's kind of some of the guidance that Microsoft provides as to how to think about that of what unpaid executive staff really looks like. And I can provide this link in the chat as well. Yeah, that was an eye opener right there. That was a great question, Brian. I'm gonna put that in chat, that link. All right, so the next question, will the E2 licenses be charged moving forward? Richard, at this time, I do not believe there are changes to the E2 licenses. My understanding is that there is a cap on the licenses. So if you have an older E2 donation, you cannot go above 2,000 licenses, but I have not heard anything specifically for Microsoft saying that those are no longer gonna be available as a donation this year at least. So as any updates come out, we'll make sure to inform everybody. Dave has a question. If we have E1, E3, and E5 licenses and intend to move our users to cloud services exclusively, is there a benefit to moving to the corresponding Microsoft 365 level at the same time? We have well under 300 users. I would say that there might be some benefit only because there are a larger amount of donation licenses available under the Microsoft 365 umbrella. The E1, E3, E5 licenses, unless you have an existing one, which you might have for E1, you wouldn't necessarily get that same level of donations available to you, but it really depends on exactly what you're looking for and the security settings and some of the makeup of your organization. So I would definitely recommend looking at those tables of features and we also have cloud consultations available. So if you wanna sign up for one, we can work with your team one-on-one to figure out what might be the right licensing solution for your organization. We have a couple of questions about services and courses. So Tanya asked, is or will TechSoup offer an on-demand digital literacy course? Like fantastic question, Tanya. I know that's something that we are really invested in. We have many courses that are available on demand at our TechSoup courses. We have courses that are related to Microsoft courses that are not related to Microsoft. We have many digital transformation courses. There are some literacy courses as well dependent on the topic. If there's something that you see or that you think would be really relevant or valuable to you that is not there, please reach out to us. We're happy to pass that on to our courses team as well. We're always looking and trying to create more relevant courses that are really tailored for nonprofits and adult learners. So these courses are available for staff, volunteers and have examples and solutions that are really targeted and tailored for our use cases. So definitely take a look at our TechSoup courses site. Question here about a requested donation from Microsoft and they provide me a Microsoft 365 administrative account. I'm wondering how do I activate it and use it as their TechSoup training on that? That's a great question. We actually have a guide to getting started with your cloud account and how to set up your account and kind of start using your licenses. I'm wondering if maybe we can send that link out or put that in chat right now. But there is an online resource and guide that you can use to definitely get some help there. And we also have a service available. So if you would like us to help manage that or do that on behalf of your organization, we can do, we have a small Office 365 setup service as well and we can get you set up on your account as well. Okay. There is a question from Dan. Will Microsoft be offering nonprofit rates for Windows 365 and what are the 25 licenses in the nonprofit portal used for? So I will confess, I'm not entirely sure I know what the 25 licenses in the nonprofit portal question is related to. So I'm not entirely sure what that is, but if you have a question there, please let me know. In terms of the Microsoft offering of the Windows 365 as a donation, we have asked about that multiple times right now. There is not a plan and place that we know of to make that available as a donation. But if we hear anything more, we will definitely let you know. And if you are interested in it, let us know because we can help advocate and let Microsoft know that this is something that the community is looking for and needs. There is a question from William. Are there nonprofit licenses for Azure? Could we create virtual machines in Azure? It's a great question, William. So what Microsoft does for Azure is they offer direct credits for your Azure usage. So every year nonprofits can sign up and get access to a grant from Microsoft for $3,500. That can be leveraged and used towards your Azure consumption. So that could be used towards your VMware and it basically you can use up to the $3,500 and then you pay the regular rates in terms of any kind of additional charges that you might incur. That is something that unfortunately is only directly offered from Microsoft right now. So you would have to go to the Microsoft site to get a little bit more in terms of signing up for the grant and starting to use that. Question here from Dinette. Do you know if TechSoup has an offering for Dynamics for Cloud? A really good question here. Right now TechSoup does not offer Dynamics for Cloud licenses, but Microsoft does. So Microsoft makes available, excuse me, about I think five cloud licenses for Dynamics for, I think it's called sales. And that is available to nonprofits and there are a few more offers and you may have heard Microsoft recently announced a Microsoft cloud for nonprofit which is heavily related to Dynamics. And right now TechSoup doesn't have that. We only have the on-premises versions but we're hoping to add that in the future. Brianna asked, if I have specific questions about our agency and Microsoft licensing, is there someone I can contact later? Absolutely. You can contact ReachUs at TechSoup.org. If anybody has questions that we haven't answered or anybody has questions that come up because of this webinar, please feel free to reach out to us and we are here to help and answer your questions. A couple of other questions I see here. Karen asks, when will we be able to order multiple copies of Adobe Acrobat Pro for nonprofits? Great question. I don't know the answer to that question. If anybody on our team who's available here does know please feel free to respond and chat but we can definitely get back to you Karen if we don't have that answer right now. Great. Well, I think that is it. Are there any questions that I haven't answered? Feel free to flag them and chat. Deborah asked, do we have a link for the information mentioned earlier on the 9501c3 libraries? We can definitely provide our eligibility information here so I'll get a second to do that. William asks, I was contacted by a Microsoft partner who mentioned that we needed to make sure that we were using our assigned E2 licenses and we needed to log into those accounts. However, we use notification emails such as scanner at company.com but nobody logs into this email address. Are you familiar? That's a great question William and something I'm happy to talk to a little bit and I'm actually gonna share my screen again because this is important and some of the donation offers. So Microsoft does make available a lot of the cloud licenses available as donations but they also have a utilization requirement. So part of actually having this donation means that they're assuming that you're using the donation. So there's a requirement basically that 85% of the assigned users need to have some sort of cloud usage within a 90 day period. So that can include logging on like your partner provided using Teams, using any of the Microsoft 365 apps that doesn't include on-premises solutions. So there does need to be some registered activity for Microsoft to know that you're using these licenses for about 85% of those assigned licenses. We have put together, and I put that in this deck here, a guide for the utilization requirements for donated Microsoft licenses that provides a little bit more of an understanding of where to go to understand how you currently have utilization set up and whether or not you are already meeting those needs or not. I will say Microsoft has been sending emails to organizations who are not meeting it and giving them ample time to kind of rectify that. So I wouldn't be overly concerned about it, especially if you're using and logging in or getting usage out of them. But there is this resource here and like I said, we'll make this available to everybody. So if you want to go and check and see what your utilization is, you can do that as well. A few questions coming in. Let's see. Gary did something here about the 25 trial licenses. He said, they're available at registration on the nonprofit portal at Microsoft. Oh, so those are trial licenses. So yeah, you can use the trial licenses. Those are available for you to kind of get a feel of things so you don't necessarily require like a commitment to that, it's just a trial so you can get set up and started. And I think you can start using that before your even validation comes through a bit so that you can understand how you would use those licenses but that wouldn't be an active subscription. So if you wanted to add licenses or if you wanted to use it for and kind of integrate it for your business routine, you would want to have a licensed account. I think there's a few other things that I probably missed, sorry in here. There is a question about who do I contact if we have questions about the Microsoft 365 app and learn some tips and tricks. That's a great question, you can contact us. You can contact us at reachus.techsoup.org. I would also say that we have, the courses are really good examples of areas that you can learn a little bit more about how to get more of the solution. And then we have a few other things that I'm gonna answer here. I'm gonna put this in the chat itself. We have a YouTube channel where we've been putting together some tips and tricks that we've learned and that we've been using internally. And so you can definitely go there and see some of those videos. Those are like one, two minute videos that give us a little tricks on how to get the most out of the solution. And for people who are part of the TechSoup kind of if you've gotten TechSoup licenses or cloud licenses through TechSoup, we have a monthly webinar series or monthly office hours where we come together, all of us who are on this journey of adopting these cloud solutions, meet, share kind of best practices, figure out tips and tricks together. So if you are somebody who is getting your licenses through TechSoup, you can feel free to drop into any one of those. And we're happy to kind of talk a little bit more about how we can support and learn from each other. There's a question from Renzo. He asked this in general, is there a program for the Power Automation apps and flow? Great question. There is actually an offer available. So Microsoft makes Power Apps licenses available for up to 10 users per app. And so you can leverage those to create your own custom workflows, to create your own Power Automate flows. And there is a donation available for up to 10 licenses there. Brian says everything seems to refer to one terabyte storage per user. What about the content that's stored in SharePoint? That isn't specific to a user. Is it tied to the user that created, uploaded it, pondering, allowing non-users to donate content? What storage does that count against? That's a great question, Brian. I don't know the answer directly offhand, but we can research that and get back to you. Or if anybody on our team knows, feel free to chime in to Brian's question here as well. And then it looks like Jim, you said that you had a question on 365 Business Premium and Q&A. And it didn't get answered. I don't know if you don't mind just asking it again so I can make sure that I get that for you. And I think there was a question about the grid. So I'm going to pop that in here as well. So this is the article that I was mentioning before that I just popped into chat in that article. And I'll just share my screen really quickly again. You can see, this is an article about how to think about the licenses. And then if you look here, there's a downloadable or a PDF actually version of all of the licenses and applications and security features. And this includes the Business 365 licenses as well as the enterprise licenses. So this is what I would suggest using. And here's a view of our tips and tricks on YouTube. And I'll pop that into chat as well. Awesome. So Jim has this question in the Q&A. So Jim says, I set up a 365 Business Premium last year for our small nonprofit. Many potential users have Windows Home, including myself, so we haven't really used the service. We can upgrade to Windows Pro, but I'm also concerned with separating personal business and organizational documentation. I'm personally using office software on two computers. Yeah, that is a really good question, Jim, and something that many organizations have and struggle with because a lot of the refurbished or donated hardware comes with Windows Home versions. And unfortunately, the Business Premium licenses require you to use a professional Windows license for. So there are opportunities that you can use your office account, but for the Business Premium licenses, unfortunately, you do have to have a Windows professional license. We have a few options available to get that. You can use the Get Genuine program that we have that allows you to get a full Windows operating system, so that'll allow you to move from Windows to, from Home to the professional. But I can understand that you're thinking about how do you separate those two out. So if there is something, maybe if you can send us an email, we can maybe talk about your specific situation a little bit more in depth and figure out what might be the right solution for you. And then Patty asks, what's the difference between Office 365 and Microsoft 365? Great question. I think over time, Microsoft will start using the term Microsoft 365 more, but right now the distinction has been Microsoft 365 licenses have a tradition, at least for the nonprofit offers are really the business licenses. So those are typically licenses that are meant for under 300 users. They're also enterprise users. The only place that Microsoft continues to use the Office 365 name has been in the enterprise licenses, so above 300 users, but they're just different licenses in general. And so I think over time, Microsoft will have more of the Microsoft name versus the Office, because one of the things I'll just state is Office 365 makes you think about office applications and there are so many other things other than Word, PowerPoint, Excel that are in these solutions. There are tons and tons and tons of applications that are like teams or even smaller applications like bookings and Sway and Power Apps that are part of these suite of solutions that are available that are not necessarily reflected in the Office name all the time. Let's take a few more questions. There was an answer for James question here. Microsoft 365, you see highlighted here. I'm looking, Mary. Mary answered that he said business plans can be mixed and matched to up to a total of 300 seats, which are licenses. Got it, thank you. And then I'm just gonna really quickly before we end, because I know we only have a couple of minutes left, just wanna provide a couple of resources that are gonna be available to you. And you'll have this deck, so feel free to look, but we're here to help. There's a lot happening. There's a lot of changes happening. It makes our head spin sometimes. I'm sure it makes everybody else's. So we are here to help and we can do that in a few different ways. We can help with figuring out the right license. So reach out to us. You can schedule time with us, book time with us so that we can talk through that more. We have packages that are available, small packages to help you get set up and install products. Hopefully that installation will work more successfully. And we also have the training, like I mentioned, the Microsoft 365 solutions have so many features built into it, but using the courses to understand how you can get the most out of your solutions is something we definitely recommend. And then we have lots of services and support available as you are continuing to make the migration or if you want to make the migration to some cloud solutions. I also wanted to, this is a little bit of preview about the different courses that are available on the Microsoft Digital Skill Center. And we have plenty of other courses that are non-Microsoft related on the TechSoup courses site as well. And then I just wanted to flag really quickly that LinkedIn also has a few offers available for nonprofits. Those are not like always thought of in the same light as Microsoft, but they're technically merged companies. So I just wanted to provide that and I put a link on the slide here as well. And then there's a lot of additional resources. So some of the links that we already provided in chat, but we did put that in this slide as well. So you can feel free to go back to this. Every slide here has this email address. We want you to reach out to us. We are here to help. We're here to partner with you and make this transition of all of these changes as easy as possible. And we're here to advocate for what you need. And so if there's things that we can approve on or things that you need more of, please let us know that that's our mission to help you guys out. So thank you everybody for your time today.