 Welcome everyone. Welcome to our webinar, Devil on a Hardware Safari with Idealware. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Susan Hope-Ard, the Training and Education Manager here at TechSoup, and we are proud to bring you this webinar in partnership with Idealware. And we want this presentation to be relevant to the important work that you do, so please don't forget to complete our survey at the end of the webinar. I do want to give you a couple of tips about the platform that we're using in case you haven't used this before. We use the ReadyTalk platform, and we do have a chat box on the left side of your screen. So in this chat box at any time during the presentation, you can let us know if you're having a problem technically, if you can't hear, or you're having problems with the visuals rendering, or when we go to screen sharing if something's not working. You can also feel free to chat all of your questions. You don't need to wait for us to ask for questions. You can simply chat your questions as they come up, and we will queue those in our queue box, and we will get to those during our periodic question and answer sessions. If you lose your Internet connection, you can always reconnect using the link in your registration or the reminder email that went out yesterday, and also just about an hour ago before this presentation. You can also access the handouts from the reminder emails that went out yesterday or today. If you look on the email that you received, you can go ahead and click on the Hardware Safari TechSoup, and that is the PowerPoint presentation. And then underneath of that, 04, the Hardware Safari, that is a worksheet that Karen and Dave will be referencing throughout this presentation. And we'll also show you our online course where you can also get more information about us. We are recording this event, so everyone is on mute with the exception of our speakers. You can find any upcoming and past webinars on our website at www.techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. You will receive an email along with a copy of the presentation, a link to the recording of the archive, and the handouts within a few days, generally I say within the week. You can also join us on Twitter. You can tweet us at TechSoup or using hashtag TS webinars. So I'm going to just take a minute to introduce our presenters. We're very fortunate today to have two very experienced, technical, technology folks. We've got Karen Graham, the Executive Director of Idealware, and she leads a team of researchers, presenters, and writers who create technology information resources designed to help you nonprofits put their vision into action. And she has an MBA in nonprofit management from the University of St. Thomas. And David Forrester is here from National CASA, and he leads technology development and support and is a member of the leadership team at National CASA. So together with its state and local programs, National CASA supports and promotes court-appointed volunteer advocacy so that every abused or neglected child in the U.S. can be safe, have a permanent home, and an opportunity to thrive. Also on the back end, we have Ali Vizdikian. She will be helping you with any technical challenges. You're going to see her in the chat box, and a special thank you to her as well. A couple things about TechSoup before I turn it over to Karen. TechSoup is headquartered here in San Francisco. I've seen a few of you already chat in where you're from. You know what we're going to be asking you. So go ahead, and as I'm telling you about TechSoup, tell us where you're joining us from. What city and state, or what country you're joining us from. While you're doing that, I'll tell you a little bit about TechSoup. We're a 501C3, like many of you joining us today. And what we do is we work to empower organizations around the world to help them get the latest tools, skills, and resources to help you achieve your mission. And we serve almost every country in the world. And we have 62 partner NGOs around the world. And we've got people joining us from Michigan, Florida, California, Alabama, Ohio, New Jersey. All you folks out there on the East Coast, you got hit with some pretty big snow storms last year. So welcome everyone. And if you are joining us from another country, you should know that we do have a special website where you can go, www.techsoup.global, and you can choose your country and find out all about the product offerings we have in your country. Very quickly, I also want to tell you that we have a special offer for you for most of this month. Because you have selected to join us for this event, we would like to extend you an offer for our Tech Planning courses. We are going to introduce you to Tech Planning 101 today with the hardware Safari and we will navigate through our free online course. But you can also take advantage of the special offer on discounted registration for the other Tech Planning courses. So we will talk a little bit more about that in the back end of this presentation. And we will also chat out that coupon and a link for you to check out those courses. And before I turn it over to Karen, I do want to say for those of you that are on the line with us, please feel free to chat in your questions. You don't need to raise your hand or do anything in the chat box other than just let us know you need help or you have a question. So without further ado, I am going to turn this over to Karen. Thank you. Thanks, Susan. It's a pleasure to be here today and I'm going to talk about myself a little bit before I launch into this. Just to share my perspective on this and why I think this topic is important. I've worked in the nonprofit tech space for what, maybe 13 or 14 years now. And my experience has included working with a software company that makes fundraising and advocacy software for nonprofit organizations, running a technology capacity building and consulting program at a nonprofit here in Minnesota where I'm based. It's being an independent consultant to nonprofits and then now being the executive director of IdealWare for about the last two years. And one thing that I have found is that frequently there are people who are given responsibility for technology in their organization that don't really have an IT background and that can feel really overwhelming. And I imagine that some of you out in our audience today are in that position where maybe you're brand new in your job and so you're trying to get a handle on what kind of technology exists in your organization. And so this webinar will help walk you through that. Or maybe you've been with your organization for a while but you've just recently been assigned to a role where you're responsible for the technology. And so that will help you if you're in that situation as well. I want to just briefly mention that IdealWare has a lot of other resources on technology on our website. And some of the things that we're best known for are consumer guides about different kinds of technology products. So for example, on Tuesday next week we'll be releasing a new updated version of the Consumer's Guide to Content Management Systems for Non-Press at Websites. All of our work is impartial, it's research based, and it's meant to be easy to understand for people without a technical background. And also the vast majority of it is free. So I hope that you'll take a moment when this is over and just have a look around at what's available on IdealWare. And joining me today is David Forrester. And we're really lucky to have him on this call because David has a lot of very practical background in technology planning and assessment. And so Dave, I'll let you introduce – oops, I skipped over your picture. I'll let you introduce yourself. Oh, hi. Yeah, thanks Karen. I actually had the experience recently when I came back to National Casa after having been away for about six years from the organization walking into our technology in the same way and having to actually conduct my own little safari here. We're based in Seattle and D.C. And so figuring out what we have and what the gaps are and what we need to do to move forward. It's maybe on a larger scale than on some organizations, but a lot of the steps are the same no matter what your size. Thanks, Dave. So the hardware safari is often the first step in a technology planning process. And what you'll be doing here is just checking out your office to identify and document what hardware you're actually using. We'll focus on hardware here. So desktop computers, laptops, printers, phones, and network devices. That's what we're going to try to cover today. If you don't know what a router looks like, you probably will by the end of this hour. And this is an important first step because it's difficult to make any decisions about what you should do in the future unless you know the current state. This is often called a technology audit and it's really the same thing, but we think hardware safari makes it sound a little more fun and adventurous, possibly more fun and adventurous than it actually is in practice. But try to make it a little less intimidating for you. It's really just a walkthrough and documentation of what you have. So we'll walk you through how to identify what you have at a basic level. And this is designed for folks who aren't very familiar with hardware, like I said, to boost your comfort level in going through the hardware safari worksheet, which comes next, and we'll show you that in a moment. If you are sitting there thinking, I think I already know some of this stuff. If you're already comfortable with Office hardware, and for example, you could look at a router and a PBX and a telephone gateway and you would know which was which. Well, then you actually probably could skip this, although it might still be a good refresher for you. But you could feel free to skip this and go straight to the worksheet if that's the case. Or if you already have a technology audit that covers pretty much the same ground as the worksheet, you might want to just go straight to the on-demand videos in the tactical tech planning curricula on TechSoup's website. And that will help you go to the next step, which is really thinking through whether what you have right now is right for your organization. So I want you to kind of take ownership of this and make sure you're making the best use of your time. But if you want some basics and somebody that really helped guide you through a technology audit, then you are at the right place. So I hope you will stick around for this. And I just want to show you the Hardware Safari worksheet. And I'm actually going to see if I can go crazy and share my live screen for this. So see if this will work. So I've got the Hardware Safari worksheet up on my screen here and it's a few pages long. And you'll just go through this and fill in the blanks. And if you want to, you can kind of rework this as a Word document and kind of recreate it for yourself. So it goes through computers, printers, telephone equipment, PBX, voicemail, et cetera. And it has some pictures there to help to remind you what these things look like, what to look for too. So let me return to the live version here. All right, I think we've got everything back. So let's just dive into this and start with computers since that's kind of an obvious place, I think, to start. Here you'll look at how many computers you have, how many are desktop computers. So like the ones that are here in the top picture, the computers that aren't designed to be moved around. And then also how many portable laptops might you have. And you're going to just fill that out on your worksheet. So, David, when people are looking at these, I know there's a place on most computers where you'll find more information about that computer. Can you explain to people where they might look for that and what they'll encounter there? Sure. On the underside of most laptops, there's a picture of an HP Elite Book here. You'll see a serial number, which is useful for figuring out a number of things about your machine. And on desktops, same situation, same thing with servers. You can see on the back usually where you're plugging in things or underneath in the case of a laptop. There's some information about the model. Occasionally there's information actually about the manufacturer data but though not that frequently. There's some great tools that you can use that are freely available if you don't have an inventory sitting there waiting for you which would be a wonderful thing to have that's up to date. You can use some tools like there's one called Bell Arc which is spelled B-E-L-A-R-C. I think it's called Bell Arc Advisor and it's free to download and you just basically run this executable on the machine. And it tells you a plethora of things about the machine including information about the processor which is sometimes called the CPU and that's basically the brains of the machine. It tells you basically the speed that's measured. Hopefully the machines you find are measured in gigahertz speed otherwise they're incredibly old and they're measured in megahertz. It can also tell you about software that's installed on the machine as well. So that won't necessarily tell you the age of the machine although you can make some guesses. So it will tell you the install date for something called the BIOS, B-I-O-S which is part of the DNA of the brain. That's probably a bad analogy but it's usually installed and it's sometimes updated but also it'll tell you about the operating system in a lot of cases this is going to be Windows if you're not using an Apple machine and that can tell you the install date for that version of Windows. Now there may have been an update. But getting that serial number will also help because you can actually go to, you can find out if there's a login actually for your organization if you buy all Dell for that, for example, and Dell will have all the information once you can get into your organization's account of all the purchases that have been made and it'll have the details on all of the specifics on the machine. On Apple, it's a similar situation, it's actually a little bit easier because the stuff's Apple, there's one company. But if you have the serial numbers you can contact the organization or sometimes on their website the manufacturer or you can actually just put in that serial number and it'll tell you information about the product. Thanks, David. We got a question about whether what you're talking about applies to PCs only. Yes, so Bellarc is, I actually don't know up the top of my head. Most nonprofits are using PCs, but I think there should probably be a similar piece of software. There's other ones out there, but if you look, there's ones for Windows as well called System Info for Windows. I'm sure there are ones for Apple. I'm not sure, Karen, if you know, Bellarc works on iOS, sorry, on Apple operating. I used to know the answer to that, but now I can't recall. Yes, but if it isn't, there are similar free pieces of software out there and the serial number thing is true across products and manufacturers. I should also mention that if you have purchased hardware through TechSoup you can probably look in your TechSoup account history and find quite a bit of information there as well. As you're recording this on the worksheet, it's going to ask you for the type of computer whether it's a desktop or laptop, the brand, and the model number which you'll be able to get off that tag. It'll also ask you for the age of the machine and don't sweat it too much about that. If you don't have the exact date it was purchased, not a big deal. If you know it's about a year old or three years old, whatever, that's fine. That actually brings up another thing that I wanted to ask you to talk about just briefly, David, which is how long do these machines typically last? Yeah, it's one of those things if you ask a techie they'll probably be different perspectives on it, but generally speaking for laptops you're looking at three to four years is a good time. They can last longer, but past that date they might still work, but they're getting past their useful date partially because despite the fact that so much is now being done in the cloud, there's still a lot of processing power in software. In fact, one of the strange things that's happened, a lot of us were hoping years ago when more and more software was being done using web browsers, that would mean that you would need less processing power on your desktop or laptop machine, but increasingly that kind of processing is actually being pushed down into the local machine through the browser. So there's a little bit of planned ops lessons too. There's no smoking gun, but eventually you're not able to run the most up-to-date software that you need to run on your machine. So for laptops, we say three to four years, and for desktops, four to five years, a lot of that also depends on the quality of the machine in the first place. So you're talking about like a Dell or a machine like that that has warranties attached. For things that are not picking on any brands, but things that are lower costs, you can probably expect those to last a little bit less recently, less long. Great. And let's move on and talk about printers a little bit. And while I'm talking about this, Dave, I wonder if you could answer, there's a question that came in about refurbished computers, and maybe you could just briefly restate the question and then answer it by chat. Oh, okay. It looks like, I'm sorry, go ahead. With printers, this is pretty easy to do. Just look at how many printers you have. Are they connected to an office network? So how do you know that? How do you know if it's a network printer or not? Well, it might be connected with a cable or through a wireless connection to a server or directly to an individual's computer. One way you can kind of figure out if it's a network computer is if your individual computer or an employee's individual computer needs to be turned on in order to print, then the printer is connected directly to that computer. Otherwise, it's probably a network computer. I hope that makes sense. And for information on printers, David, they'll usually have a tag on the back somewhere that has some other information on them, right? And then I'm wondering if you could talk about what other information might be available about printers, say by looking at the properties on a connected computer. Yeah, so you can find out some information about, well, sometimes it depends on the software, but sometimes you can find out details about when the operating system was last updated, the firmware for some of the machines. Some, depending on how it's set up, you can actually see how many copies or if it's a multi-function kind of printer that also is used for copying and scanning. It'll keep details on how much of that has happened as well. Oddly, there's a lot more variability in printers than there is in the PC or the laptop desktop world. Great. And that reminds me, since you mentioned multipurpose machines, there are some other items that aren't specifically covered in our hardware safari that might apply to your organization. So tablet computers, for example, copiers, scanners, other kinds of AV equipment, you might want to be thinking about that kind of stuff here and add an extra page for an inventory of those kinds of devices and equipment as well. So, and then we'll talk a little bit about phones next. And you'll start by looking at the public face of your phone system, which is the actual physical handset that is on your desk. And so, you know, that probably looks something like this for most of you. And phones don't tend to get out of date as quickly as a computer. They can have a much longer lifespan. So you might actually be looking at something that is a lot older than the one in the picture, but still works perfectly fine. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. And then some of you might actually have a totally different kind of phone like me. I don't have anything like what's pictured here. In fact, I don't have a physical phone at all. I use a soft phone for everything. And what that means is that I use an app on my computer or an app on my cell phone to make and receive calls from my organization's phone number. So that's becoming a little bit more common because it offers a lot of versatility, especially for distributed teams. And it's also a pretty economical and portable option. So just to mention, like, it's possible you don't even have any phone hardware at all, but many of you likely do. And then the server closet, which is often the scariest part for people who are brand new about this. You might also call it a data closet, server room, the closet with all the wires in it. And hopefully it doesn't look like the one in the picture here. But this is wherever you are storing your central hardware and connections. And so, Dave, I'm wondering if you could walk us through, like, what kind of things just very briefly would people typically find in a server closet? And then while you're at it, maybe you could also share a little bit of advice on how to keep a server room tidy and also secure and safe. Sure, sure. Yeah, so I actually walked into some server closet that don't look all that different from that. And then some of them have been actual closets that were repurposed to house servers. So you'll find servers. So sometimes they look almost like a desktop machine, but usually they look like a sort of flattened out, thin, sleek kind of desktop machine, but they're not connected to a monitor, or not all of them are connected to a monitor. Sometimes there's a rack or something called a cage where they're all sort of slotted in together. But if you have a server closet and you're a relatively small organization, you may have just a machine in there with a consumer fan blowing on it to keep it cool. And that's one of the things you definitely want to do is make sure you can control the temperature in that room because it can get pretty warm in there, and that can do some damage to the machines. There are other kind of good things to have on hand. You want to be able to actually lock it. Occasionally people have it in a closet that doesn't have a lock on it. You want to have a way to secure it physically. We talk a lot about network security, but one thing that often is overlooked is the actual physical security of the machine or set of machines. And then labeling, a label maker, but Karen was saying the other day when we were chatting, you have a special tip or trick on how to label things with some household materials. Karen Yeah, I learned this from one of the consultants I worked with. He taught me to use those little square fasteners on bread bags, the little plastic squares, are exactly the right size to snap over a cable, and then you can use a little Sharpie to write what it is on there. So that was how we labeled things. That's a great idea. The other thing you'll want to have on hand that helps keep these cables and looking less like spaghetti, there's obviously stuff you can buy that's specifically for this, but just zip ties too, like the plastic ones that you can zip. Those are really inexpensive. You can get them at Home Depot or buy them online from Amazon or somebody else. And those really come in handy for trying to keep the spaghetti from happening. And then one of the other ideas is having the contact list on the wall for any providers you have. So the internet provider, if you have somebody who helps with the copiers or printers, if you're lucky enough to have outsourced IT that comes in on some consistent basis having contact information for them there too. There's so many things you can find in there. You'll probably find a pile of old machines. That's something we might talk about a little bit later. Yep. Two other things I would add based on some really disastrous server closets that I've seen at my job store are, see what you can do to protect it from water damage? I had one client that had a sprinkler system in their office and one of the sprinkler heads was directly over the server and so they had a false alarm that turned on the sprinklers and it wrecked their machine. So maybe positioning it so it's not directly under that sprinkler head would have saved them a little bit of grief. Another thing is just trying to keep rodents and that kind of stuff out of it so you don't get your wires chewed up. So you probably don't want to store your snacks in the same closet with your server equipment. But anyway, really good tips from David about keeping everything organized and safe. So another thing you'll probably find in there is a PBX, Private Branch Exchange. We won't quiz you on what that means because it's really not that important. But what a PBX is, it's a device that controls the access to your phone lines. And one thing that's cool about it is if you have like 10 staff, it's not likely that all 10 of them will be on the phone simultaneously. And so you can probably get by with only say five or six phone lines. And so a PBX can handle kind of routing to those different lines and maximizing the efficiency of that system. Another thing it can do is provide voicemail, transferring between lines or between extensions, things like that. And you'll know you have a PBX system if you have to dial an 8 or 9 before you dial out to get a line. There are a few different kinds of PBXs. So you might have an old one that has a bunch of different cables sticking out. Those last quite a long time so you might actually have one that's pretty old. The newer ones are a little more compact and might look something like the one in the picture here. But it's possible you might not have something on-premise. You can also have a remote PBX and so that's handled somewhere off-site. Anything else to add on that, David? No, I mean I think the phone systems are one of those things that they sort of linger and kind of work until they don't. And if you don't already have a contact for somebody to help support it, you'll probably want to reach out before you have problems with it to make sure you have somebody in your contact list to help you with that because if you're going to be responsible for technology in your organization, even though you didn't think of telephony in phones as part of your job, it ends up when it gets broken coming to you. And it's good to have somebody that can help you out in those cases because it's the thing that people scream about. Other than email, that's the thing that people are really going to get upset if it's not working properly. Yeah, that's a good advice. Well, this next little segment, we're going to go through your network, like your Internet network, and where are the different places where things are coming in and data is passing through and so forth. But before we do that, just a little other note about phones here too. Well, I mean that's also relevant to phones. So there will be a place where data lines come into your office, your Internet, your phone line, and techies folks will sometimes call that the D-mark. It's important for you to know where that is in your office. So that if you have a repair technician come in, you can direct them to that spot right away. So we'll talk more about Internet stuff in a minute, but let's just touch on another piece of phone hardware that you might find there. There are two different ways to get phone lines into your office, and one is old-fashioned copper lines, and those will probably plug directly into your PBX. So come into the building, plug into the PBX box. But if you're using digital lines, which more and more people are doing, if you're using voice over IP, VoIP lines, then you'll likely have a box that looks like some of the ones in the picture here that are the gateway between the outside world and your phones, and those just allow you to have some security and control over that data coming in and out. And then if you have a smaller office, you'll likely have a modem. And I think many of you are from fairly small organizations. You might have one of these at your house, too. And the modem might look like some of the ones that are pictured here. That controls the Internet connection between your office and the outside world. So that's often the first thing you'll see in the chain between the Internet coming into the office and that this device will be the first thing. If you have Internet access provided by a cable company, like say Time Warner or Comcast, then you'll have a cable modem which looks like these. If it's provided by a telephone company on the other hand, then you'll have a DSL modem which will look like the ones on the bottom. And it will probably connect to an Internet cable coming in from the wall and then it'll have another cable coming out of it to the next thing in the chain which we'll talk about in a minute. Now there's also a lot of newer high-speed Internet options. Internet over Copper is an example. And so, David, do you have anything to kind of comment on on that? Like will people see anything different if they have that sort of Internet service? The difference between DSL and cable, one looks more like – I'm sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. The cable modem looks like it looks like that coaxial cable coming in. So it's sort of – and the DSL will look a little bit – in a lot of cases it looks more like what you would have for an old landline for a phone coming in. Yeah, that's a good way to tell the difference. Great. We're getting a couple of questions here. I just want to pause for a moment. So someone's asking here, we don't have a network. All we have is the modem for the Wi-Fi. Should we lock this up? David, do you want to take that one? I guess it sort of depends on the layout of your space. But it sounds like maybe – so you having the Internet's coming in and it's connecting into your Wi-Fi router, which we're about to talk about here. I think it probably doesn't need to be locked up. I mean, that's sort of an additional caution. But if you don't have a server closet where that's coming in, then it's probably not necessary to lock it up. Great. Well, so here's kind of the next stopping point. Modem is handling an Internet signal. But in order to plug a bunch of computers into that Internet, then you need to have a router to help manage the flow of Internet data to and from your computers. And there are some very reliable and inexpensive routers available. A lot of you probably have one, a Linkless router that looks like this one that I just circled that is very widely used. And so the router is going to be plugged into the modem. And then there may be another cable coming out of that that will plug into the next thing, which is your firewall. And you might also have a wireless connection. So there won't be cables going out of this. And so that will allow all your computers to connect wirelessly as long as they're in physical proximity to the router. Now, some of you may have separate guest and internal Wi-Fi systems, like a private Wi-Fi. So, David, are there different devices people might look for if they have separate guest and private Wi-Fi? Frequently, those are on the same device. These days you just run two different SSIDs, so the things you look for when you're connecting to Wi-Fi. But you can usually run them off the same. Like the one that's pictured here, you'd be able to run a guest and a staff one. What about different devices to boost the signal and that sort of thing? I think you get into that when it's in a larger space. Sometimes you can connect, for instance, in a space where you might have dead spaces within your office space, then you might need multiple Wi-Fi routers. And so you can connect those using some software. There are also, even in some extreme circumstances, there are actually tools you can use, and often you see people using them in offices that are set up in old houses where you're using the copper within the house that's used for electricity, but you actually plug these in to extend the signal up into a space that for whatever reason is not able to get the Wi-Fi. So it actually plugs into the wall. That's mostly for consumer space, so it's not usually used in an office setting. Yeah, and we don't have a picture of one of those here, but some things some of you might possibly encounter if you're in a large building or maybe one where there just are a lot of dead spots. We have a question here about buy versus rent for routers and modems. Feel free to disagree with me on this, but I would say generally these are inexpensive enough that it probably makes sense just to buy one. But the caveat being that if you have a service provider that is doing your network support and it's kind of taking care of everything for you, then it might make sense to just have a package where they provide these devices for you and you don't own them, they do. Any other thoughts on that? Yeah, I would agree with that. It's much more unless there's some cash flow issue, and I can't even – it'd be a really difficult cash flow situation if these were going to break the bank. But if you did lease it, you'd be paying a lot more over the life of the product. Great. We also have a question about what's the difference between a router and a switch, and we'll get to that in just a second. But first, firewalls. This is pretty important. This is going to protect your internal network from attacks. So it monitors incoming and outgoing internet traffic. And I'll give you an example. If you are in a web browser and you click a link to see a web page, the firewall is going to let that information through because it knows that you've actively requested it, right? But if someone is trying to push something suspicious into the network that wasn't requested, then the firewall will intercept that if everything's working properly and then protect your network from attacks. And so the firewall should be sitting in between your computers and your router to protect the computers. And I also want to point out that if you look closely here, I'm going to back up a slide. This – the router on this page and the firewall on this next one look identical. And that is because there are combination devices that actually serve as a router and firewall all in one. And then somebody asked about a switch. And what's the difference between a switch and a router? A switch is kind of like a network version of a power strip. It's got usually a bunch of ports on it. And it can just like split everything out to go to a lot of different computers. David, I wonder if you could explain that any better than I can. Like what's the difference between a router's job and a switch's job? Yeah, I mean that's essentially a great way to describe it. There's also some differences just to tag on that sort of similarity between the two machines. You know, there's a lot of these things do some of the same – they accomplish the same job. It really depends on kind of the needs of your organization. So you can get away with actually just having a router if it's a smaller group. But if you have more, you're going to need to go to a switch. Same thing with firewalls and routers. There's sort of hardware-based firewalls and software-based firewalls. And most routers these days like a Wi-Fi router has a hardware-based firewall that's part of it, or I wouldn't say most, but generally speaking usually. That's what's going on there. Great. There was also a question Susan is asking about kind of the difference between hardware firewalls and software firewalls. Is a software firewall installed on that computer enough? What was you saying about that? Yeah, I would say not. I mean if we're talking about just using this in the case of say a PC using the Windows-based firewall, which is great to have on on your PC. That's probably not sufficient, but it's a nice thing to have in addition to having another firewall, either a hardware or software-based firewall. Because once it's getting to your individual machine, it's now on your network. Anything that has got passed and it's in your network, it might not get onto your particular machine, but it can get onto other folks. It's also harder to, one of the nice things about having a separate firewall is that you can kind of manage policies and manage updates to the firewall in one place rather than having to update it across all of the machines. Great. All right. For the sake of time, I want to kind of move through a couple more slides here before we come back to more questions. I know we've got a few piling up here, but I also want to leave plenty of time for closing this out. We'll do our best to get back to those other questions, but let's talk just briefly about servers. A server is just a computer. It doesn't have to be a scary thing, but it's usually one that's attached to a network and it performs a specialized role. One role for a server might be to centralize file storage and give you access to shared files from any computer that's on the network. It also might be used for email or it might be used to run a particular software package like your CRM that's installed on the server and then allows everybody to share the data that way if you're not using a cloud-based data management application. So when you're going through your hardware Safari worksheet, if you find computers especially that are in a closet or in a storage area that are connected but don't seem to be any of the other things that we've discussed so far, then it's quite possible that that's a server or some other kind of network storage device. If you don't find any servers in your office, that's not necessarily a cause for alarm. And David, maybe you can talk about that a little bit. Sure. Yeah, we're increasingly seeing now with things like Google for nonprofits and Office 365 which are both free to nonprofits. Increasingly organizations are doing some of the activities and some of the functionalities that used to be performed by servers are being done in the cloud. There's still a server there. It's just not in your premises. It's in some multiply redundant server farm that's controlled by Microsoft or Amazon or Google. Occasionally you'll have smaller organizations set up with peer-to-peer networks. That's less and less common. Especially in the data now where we have printers that have Wi-Fi capability, you can connect to them wirelessly. And because of these cloud-based solutions for, say, file sharing, it's less likely they have those peer-to-peer networks that have been set up so you could, I think, Karen, you were making reference to it before. I like to share a printer off of Susie or Jim's machine or have a bunch of folks using Paul's machine as the storage place for files. Great. One last thing we want to touch on here is here's another source of information for you. It's looking through your invoices, contract records, all the paperwork to see what you can find out there. David, I know you've done actually a lot of technology assessments. I'm wondering if you could share a little bit about what kinds of things you might have found that were surprising to organizations. I think the thing we see a lot is duplication of service. That's the biggest one. And this is just a function of, you know, we'll turn over essentially in most text-abs within organizations in our sector are relatively small. Maybe one person may be part of some person's job in smaller organizations. And with that turnover, the new person comes in and might not be aware that there was something else already existing to perform the function that they wanted, and so then they went ahead and did another. So that's one thing we see a lot. The other is paying for support or ongoing, you know, warranties on hardware that's no longer within the organization. That just keeps – it goes into accounting, it goes to billing, and they pay the bill, and they're not aware of all the machinery that's behind the scenes. Yeah, that's a great tip. So definitely worth doing an audit of your paperwork as well. And so now we're kind of at the finish line here, and I think you're ready to do your homework. It will take you maybe an hour or so to investigate what you've got, document it all on the worksheet. And so I'm hoping that you feel a little bit better equipped to do that now than you did at the beginning of the hour here. And once you've done that, then you're going to start thinking about, okay, I know what I do have. What should I have? And so I'll let Susan walk you through our online course on Tactical Technology Planning, which is designed to help you answer all of those questions. Great. Thank you so much, Karen. As I go to share my – I'm going to share my desktop and the course that we've been talking about that could help answer some of the other questions that are in the queue. And hopefully we can get to all of those as well. But for those of you, hopefully you are now seeing TechSoups and IdealWare's course, Tech Planning 101. What you just listened to today was part of one of the modules. So what we want to recommend to you, this is a free course. For those of you that want to dive deeper and really get a line on assessing your organization, do a real tactical technology audit, we suggest that you come and take this course. It gives you an introduction. It covers the difference between tactical versus strategic planning for your organization's technology needs. And one of the first modules is something you just watched today about the hardware Safari. And you can also watch that video again. And we have all these other modules that are built to help you learn. They are a video followed by an activity and a worksheet. All of this is downloadable for you to use with your technology committee. You can see here that we've got a lot of folks that have earned a lot of tech points. That means they've watched the videos and they've downloaded all of the activities. This course is a great way to start your technology audit. And it can take you as much as 10 hours to get through the course if you include some of the other activities that we recommend. There's a downloadable workbook. And there's also resources from TechSoup and Idealware that you can access. And as I go back to the presentation, someone asked what are tech points? Jessica, tech points are simply once you log into the platform and create your profile. It's like getting your library card. This course, as you move through the course, we incentivize you with tech points. So as you watch a video, as you download a worksheet, as you interact with other folks on the platform, you can chat with other learners. You earn points. And we ask that you accrue 40 points to receive your Certificate of Completion. So it's actually a lot of fun, as I showed you in the screen sharing. We have some folks that have 396 points, so they've obviously come back to the course again and again. You get points for logging in each day and for communications, virtually everything you do on the platform. And again, this is a free course. We've got four tech planning courses. The first one that I just discussed is Tech Planning 101. And that is, of course, really just to get you started. It gives you a foundation for your technology plan. And then there are three other courses. We've got Tech Planning 201, 202, and 203. And we have a special offer for the rest of this month, or at least through the 26th. And it's 25% off discounted registration for those courses. So essentially, we encourage you to take the free course because that is going to give you a really good foundation. And then you can decide for yourself if you wish to go on and take any of the other courses. And we will chat out that coupon. The coupon will also be included in your follow-up email. So we just want to give you every possible avenue to really learn more about technology planning. And I can tell you that I learned a lot in working with Karen to get these courses on our platform. So I'm going to say that we've got a lot of questions, and we still have some time to answer them. Karen, I'm going to start at the top and ask these questions for you, Dave. Is that good? Sorry, I was muted for a second. Yes. Excellent. I was trying to answer one of the questions, and I kind of messed up my use of the chat. So there was a question from Joseph about that. It says, we currently use Crash Plan to back up our servers. Are there any better programs out there? There actually are a ton of different backup services. And Crash Plan is a fine one. David, maybe you can mention a couple others that are inexpensive that you've recommended for small nonprofits. I also want to point out that there are some product discounts through TechSoup on some various kinds of backup services and restoration services, so it might be worth looking at that as well. David, anything to add to that? Sure, yeah. I'm actually a big fan of Crash Plan myself. And there is different kinds of backup when you get to a server. So there's sort of bare metal backup, and then there's just regular kind of, I don't think Crash Plan does bare metal, but basically it also depends on if you've done something like virtualization of your server. Then you can use some nice tools like Veeam. But there are a number out there that most of the major players do provide nonprofit discounts too, but they might not publicize it, so definitely worth asking for it. The other thing is just, and that's for servers. Some folks, especially the ones who don't have servers, you may want to use something like Carbonite, which you can use for teams, to do backup of the individual laptops and desktops that you have in your enterprise. Great. Well, and I can tell you an ideal where we use two different systems to backup our server, which is a virtual server. One's in the cloud and one is a physical device. We feel safe as doubling up on that. So we have Google, we have Google Drive backing up a lot of our stuff. And then we also have a physical storage device that somebody keeps at his house for the backup of the backup just in case. There's also, wow, there's a lot of questions coming in here, so that's great. There's a question about technology insurance. So that's not immediately relevant to hardware audit, I guess, but I still think that's a topic that might be of interest here. David, thoughts on that. Is technology insurance worthwhile? It's usually, so I've never seen it. The deductibles usually are so high that most organizations can't really avail themselves of it, so it's sort of lost money. The other thing you can do is it's often with your overall insurance, for organizational insurance, there's a, you can do it as an add-on and that's less expensive rather than taking out a whole different insurance policy around technology. But I don't know, you may have had different experience, but that's been my experience that most people can never, you know, like health insurance, eventually it's likely you're going to get sick, but for technology insurance there's not going to be, it's very rare you'd have a catastrophic situation where you'd be able to, you'd be financially, you know, it'd be worth it. At least that's about my experience. Yeah. There's another question here from Nina. She says, most of my staff work remotely. Do you have advice on conducting the audit with them? And Idealware has a distributed team as well and so we kind of have the same situation. And although what's different for us is that many of our staff actually own our own equipment and so that's just, it's not like corporate hardware, but if you do have that then I would suggest, yeah, just maybe sending out the worksheet to everybody and having them record the stuff that's at their site, at their workstation and send it all back in. Or if you want to make it even easier to consolidate all of that, do a shared document, maybe a Google Sheet or something like that that everybody can kind of type into together. The other thing you might want to do is do that. Maybe share this presentation with them as well. For sure. One thought I had was maybe also just sending people a link to that Bell Arc advisor. Then your staff basically just run it. They all have to do is download it and hit run and it'll create a report that they can just send to you by email that'll tell you a lot of details about what's going on on their machine. Great. And I know we're almost at the end of our time here so I want to just maybe pick one more question and then the rest we can see if there's a way to answer offline. So there's some questions about cloud services that's not really our focus today so I think I will direct you elsewhere for that. There was one question about external memory and I know we alluded to that earlier. So David, maybe you can talk a little bit about that too. The question is can an external memory serve as server file storage and they handle software packages for single computers? External memory. Do they like a NAS device or that kind of thing? Yes. So NAS devices, network attached storage or like an external hard drive that attaches by USB. Those can be helpful for extending the storage I guess for individual machines. I don't know. Sorry, I'm not seeing the question up here so I'm trying to... What is the... I think it was also about running software packages on those and I'm not sure it's usually capable of that. For some you certainly can but I wouldn't... Essentially those network attached devices the machine doesn't really, it just treats it like another drive whether it's an internal or external. So theoretically you could do that. I'm not sure why you would but one could do that. Great. So we're kind of at the end of our time here so I want to hand it back over to Susan but let me just suggest I think maybe the three of us, Susan and David and I could huddle a little bit briefly after this and probably direct you to some further resources because I noticed that there were some unanswered questions about moving on to the cloud and TechSoup and Idealware both have a lot of good guides and resources to help you with those decisions so we'll make sure you get some of those in the follow-up email. Susan, I'll hand it to you. Thank you. Yes, we certainly will. We'll take a look at these questions and make sure that we identify resources so that when you receive that follow-up email there will be links for you, like all of the course information we've been talking about and the testing where you can find out more about your PC. So we'll be sure to include that. Very quickly, first of all, thank you so much for your time. I know we've run out of time but if you don't mind chatting something you learned or that you're going to share with someone else in your workplace or co-worker, we would appreciate that because I know a lot was covered today. Again, you can also take a Hardware Safari with us in our TechSoup courses online. It is a free course and the Hardware Safari is just one small part of that. We have some upcoming webinars. On the 23rd, we have a webinar about Adobe Creative Cloud. We also have a design webinar on the 7th of March about building a strong brand for your organization. And then we're going to have some quick books, webinars coming up in March as well. So we invite you to come to our webinar page and learn more and register. All of these are free. I do want to thank Karen and Dave. They've taken a lot of time to prepare this and also make sure that they could as much as possible answer your questions. Thank you so much. Both of you, you've been incredibly informative. I've learned a lot this hour as well. And I also want to send a special shout out to Ali on the back end. And most of all to you, the most valuable asset you have is your time. So we do appreciate it. Please do take an extra 15 or 20 seconds to complete the survey that will pop up as soon as you log out. That will help us make these webinars better. And any feedback is good feedback. Please be honest. I also want to thank ReadyTalk, our sponsor for these events. And we want to wish you a great rest of your week and a wonderful weekend. Thank you so much. Thanks everyone. Thanks. Bye-bye.