 Our speaker is Shruti Ramaswamy. She is TechSoup Vice President of Strategy and Strategic Partnership. She's responsible for all of our Microsoft program offerings. She worked closely with both nonprofits and the Microsoft to ensure that the sector around the world is able to derive the most impact out of the program offerings. Prior to her work here at TechSoup, Shruti was the Technology Consultant at IBM. So I'm so excited. I love when you teach this and I'll always learn. So Shruti, welcome and thank you. Thanks for that introduction, Aretha. And thank you to everybody here for joining today from all over the country and from Europe. We have some people as well. So we're really excited to spend some time today and delve a little bit more into the Microsoft cloud subscriptions that are available to nonprofits. Just, I know you are all here because TechSoup, but just to remind you, TechSoup is a global nonprofit. We are a charity as well and we are here, our mission is to connect charities and nonprofits around the world to technology to further your own missions. And here at TechSoup, we're here to connect you with donated and discounted products, services, education solutions. We know that access is a huge barrier. So we wanna make sure that you have access to all the technology that you need. But we also know that adoption of that technology is the most important for you to actually be able to get the mission impact that you're looking for. So at TechSoup, we offer software, hardware, both new and refurbished. We have IT hotspots, we have courses, we have consultants, and we have so much more, which also includes services and solutions that can help you adopt the solutions that you're looking for. We know that everybody is at different stages of their technology adoption and we work in partnership with over 400 corporations and foundations to make sure that you have access to the technology that you need wherever you are. So whether or not you're looking for installed software, you're still working on traditional desktop solutions or you're looking for adoption of new solutions, like what we're gonna talk about today, cloud solutions and moving on to really enabling how you can think about more specified and specific user flows for your organization through Power Apps or other types of technology. We're here to help you and to connect you to other people who are going through similar challenges or to connect you to the resources that are gonna help you adopt the solutions that you need. So what we're gonna talk a little bit more in depth about today is specifically the Microsoft Cloud subscriptions. If you have been with us over the past couple of, I would say months, we've been talking a lot about Microsoft programs. We've basically had a webinar almost every month over the last couple of months and we focused a lot on some of the Microsoft program changes that are going to be happening. And we have materials, we have blogs, we have resources at the end of this deck that we'll cover that in a little bit more too. But a lot of the questions that we've been receiving have really been about the cloud subscriptions. What are the cloud subscriptions? How can nonprofits take part of them? And what is available to the sector? So what we wanted to talk a little bit more about today and spend our time on today is really delving a little bit more in depth about the cloud subscriptions that are available to nonprofits, how to engage with them, how to interact with them and how to choose them. One thing I'll just say upfront are the licenses have a ton of different options which is fantastic for organizations but it can also be really overwhelming and confusing. So we're here to help dissect that and think it through a little bit more with you on some of the recommendations that might be best suited for your needs. So as we start today, I'll talk a little bit about that overview and then we'll save some time at the end for questions. As Aretha mentioned before, there is a Q&A function that is a part of the right-hand screen on the Bevy platform. So feel free to use those. Those will be curated throughout the session and we'll have time to go through them. There will also be team members who are engaging directly in chat and answering those that we can answer right away. And we will also be sending out this recording with the presentation and links to many resources including a way to email us directly to get any questions that you might still have after the presentation that you didn't get answered, taken care of. So we'll start today with what is the cloud? A pretty big question. So we'll do our best to answer that. And I think some of the easiest ways to think about that are really in comparison to what is not on the cloud. So there are two primary ways that organizations can engage with software. That's on-premises, which is a one-time kind of purchase or request that you're making. It's a solution that lives on a device itself. It's something that you're installing. It is a device-based license for the most part. So when you're getting an on-premise office standard, for example, that office standard license is installed on either your desktop or your laptop, it lives there, you pay for it once, and you might be able to get some updates in terms of security updates or maybe patches that come through. But otherwise, it's really a static platform and suite of offerings that you're getting. On the cloud side is really a subscription-based product that's based off of a user. So it's not necessarily tied to a specific device. Often, it's really tied to a specific user who can take that subscription and use it on multiple devices. It's also a subscription so that you're getting the solution over time. So as updates are made, as feature updates are made, as new applications are developed, all of that is automatically going into your subscription. So you will constantly get the newest versions of things. You will constantly get any updates that you need as long as you're connected and you're able to receive those updates. One of the things that people think about when you think about cloud is that you always need internet connectivity to be able to leverage and use it. And while connectivity is really a key feature because you don't have to store as many things on a local device, you can take advantage of the power of what governments of large corporations, what everybody is using to be able to store some of that data, you don't necessarily always have to be connected to use some of the applications itself. You will need to be connected obviously if you're trying to use any of the cloud services such as real-time collaboration, real-time chat, or some of the updates that you're trying to receive. But a lot of the functionality is also available through offline apps or installed apps that could be a part of your cloud subscription as well. When you think about the differences between, those are the very high level version of those, but there are some advantages and disadvantages that are important to note and it might not be the same for every organization. For example, with the cloud licensing, the cost can be spread out over time and many of the subscriptions are actually available as a donation so they might have even more reduced costs. You'll be able to access those things from different devices. So particularly in an environment when many of us have multiple devices, I do probably as much on my phone as I do on my laptop. So that can be really useful to have some of that mobility. But in terms of disadvantages, a lot of us in nonprofits have budgets that are really set at certain time periods and having ongoing costs or ongoing subscriptions might be harder to fund for or you might not have funding for that type of expense. As I mentioned, connectivity is not always necessary to do everything that you need, but if you really have a situation where you are not connected for most of your time, it might be a barrier to you and getting the most out of the cloud functions that there are. So there are some advantages and disadvantages where an on-premise solution might still make sense for your organization. But overall, we see a lot more applications, a lot more features and a lot more of where Microsoft's development is going into, really leaning into the cloud solution space. I'll also state that part of some of the changes that I had referenced earlier on is Microsoft is really committing more to having most of their donations that they are making available to the nonprofit sector be primarily focused in their cloud subscriptions moving forward. So it is an area of investment and priority for the solutions that you'll be getting as well. Why should cloud solutions matter to you? We talked a little bit about some of the advantages and disadvantages, but I think a lot of the advantages really play out very well for many nonprofits. Particularly, we'll talk a little bit about some of the advantages that you can get in a cloud solution with mobility and collaboration, security, data backup and recovery and a reduction of cost. And I'll just say upfront that these all might not apply to you and there may be scenarios in which this is not the reality for a lot of people. But by and large, there are a lot of benefits that you can get into moving to a cloud-based subscription, particularly because so many of them are really robust that Microsoft offers and quite great in terms of donation offers that are available as well. So the first one is mobility and collaboration. The best part to me about a cloud subscription is that you can really access your data anywhere and anytime. And that is really critical, particularly at an age where we have a lot more remote work, we have a lot of people who are working from different places. This is a huge ability for people to still collaborate and work and function together. So you're not reliant on one device for your email, for your documentation, for your presentations. You should be able to access the same kind of files that you are working on from wherever you are and from whatever device you're using. And as long as you have an internet connection, it doesn't matter where you are to be able to access it. And this is really helpful when you are working in groups with other people, with volunteers, when you both wanna or multiple people wanna collaborate on a space or have a quick meeting to bring and talk about something together or if you're running a volunteer event or a church event where you have an ability to all kind of work on the same file so you can manage things together and see where you are at real time. And a cloud-based solution really helps with that because all of a sudden, everybody is looking at the same thing at the same time and can work a lot more productively while there are in different locations and really enables collaboration. The next aspect I would say is security. And I think this one is a little bit harder for some organizations because they might have very different security settings or rules that are in play based off of the organizations and the population that you serve. But I think some of the real benefits to cloud solutions, particularly when thinking about security is that you are gonna be using the same kind of infrastructure and solutions that many large organizations and governments are relying on. So the same kind of security systems and alerts and really overview that an organization is relying on Microsoft to do from their Azure services, you're gonna get that same level of service and support for you. So they're always checking on attacks or potential vulnerabilities. And you'll see a lot in the news recently where there have been a lot of vulnerabilities that have been attacked and have been really targeted towards the nonprofit community. And a lot of those have been through on-premises solutions where there are easier ways to delve into attack vulnerabilities. And so there are a lot of benefits in being able, particularly smaller nonprofits for being able to use some of the security solutions that are available and built for scale. The other part of that is security upgrades are automatically updated into your solution. You don't have to be reliant on an IT professional or somebody in your organization to be monitoring all of those security updates that are going out. Those are automatically patched to you if you're in a cloud setting. Most of the cloud solutions that are available and I'll talk a little bit about the licensing options have pretty robust security components that allow you to have control, access, user role access and as an administrator of these accounts there's a lot of ways that you can manage that. And that's pretty ubiquitous. So that is something that you can also get in a Google workspace. And it's something that should be really thought about as a specific policy that organizations have on how you're setting up rules and access when you're thinking about licensing in a cloud-based solution. And I think the other thing to note here is that this is something that is going to be really particular to specific organizations. So there are certain rules if you're working with vulnerable populations, if you're collecting data that's health-related you might have other issues and other things that you need to be aware of. And so there are licensing options that we would definitely recommend you looking at or additional kind of add-ons that you might wanna have to make sure that you're getting everything that you can in your solution. I will say that there are also some feedback and negative things here as well where people do want more control of their data. They don't want to have some of their data in the cloud in some ways. And I think there are some really great published rules about what data is accessible and not accessible to people outside of your organization. Those are clear and guidelines and you can take a look at them and assess whether or not a cloud solution is the right secure solution for your organization as well. But by and large, I think a lot of the security features do support and help a lot of the nonprofits that we serve in scaling their own solutions. The next feature that I would mention is data backup and recovery. Cloud solutions are there to automate your data backups and recovery. I don't know how many times all of us have that moment where things have dropped or your laptop dies and all of a sudden, all of your work is gone. So that is one of the beauties of a cloud solution when you're on something that is automatically auto-saving all of the time, you don't have to worry about that. There are ways that you can always access things. Things are automatically being saved. There are robust version histories so you can go back and all of your documents and restore previous versions and make sure that you can see all of the kind of edits and changes that have been made. And we definitely recommend having a backup and cloud solution available for organizations at a minimum as a backup and recovery area because if there are natural disasters, if there's any type of situation in which an organization has a flood in their office or things, you don't want to lose all of the hard work that you have. We have worked with so many organizations, particularly going through fires or flooding or things where there's so many things that were paper-based that were really just lost because of the natural disaster that happened. If nothing else, if you're just using a cloud solution to backup your data or to store all of the files that you have, we would definitely recommend making sure that you invest in that so you just have an opportunity to not lose all of the hard work that your teams and that your organizations have been working on. And the last item that we really wanted to highlight is a reduction in overall cost. And this, again, can really be different for different nonprofits, but by and large, what we see is that especially as organizations move over time to cloud solutions, you don't have to own your own servers. You don't have to run your own databases. You don't necessarily have to devote the same IT administration time to thinking about security patches and updates. You should be able to deploy licenses more rapidly so you can get those to organizations if you have a big volunteer event coming up where you need influx of licenses. You can get those for an influx and then take them down. You only need to pay for what you're using when you're using them. And that flexibility can be really helpful, particularly for organizations that have some seasonal kind of events or seasonal type of activities. We work with a lot of organizations that are doing a lot more in the summer when schools aren't in session. And so having licenses that you can augment and bring up during that time is really useful. And we'll talk a little bit more about this, but it's flexible. There's a lot of mixing and matching you can do. Not everybody has to be on the same license and we'll talk a little bit about those costs, but there are a lot of donated license available. And if you need additional licenses, you don't always have to get the highest tier of license. You can mix and match there so that you can balance those costs a little bit more over time as well. I'm gonna move us on to talk a little bit about what offers are actually available to the sector and to nonprofits particularly. So right now, Microsoft makes a few different license types available to the nonprofit sector. And there are some eligibility guidelines on there. We're happy to answer questions on that, but for the most part, eligible nonprofits are able to get either on-premises or cloud licenses and both are available as either donations or discounted licenses. So on the on-premises side, those are the licenses that we talked about before. So those are the device-based licenses that you would install onto your desktop or onto your laptop. You can get those, they usually like standard level products are available as a donation for up to 50 licenses. And if you want more licenses or if you want professional level products, they are also available at a charity discount which gives you about 60 to 75% off of the commercial pricing. When you're getting them at as a discount, there are unlimited amount of licenses available there. And you can also choose to get software assurance, which is a benefit that allows you to get upgrades moving forward for a two-year period. So that's on the on-premises side. On the cloud side, Microsoft makes available both donated and discounted licenses as well. And these are based off of the license type and we'll talk a little bit about the hierarchy and the different types of license types that Microsoft makes available. And we're gonna spend a lot of time talking about the productivity suite, but Microsoft has a lot of different things that are built into their cloud suite of applications. And I'll talk a little bit about some of the other things that are available as well. The Microsoft cloud is actually a really large and big kind of phrase that encompasses a lot of different solutions. So within that is the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 suite that many of you probably are well aware of. Those include the Office apps that you know and love PowerPoint, which we're using today, Excel, Word, OneNote, OneDrive, Teams. Those are all included as part of this suite of applications under the Microsoft or Office 365 umbrella. There's also the Enterprise Mobility Suite. EMS, as it's called, is really an opportunity to have more device space and access management tools so that you can help secure your organization and manage devices a little bit more. Power BI is a really powerful data analytics tool that Microsoft makes available. If you're used to Excel, Power BI is a really fantastic tool to show data visualization in a very different and a really powerful way. There's a lot of dashboard abilities. We've actually adopted Power BI at TechSoup over the past two years. And since then, we are all reliant on some of those dashboards for real-time access to data and making sure that we understand how programs and nonprofits are progressing through different things that we're operating. Windows, I have a Windows 10 logo here, but Windows 11 is now available and you might be using that as well. So Windows is the operating system that Microsoft makes available. Many of these solutions also work on Macs. So I know that there are a lot of people here using Apple products and Apple solutions. So most of the cloud and on-premises solutions have Mac versions that are available. So it's not necessarily specific that you have to have a Windows OS to be able to operate. There's also Microsoft Dynamics 365. Dynamics is a really robust solution, a lot more like a traditional CRM system for those who are interested in that. We're not gonna spend a ton of time on dynamics today, but in the chat, I did put in my information. So if you have questions on that, I'm happy to answer that as well if you wanna reach out. There's Azure, which many of you might be using or have heard about, which is Azure is Microsoft's really version of kind of a cloud backup solution and a platform as a service for you to use. And Microsoft also makes available to organizations a $3,500 credit every year that goes towards Azure consumption. So if you're using Azure and you're moving from servers that you currently have on-premises servers into Azure, or if you're looking for virtual machines, things like that, or even hosting a lot of your, if any of you are still using traditional servers, Azure is a really great starting point to move those into the cloud. And with the $3,500 credit, you do get a lot of benefit in actually being able to get a lot of that for free based off of your own consumption. And then there's also Power Apps. Power Apps is a low code to no code environment that you can use to be able to create your own workflows and your custom applications. I've played around with Power Apps myself. I am definitely not a technologist or a coder in any sense of the word, but I've found it pretty useful and valuable to use to create really simple applications to just make my own work a little bit more efficient. So if any of you are excited about that and play around, there are free licenses available with Power Apps as well. So as we talk a little bit about the Microsoft cloud, I'll just, we talked about a little bit of the functionality, but this is a good way to break it up a little bit and see all of the different areas that the Microsoft cloud is supporting. There's the productivity suite with the Microsoft and Office 365 solutions, the infrastructure and platform as a service with Azure, data visualization with Power BI, custom applications with the Power Platform, identity, security and device management with enterprise and mobility and security and then your operating systems as well. But all of these will have a lot of the components that you are probably looking for or that you've already been using on an on-premises environment but really built with the power of the cloud behind it. So what we're gonna talk a little bit now is the specific licensing options that are available to nonprofits and really what are the key solutions that people are mostly interacting with or requesting from TechSoup. So we're gonna talk a little bit about the productivity suites of Microsoft 365 and Office 365. So Microsoft 365, there are a few different options that are available and in this deck we'll have a link that kind of shows you a table of all of the options that are available. I'm just picking out a few that I think are probably most relevant to most of the organizations here today. The first one is the Microsoft 365 business basic solution. This is completely free for up to 300 users. It is only cloud services. So if you do require, you will require internet connectivity to really use these solutions but it will come with Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, all of the Office apps, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook that you would need. The only thing here is that it will be completely online. So you would be using a web browser and things like that to be able to access it. You can also use your phone, of course. There's also the Microsoft 365 business standard license. This includes pretty much the same suite of software for cloud services, but it also includes desktop apps so that you don't necessarily have to have an internet connection in order to be able to use the licenses. You can actually install Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive to your desktop solution and still be able to interact and use it offline and online. And because it also includes those desktop apps, it also includes publisher and access for those organizations that need those functionality as well. Business standard is available for organizations at a discounted rate for $3 per license per month for up to 300 users. And then the last one that I wanted to highlight in the Microsoft 365 solution is the Microsoft 365 business premium license. Now, this is a really robust offer and I think Microsoft's best and most fantastic offer out there for nonprofits right now. It is free for the first 10 users and for many organizations, particularly small organizations, 10 users can cover most of your organization. And it comes with everything that the business standard application comes with. So it comes with the desktop products, installed products so you don't need internet connectivity to use everything. It also comes with the cloud services but it also comes with security offers, including Intune, Azure Information Protection, Defender, it'll have some Windows Virtual Desktop solutions. So it really provides a lot more robust solution. Maybe you won't need all of that but it provides you the opportunity to grow into that as well. So I always recommend that if organizations are thinking about it to take advantage of this donation offer. And if you need additional licenses or more licenses and you might not have the budget for $5 a license a month, you can always consider augmenting with a business standard license or a business basic license depending on the users that you have. And like I mentioned before, you can mix and match. So not everybody in your organization has to have the same license. What we would recommend is people who are administrators, people who are in IT settings, people who need a higher level of security settings, you can think about the higher level products for them or licenses for them where maybe some of your users have business premium. But if some of your volunteers or some of your other staff who are only accessing certain things or only using email or only using online services, you can mix and match and go for a different license for them. The next, oh, and I talked a little bit about the business premium licenses. I forgot I have this, so I should have gone here first but really talks a little bit about all of the different things within business premium. I won't go through all of this here but just know that there are a lot of components in here including storage and email that you can get here. And if you have a chance to look at the deck afterwards, just feel free to look through some of these details. The one other thing I just would highlight is the cloud solutions, all of the Microsoft 365 solutions that include desktop apps can be used on up to five devices. So it can be on a phone, on an iPad, on your PC, on your laptop and still have one remaining. It is really helpful to have user-based licensing particularly when we're working in environments where we have a lot of different kind of ways that we're engaging with our technology and our teams. The next suite of software I was gonna talk a little bit about is the Office 365 solution. The Office 365 solution is really similar to the Microsoft 365 solution. I apologize that the names are pretty confusing and are all called the kind of the same things. Office 365 is really enterprise product. So you'll see the licenses here have an E next to it. They are traditionally meant to support larger enterprises. So these solutions, though it's not restricted, are usually meant for enterprises with over 300 users or 300 licenses that are needed. Again, there's no restriction. You can use it if you have less but the functionality and the way these licensing types were created were really based off of that enterprise user. Office 365 E1 license includes similar to the business basic. It's all online solutions. It has all of the products and apps that you would probably need for productivity and also includes teams, outlook and exchange. Again, you will need internet connectivity for these. These are available as a discount for $2 per license per month. I'll just note here that this was previously a donated license. So we'll talk a little bit about that before. So if you're already on the donated license, don't worry, the costs aren't going to change for you. But if anybody is newly getting this license, it is only now available as a discount. There's also an E3 license. E3 is definitely something we might recommend if you do have higher security needs. These include both cloud services and the installable desktop applications. It includes all of the same programs we talked about before but it also includes the desktop applications of publisher, access and provides Azure Information Protection as well. And then there are also E5 licenses are the most robust in terms of the security features that are available with it. It has everything that we said before but it also has conditional access and there are a lot of other security features that are built into an E5 license. So we would typically recommend thinking about an E5 license if you have a very large organization that or an organization that has very strict security settings, sometimes legal nonprofits or organizations working in health services really need to think about how and where they're storing data and the E5 license can provide a lot more visibility and solutions and tools to be able to do that. Okay. One thing that I talked a little bit about is that there were some of these licenses that you may have and that you may have received before and are using that were donated that are no longer available as a donation. I just wanna be clear that organizations who have a donated version of an Office 365 E1 or an E2 license, if you've got that as a donation before you can keep that as a donation moving forward. You can still get up to 2,000 licenses of those seats of those license subscriptions that you have. The real change is if an organization has never received that product or solution before and you're starting to request an E1 license those licenses are now at a discounted rate but if you are on an existing donation that is grandfathered in, you don't have to change that and you won't automatically be charged for that or anything moving forward. What I also wanted to highlight here is that Microsoft does make available some of these licenses as a pure donation. That includes the business basic license as well as the Microsoft 365 business premium 10 licenses for free. And part of that donation is also a utilization requirement. So if you are getting a donated license from Microsoft Microsoft does have a requirement that you have to use at least 85% of those to be able to maintain and keep getting that as a donation. There's a little bit of details behind that. So it's not as simple as just, oh, use it or lose it because using it means different things. So I'll try to explain that a little bit better but I will just say we have a lot of resources that we have created and put together to make this a little bit easier to understand. Really the way that Microsoft defines utilization is that for any license that is actually assigned to a user, so if you're like techsoup.org has donated licenses, if they had a donated license that was assigned to me, Shruti Ramaswamy at TechSoup then that me as a user would have to at least use one Microsoft 365 cloud service within a 90 day period. So that could be as simple as me backing something up into the cloud once every three months. It could be me logging onto Teams. It could me be logging onto my office 365 and sending emails. And so it is really vast, it's not a super hard particularly if you are actually using the licenses but this is something to be aware of particularly if you are getting or requesting a lot of licenses but you don't have a particular need or user to assign or using it right now. So I would recommend that you don't assign a license to a user unless you're sure that the user actually is going to start using that license. And you can request a hundred licenses and have that but if you don't have a user yet that doesn't count against your utilization. It only counts against your utilization once you assign that license to a specific user. Once that user is assigned that user does need to start using that license. And again, the usage is not something that is every single day. It's once every 90 days. It's really just to make sure that Microsoft is able to distribute the donations that they have to people who need it the most. And so if you're not necessarily using it now you can always unassign that license. It can be used, Microsoft can use that to be able to serve more organizations but the way to figure out are people using your licenses or as your team member actually getting the most out of these licenses is not as easy as you would hope it to be. It's not like there's this very easy way that you can see all of that. So what we've put together is a couple of resources that allow you to understand where to go in your administrative center to see the users that you have, the licenses that you have and some suggestions for reporting so that you can understand where you are against that requirement. And I will just say, Microsoft will send you an email if they find that you are not using all of the licenses that you have as a donation and will give you a time period to be able to use it or unassign the licenses. So it's not like as soon as it happens they'll take it away but it is something to be aware of and I believe Microsoft is going to be sending some communication around for organizations who might be in this scenario. So if you get it I want you to have a little bit of the resources and background about what this means for your organization and how you might be able to rectify it as well so that you can continue to use that grant. As I mentioned before, we have a lot of resources. I've only talked about five of thousands of solutions that are available to you. We do have a full-size kind of table that allows you to look at the comparison, see everything that you might need. So there are a lot of resources that are going to be made available to you after this meeting. So feel free to use them. Click on these, you can download this PDF and get a little bit more sense for the solution that might make most sense for you. And one thing I just want to plug this is personally something that I get a lot of joy out of so I just wanted to share is that when we talk about Office 365 and Microsoft 365 we often talk a lot about PowerPoint, Excel, Word because people use those the most or Teams but there are so many other apps that you just get for as part of your subscription. Those include really helpful tools and applications that you might not even know that you needed. It includes project, SharePoint. It includes things like bookings. So if somebody wants to book time or book volunteer hours there's an application that integrates with your Outlook schedule that you can use and it is free. It's already part of your Office 365 or Microsoft 365 solution. There is Sway or Stream that you can actually create interactive reports, board reports right in there. Again, all of these come with your suite of services. So there's so much there so I would really encourage you all to explore them in your Office 365. If you log on to office.com you can see all of the apps that you have access to. The other one I'll just plug really quickly is forms. So these are really helpful for quick surveys or quick data collection. Like these tools are available to you and you don't have to necessarily get other subscriptions. You are already getting it as part of your Office 365 or Microsoft 365 solution. So I definitely recommend just taking a look at what's there particularly if you're getting a lot of other solutions or if you're building a lot of things a lot of great apps exist already and you're already kind of part of them and they're integrated with your Office 365 solution. Just my own public service announcement to just take a look there because there's a lot of great gems that are hidden in there that might be useful to your organization as well. And again, there's a lot of other cloud offers there's opportunities for add-on. So if you need additional storage if you need audio conferencing if you need additional security there are a lot of additional things that you can get at a pretty low cost that 60 to 75% off discount rate applies for most of the cloud solutions as well. So there's significant discounts available to nonprofits for getting to what you need as well. In terms of how to get started for those of you who might not already be on the Microsoft cloud or using a Microsoft cloud subscription there are a few things that you just need to know. One, you first have to get validated as a nonprofit so that you can be eligible for all of these fantastic donation and discounted offers. So to do that organizations do have to go to Microsoft they have a nonprofit portal there you can create an account that will automatically get validated for charitable offers. One thing to note is the person who is actually creating that account is by default the administrator. So if somebody is doing that and forgot to make somebody else the administrator that's the person to go to see who actually manages your account. By default the person who sets it up is the person who is gonna be the administrator on your account. You can always add more administrators that it is something to be aware of. Once you've gotten vetted and you have that what Microsoft calls a domain which is basically your Microsoft account you come to TechSoup and you can request any of the cloud subscriptions that you want. You can add that directly into your cart and go to our cloud manager select the licenses and quantities you need you can explore add-on options and once you have all that you can get your account set up and start assigning those licenses. You can figure out who you want to be the administrator on your account if you want that role to be provided to others and you can use that to download any desktop applications as well. That can be daunting for a lot of organizations particularly if you don't have somebody who is in an IT role or if you are just scrapped for time which many of us are. So we just want you to know that we are here for you. We understand that there are steps to migrating that there is cost and time to change in general and we wanna do whatever we can to make that easier for you. I also wanna note that many of you might already have Microsoft licenses and they might be directly with Microsoft or with another provider. You do not have to get your licenses through TechSoup for your Microsoft Cloud subscriptions. We hope you do because when you partner with TechSoup your help and whatever you contribute there actually helps us to support more events like this. It allows us to be able to provide a better level of support to you. So when you call us that we can actually see what's going on and support you better. A lot of times people are calling and saying I need help with this but we don't have visibility to it because you may have gotten the licenses directly with Microsoft or with another provider and unfortunately we don't have access to that. But when you come and get those licenses through TechSoup we can provide you a little bit more help and guidance through that process. And for all of those steps I just mentioned we are here to help you through the way. So if you need help figuring out what cloud solution might make sense for you we have a lot of resources but we also have a free cloud consultation available. You can sign up, you can get a cloud consultation you can work with a team member of ours who can walk you through what the right license might be for your organization. We also have services that help you with the setup and implementation so we can actually create and manage that account and put that together for you and give back the administrative rights to you. We also have managed services where we can manage that account for you moving forward. And then we have courses and things to help you actually migrate to a cloud environment if that's what you're looking to do as well. So wherever you are in the process don't feel daunted by it we have solutions and support and guides and ways that we can support you through it. And we also have communities that are going through this as well. All of you here today are a community in a sense of nonprofits that are seeking similar information. We have forums on TechSoup.org that can help bridge that together. So feel free to ask questions and learn from your peers as well. And then as I mentioned we have a ton of resources here the free consultation links to our courses as well as some of the blogs and content that we've put together to help you navigate some of these choices that are available to you and figure out the right next step for your organization. And what I'd like love to do now is just go into your questions. I'm sure there's tons of questions that have come in and I know we only have about 15 minutes. Some of the key questions that we hear a lot that we'll kick off with are what do I do if I don't have dependable internet connectivity? And as I mentioned throughout cloud subscriptions many of them include desktop applications that includes the donated Microsoft 365 business premium license and also the discounted licenses of business standard and Office 365 E3 license. So you can use those applications when you're offline and if you really don't want a cloud subscription or solution on-premises solutions are still available for you at either donated or discounted cost as well. We also hear a lot about the difference between Office standard or Office 2021 and Microsoft 365 business premium. We talked a lot about those differences today so hopefully that's a little bit clearer to you but I'll just say very simply Office standard or Office 2021 is a device-based license. It lives on the device that you're installing it on and the applications live on the device that you're installing it on. So if you're really trying to get more mobile or if you're trying to access what you're working on in different scenarios or different devices that's where a cloud subscription like a Microsoft 365 business premium will provide you a lot more flexibility. You'll get those same applications and get all of those apps that I talked about before you'll get Teams, you'll get collaboration you'll get the ability to use both online and offline versions. So to me there's a lot more you can get particularly out of the business premium license than you might be able to get right now with the standard license. And then the biggest question is can I mix and match? We talked about this for sure. We definitely recommend that you always think about the user roles for organizations that you need licenses for and figure out the right license for them because it can be a really great way to manage costs a little bit more effectively as well and get those donations to go further. So with that I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and get into everybody's questions today and thank you guys for your participation and patience and listening through all of this. I really do hope that this was a helpful overview for many of you. The first question we have was from Paul. Is there a way to get more than 10 free licenses offered by Microsoft for Microsoft 365 business premium? I know this was uploaded a bit. I think we talked a little bit about it but just to let you know you can mix and match. So if you get the 10 free business premium licenses you are still eligible to get some of the business basic licenses that are also available for free for up to 300 users. The licenses have a little bit of a difference where the business basic is only the cloud applications but if you're looking for that and that will serve your purpose you can still get both of those donated licenses. I'll also add if you are just looking for an on-premise you can still augment with some of the donated on-premise solutions as well. Gene DeVore asked, we have been using the business standard licenses for the past several years. What do we need to do to get our 10 free business premium licenses? Great question. Gene, you can do a couple of different things there. So if you're an organization who may have already received your licenses directly with Microsoft, you can either contact us and you can move those subscriptions to TechSoup and we can help you get set up with the Microsoft 365 business premium offer. Or if you choose to do that yourself you can go into your administrative center and you can actually request as long as you're an eligible nonprofit who has gone through the Microsoft nonprofit portal to be validated and eligible. Once you do that you should be able to go into your administrative center and add those licenses directly into your account as well. The big thing there is just making sure that you have gone through and registered and you are verified as an eligible nonprofit for Microsoft. As soon as you are then you'll see a lot of those offers available to you. Dwayne asks, should you still backup the data even if it's in the cloud? So Dwayne, that's a really good question and I think there are different ways that you can answer it. If you're already in the cloud if you're already using SharePoint Online if you're using OneDrive if you're using these tools you are already backing up your solution. So having a double backup or things like that might not necessarily be as valuable you are already having those. Some organizations like to have that to have a double failsafe or some other ways and there might be certain criteria of data or certain things that you want to store in different ways or restrict access that you might want to but essentially if you're moving to a Microsoft 365 solution you are getting all of that backup and recovery essentially as a part of the solution that you already have. There are other backup and recovery services available particularly if you're in an admin role that I think that's really dependent on your organization and the role your IT admin is doing in terms of backup. The other thing that might be something to consider there is if you have legal restrictions or things where you have to have certain levels of backup stored in certain ways where that might choose a specific license or a specific license type that might be more applicable to your specific solution. Again, if you have any questions on any of that in the email that we send we will send our email address as well so you can feel free to reach out to us directly and ask any questions. Katie asks, once you order your product through the nonprofit portal how do you distribute the product to your team? This is a really great question. One of the things and I'll just share my screen really quickly again that I just wanted to call out is that right here once you get your licenses it's not that you just like automatically can use it you actually have to set up your account and actually assign the licenses and so there's parts of this that's actually the administration of your subscription and being able to distribute those licenses to the organizations. We have a user guide I'm hoping it's in this resource here. I will add this resource before sending this to you but we do have a resource that is just a setup guide that'll walk you through with different screens on how to actually set up your licenses and assign those licenses. I'll add that link directly to these additional resources page and like I mentioned before we also have a service so if you want TechSoup to help do that for you you can request that service from us as well and we're happy to do that. Okay, the next question is from Jeffrey. Does Microsoft 365 Business Premium include a license for Windows 11 Pro? Really good question and a tricky one so I'm going to answer the best way I can here and you'll see there's a little asterisk here. So the Microsoft 365 Business Premium license technically comes with an upgrade to a Windows 10 or Windows 11 Pro. If you have already a Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 professional license available. So it is not an automatic upgrade if you have a home license or if you don't have an OS at all but if you have an existing Windows version of 7, 8 or 8.1 professional license then you can leverage the Microsoft 365 Business Premium to have Windows upgrade rights to be able to leverage that license and get a Windows 10 upgrade. The way the Windows 11 upgrades are working right now is really based off of your own desktop or your laptop solution and your hardware. So there is an opportunity for you to run a check basically to see if your hardware is compatible with Windows 11 and it's a free upgrade available to anybody who is eligible for it based off of your hardware and you can upgrade to that yourself. Okay, next question is from Jennifer. By law, we have very strict confidentiality requirements which exceed even HIPAA. What options are there for smaller nonprofits that have these requirements? And I see that Kevin answered some of these questions on chat but I just did want to call out that there are a lot of add-ons and a lot of different kind of ways that you can configure your licenses and add on specific things to make sure that there are HIPAA compliant ways you can still use a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 solution. There are many hospital systems and things that are using these solutions right now. So those ways to do that and configure your solutions exist but it does take a little bit of planning and management and evaluation of all of the different license things that are available. So hopefully Kevin answered some of the specific details but if you have questions on those I would definitely recommend signing up for a cloud consultation and we can walk through that a little bit more in detail with your specific organization. Amanda asks, what options do I have to switch from a Google workplace for nonprofits to a Microsoft or Office 365? That's a great question and that's something that a lot of organizations are asking or are dealing with. It depends really obviously as many answers do on how you're using the Google workspace today but if you're using the Google workspace for data management or if you're using the Google workspace and you have email we would probably suggest here an email and data migration to be able to port and manage and bring all of that over to your new workspace and Office 365 or Microsoft 365. We do have services that are available to help you through that and there are some do it yourself ability to do that as well. So if you have an IT administrator who wants to take that on or is able to there are ways that you can migrate your email and migrate your data to be able to transfer from a Google workspace to a Microsoft workspace or vice versa we see both happening and so we would just recommend thinking through that as a project and thinking through that as part of your cloud journey is that making sure that you think about the time or the resources that'll devote to actually doing that migration effort to make sure it's easier on your team to be able to work in the new environment. The next question is from Paul with the basic subscription I realized they're only cloud based only but those users cannot have an email address with Exchange Correct. I think Kevin answered this already in the chat as well. Depends on you can still leverage some of the outlook and the exchange server for emails and you can create on Microsoft.com emails as well so you can still leverage some of that it's based off of what you have existing and what domains you're currently using for your emails as well. Linda Woods asked how can I find out what's available to my organization? That's a really good question, Linda. So there are a few ways that I would say that you can do that. One is that if you have already registered and you're already eligible for nonprofit offers you would be able to come to TechSoup and you can see in your profile what you're eligible for. So if you're eligible for Microsoft offers you would be able to see all of the product solutions and cloud subscriptions that you're eligible for. If you still haven't gone through that process with Microsoft or you're not sure if somebody in your organization has already done that you can go to the Microsoft. It's Microsoft.com backslash non-profits and there's a part there that's getting started or sign in and you can go there and check if your Microsoft's account is already been created. You can log in with your credentials and see if you've already been validated or not. If not, we would recommend that you definitely go through that process and then once you're set up and once your account is verified for charitable offers then you can get access to any of these solutions that we talked about today. Anastasia asks, when sharing a file or folder with multiple users using cloud or OneDrive do all users have to sync all those files to their computers? In other words, do all users always keep recent copy of files that are in the cloud storage? I would say that it depends on what your users are trying to do. So if they're accessing something that is on Teams or accessing something that's on SharePoint it can live in SharePoint. They don't have to download that to be able to edit it. They don't have to download that or save it to their desktop to be able to save those changes. They can do those live right in that environment and it'll auto-save. As long as you're using the online subscription or version and you're doing things in the shared drive itself those are automatically gonna be syncing so you don't have to have download, copy, change your edits and then re-upload. You can do that all live and it might feel a little weird at first but all of that version history is actually tracked. So even if you're worried that somebody made an edit yet you didn't want to you can always go back in the versions and restore previous versions if you feel like you did not want somebody to do something. There's also ways to edit documents that are as suggestions or as edits. So I would say there's a lot of features that are available which makes it so you don't have to actually download those files yourself. I know there are a lot of other questions that are in the chat and hopefully that you've gotten some of them answered within the chat from some of our team members here today. I know we're at time right now. I wanna thank you very much for your patience and for your time today. I know that spending an hour with us is a lot of work for everybody to navigate and so I really appreciate it and I hope that this was a valuable session for you. Again, everything will be available, the recording as well as the slides within a few days so make sure to check your email and within the next few minutes you'll get an email with a survey which we really ask that you please fill out because it really helps us to know whether or not these are valuable or not for you or how we can improve them and thank you again for your time. I hope you had a great day.