 Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us for the Microsoft Cloud subscription for your nonprofit. I'm so glad you made it in today's webinar is designed to provide you a better understanding about the cloud and learn about Microsoft Cloud solutions that are available to your nonprofit. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. I want to go ahead and introduce our speaker today, Shruti Ramaswamy. She is TechSoup's Vice President of Strategy and Strategic Relations. She's responsible for the Microsoft program offers, and she worked closely with both nonprofits and Microsoft to ensure that the sector around the world is able to derive the most impact of our nonprofit program offerings. Prior to her work at TechSoup, Shruti was the technology consultant for IBM. Shruti is always a pleasure to learn from you, so I'm going to go get into it in particular. Thank you so much, Aretha, and it's great to have everybody here today. So what we wanted to do today is to spend a little bit of time to talk about the Microsoft cloud solutions and subscriptions that are available to nonprofits. But what we really want to do is focus on your questions. So we'll talk a little bit more about the cloud solutions are available. Talk about some upcoming changes that are going to be coming into play in the next couple of months and then really turn it to you to ask those questions. Before we get started, I just I know you all are here because TechSoup and you've heard of us in some capacity, but just in case this is one of your first interactions with TechSoup where you want a little bit more information. TechSoup is a global nonprofit. We are a charity ourselves and our mission is to connect other charities and nonprofits and civil society organizations around the world with the resources that they need and you need to further your own missions. So a lot of that is through the technology solutions, access to technology, but also the support and adoption of those technology solutions so that you can use that to your best mission advanced. We try to connect you with donated and discounted products and services. So that includes software, hardware, IT hotspots, courses and services, and so much more. We do that in partnership with over 400 corporations and foundations around the world who come together in the TechSoup kind of ecosystem to bring those offers to the sector. We try to make sure that at TechSoup we can help you no matter where you are in your stage of digital development. So whether or not you are on an installed software base or just looking for hardware at this point, or you're migrating to use more cloud subscriptions and need support either to manage your IT, to use some of the larger platform as service solutions like AWS or Azure, or if you're transitioning from stage to stage and need some help in migration. We are here to offer you help and support throughout this. What we'll do today is provide a lot of materials and background and education for you to be able to understand some of the resources that are available. But in the deaf, which will be sent to you as well as the recording, you'll also find curated resources. So tools, courses, some of our content that we've put together that can help you in making some of the decisions you might need to make or learning how to adopt new solutions. So I always like to start particularly on any type of discussion about what's available in cloud subscriptions, about what is all of the terminology that we're going to be using today. So particularly for Microsoft licensing that's available to nonprofits, there's two primary kind of solution types that are available. One is the on-premises solutions. So these are the solutions that you install onto your desktop that live locally on your machine. And then there are cloud subscriptions. And so what we're going to focus on today is that cloud subscription, but I think distinguishing between the two is always really helpful to just make sure that we're all speaking in the same way. So the first solution area I talked about was the on-premises solutions. On-premises solutions are typically that you pay for once. You download it and you install it onto your desktop or your laptop. There may be some patches and security patches that are available, but for the most part you don't really upgrade and you don't really get new features or new things on the installed version until you upgrade to the newest version or get a new license. These typical products here are things like your Windows operating system, your Office 2019 or Office standard that you're actually getting and downloading to your desktop. And there are two different ways or two different offers that are available to nonprofits in that on-premises solution. One is donations. And right now the only on-premises donations that are available for the most part are limited to the Windows operating system. And for those organizations that have computer labs or public access computers where multiple people are using the same machine, there are some donations that are available for them as well. So these are available on TechSoup with a small administrative fee. And then the vast majority of licenses that are available that are on-premises licenses are available by a discount. So Microsoft provides a charitable discount of up to 60 to 75% off of the commercial pricing. There's no quantity restriction here so you can get as many licenses as your organization might need. And they include both the premium and professional level software as well as some of the standard solutions. Right now these are available either through a license only so you can just get the license that you need. And there are also opportunities for you to get the license with something called software assurance. Software assurance is only for these on-premises licenses but it provides an additional layer of support as well as an opportunity to upgrade your license within a two-year period if a new version came out. So that's the on-premises side. You might have used that before. You might have that right now. You might continue to be using it. So what we're going to focus our discussion on a little bit more today are the changes and the offers that are available within the cloud subscriptions. So Microsoft offers many different cloud subscription products, particularly for nonprofits as well as for all types of industries. And a lot of what Microsoft develops, all of the kind of new capabilities, new features are really cloud-first. So the cloud subscriptions are subscription-based products that you usually pay on a monthly basis for. You can also choose to pay on an annual basis but really you have an ability to get the licenses that you need when you need. The cloud subscriptions because they are subscriptions, you are always going to get regular feature updates. So that license that you're paying for is an ongoing kind of update. So anytime there's a patch, anytime there's a security patch, anytime there's a new app that's developed, that's completely updated for you. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to take a new action. You don't have to get a new license as part of the Office 365 or Microsoft 365 Suite. You're going to get any of those product enhancements and product features in an ongoing basis. For the most part you're going to require a stable internet connection if you want to use those cloud-based solutions. So if you want to be able to share, to use things real-time, to collaborate, to use some of the teams or the live functionality, you will need an internet connection to be able to do. But many of the cloud subscriptions also include features where you can use downloadable apps. So it doesn't require you to have 100% connectivity at all time. But when you want to save it to the cloud, when you want to share things at that point, if you have internet connectivity, then you can update and get those features at that. Microsoft makes available both donated and discounted subscriptions for cloud solutions. And so we'll talk a little bit more about those in a few minutes and really you can mix and match. One of the things that I just like to make sure everybody understands is not everybody has to be off the same license in your organization. And actually you probably want to vary that based off of the uses that different people in your organization or your volunteers or staff members are actually going to use the licenses for. There might be staff members or team members that have IT administrative access who need more protection or more security features enabled at their licenses. There may be some volunteers who really just need access to email or access to share drives, in which case there are probably licensing that work for them. Another great thing about a cloud solution is that you can get it when you need it. If you have the need for additional licenses for a period of time if you guys are hosting an event or if you're an organization that has much more seasonal stability or instability in that way. You can add licenses when you need it and you can take away licenses when you don't. So you're really paying for what you need when you need. We talked a little bit about the differences between on premises and clouds. I'm not going to go over this too much, but there are obviously advantages and disadvantages to both. So our assumption is not that everybody should be necessarily on a cloud based solution, but there are a lot of advantages there. And that is where a lot of the donations as well as a lot of the product kind of innovations are going towards. It's really going to that cloud first models. There are definitely some benefits there. The costs are spread over time. You can have that ability to have flexible kind of pay as you go licensing and you can mix and match. That being said, it depends on your environment. If you're in an area that's really remote that you don't have stable internet connectivity, that might be harder for you to be able to use some of these subscriptions. Even if you can use the downloaded applications if you're requiring updates and things and you really don't have that. There might be absolutely reasons why you need to have an on premises environment and for many people having a hybrid. Some people have the cloud based solutions. Some people have some of the on premises environments and you just have to mix and match based off of what's the right solution for your organization. What we wanted to talk a little bit more about today is really there are so many different types of licensing options that are available and that Microsoft makes available. Sometimes it can be hard to distinguish what is out there, what's available for nonprofits and how to make the decision on the right license. That's for your organization or for your user group. We wanted to talk a little bit about that and what I'm also going to talk a little bit about is an update that's coming up. Microsoft is in the process right now and they announced that they will be making some pricing changes to some of these cloud offers. So really want to make sure that you're aware of those pricing changes to come. Especially if you have current licenses so that you can understand what that pricing implication will be for you as you move forward for your own budgeting. And if you are thinking about a cloud solution, thinking about how that might impact when and how you make that decision. So we talked a little bit about overall what the cloud solutions are. I'm going to spend a little bit more time today focusing on the productivity solutions, which is the Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Suite. That's also where some of the pricing changes are happening, but there are many other cloud solutions that Microsoft provides. That includes Dynamics 365 for some of the CRN solutions. They have platform as a service, so Azure. Azure also is available to nonprofits. There's a $3,500 credit that you can apply directly with Microsoft to get. And then on a yearly basis, you can use a credit of up to $3,500 for any of the services that you're using or consuming in Azure. There's also data visualization tools like Power BI, Power Platform that has an ability to have custom applications or custom workflows that you can build in. And I'll just note that some of the Power Apps and Power App features are also available within some of the Microsoft 365 suites as well. And then there's also the Windows 10 operating system and enterprise mobility and security, which is really thinking about identity security and device management. Again, I'll talk a little bit more about the productivity suites, because that's where many of the organizations focus on. But if you have questions on the other areas, we definitely have resources available to you to dig deeper into that. And if you have questions, feel free to put those in the Q&A. So Microsoft makes available multiple different versions of the cloud subscriptions for nonprofits. The Microsoft 365 umbrella of products that are available, we've highlighted a few that are the most used and most requested by an organization. The first one is the Microsoft 365 Business Basics solution. This is a solution in a cloud that is available for free for up to 300 users. So this is completely donated for up to 300 users, and it comes with Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, all of the kind of office applications that you're probably used to. Windows Excel PowerPoint, but these are only cloud services. So you would have to have internet connectivity to be able to use these solutions. This Microsoft 365 Business Basics solution does not come with the downloadable desktop applications. So the assumption is that you are working in an environment where you have connectivity to be able to use these resources. The second solution here that we've highlighted is the Microsoft 365 Business Standard License. This is a discounted license, and I'll talk a little bit more about the cost behind these in a second. But this license provides the same things as the business basic solution, but it also includes the desktop applications. So because it includes the desktop applications, you're also going to be able to get access and publisher, which are only install based solutions. And then there's the Microsoft 365 Business Premium License. We always recommend that organizations think about starting with a business premium license for a few reasons. One, it's probably the most robust offer that's available to nonprofits and the first 10 licenses are free, completely free. And so, particularly for organizations that need less than 10 licenses or smaller and have smaller staff, this is like definitely the most robust solution that's available as a donation for nonprofits. This includes everything that I talked about in the standard license, but it also includes additional security features and additional features for identity management, device management, and some of the conditional access that you can use with Azure. With this, you also get an upgrade if you are already using a Windows professional license, you can use this upgrade right to get the higher version. So if you're on a Windows 7 or 8, you can go up to a Windows 10 or 11. And I think one of the slides before said Windows 10, but you can get Windows 11 now as well, as long as you have hardware specifications, the upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows 10 is actually free. Okay. The next set of licenses I wanted to talk about were the Office 365 licenses. And I'll just note that many organizations have been or have used Office 365 for many years and the donation and the offers that were available to us five years ago is different than the offers that are available to us today. So many organizations might have existing licenses that are on Office 365 E1 or E2 license that was like the original donation license that was available. And so there are still many organizations using these licenses, but the Microsoft 365 is typically recommended for organizations under 300 seats. It's really based off of the business type product selection, whereas the Office 365 and the E distinction and the license is really meant for enterprise offerings so organizations that have over 300. The Office 365 E1 license is a discounted license. And that includes all of the things that we talked about before. So it includes teams, exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, but again just the cloud services only. So you do need an internet connection to be able to use that. The Office 365 E3 similarly to the Microsoft 365 solutions includes the downloadable applications and it also includes some additional security features that many organizations are looking towards and using as well. And then there's always an E5 license and E5 licenses are really for very advanced security needs where you want a lot more level of control protection and oversight of the data and identity and devices that you're using. These are all discounted licenses today, but there are historically organizations who have gotten E1 and E2 licenses as a donation and that's not necessarily changing. So if you have that historically as a donation, that's not changing, but as of today if you're getting a new license, these are all available as a discount. So I talked a little bit about the product areas and solutions. I just wanted to just say again the Microsoft 365 Business Premium solution is what we always recommend particularly if you're thinking about getting a new solution or adopting the cloud solutions. Just because it is available for free for the first 10, and it has a really robust amount of solution features in it, not only does it have office applications and email but it really has that advanced security that many of the other license types don't necessarily have. So what is changing and what are the pricing behind it. So what we wanted to do today is talk a little bit about a price update that Microsoft made available or announced a few weeks ago. So effective on September 1, so nothing happens today, but on September 1 or starting September 1, some of the Microsoft 365 and Office 365 pricing is going to be increasing. So right now the cost per license for anything above the 10 licenses for the business premium product is at $5 per license per user per month. That will be changing to $5.50 per license per user per month after similarly in the E1 license you'll see there's going to be a price update there so there will be an increase by 50 cents. People who are on Office 365 E3 licenses that price is actually going up by $1.25 so from $4.50 per license per user per month that goes to $5.75 and then the Microsoft E3 license is going to move from $8 to $9. A few things about this just to make sure that it's clear. So the changes are going to be effective as of September 1 or at the date of your next subscription term rental after September 1. So if you're getting a completely new subscription, the pricing after September 1 is going to be what's on the last column. If you have an existing solution, you have a price protection for a 12 month period. You are basically signing an agreement for a 12 month period. Even if you pay on a monthly basis, you have a subscription term for 12 months. So that will continue and you'll be locked into the rates that you currently have for a 12 month period, but it's based off of the date of that subscription renewal. So for example, if I got licenses today, my prices would be locked at the current rate until June 2, 2023 of next year. And then after that period, when my subscription is renewing, I would renew at the increased pricing that's available then. So if an organization just provided and got licenses, or if you've had licenses for many years, you have to look at that subscription renewal date to understand when those price increases will actually impact you. And we want to make sure that's clear and that you understand that because obviously for many of us, we're budgeting for the next year, we're budgeting in different calendar cycles. So we want to make sure that you're thinking about that as you're thinking about your budget for the next year or for the next few years as well. The other thing to highlight is the area in the great out portion, the vast majority of licenses are not changing their prices, including those that are available as a donation. So those that are free today, that is not changing. So the business basic license, the business premium first 10 licenses, that is still available as a donation. And as I mentioned before, if you have an existing E1 or E2 donation, that is not necessarily changing as well. Those are still going to be free. There's no change to that. It's really the pricing increases for the five products that I listed above. All right. So one of the questions obviously is why is Microsoft changing these prices? Why now? And so we just wanted to provide a little bit of background of this. One is obviously Microsoft continues to offer a pretty significant discount and they've had a pretty consistent discount actually for the nonprofit sector. So they have always had a 60 to 75% discount rate off of the commercial prices for nonprofits. And I think it was in March or actually probably earlier than that, that some of the commercial rates had already changed. So the products that we had mentioned, those are product changes that have already and pricing changes that have already been in place outside of nonprofit for a few months now. And really the key area of why they have the price increase right now is really because of enhancements that they've made. It's in several years since there's been pricing increases on the office 365 and Microsoft 365 solutions and Microsoft has added a ton of new features. Actually the Microsoft 365 solution in general is supposed to be an indication in some ways of so many different solutions, not just office that are. These include a solutions like Microsoft 365 or sorry Microsoft Defender Security, also audio conferencing and dialing across all of the solutions. All of the Microsoft and Office 365 solution also include teams for meeting software connections and they include a ton of different apps. One of my favorite things to do is take a look at if you go to likeoffice.com and look and log in and see all of the different suite of applications that you have. There are always new applications being added to your Office 365 suite that you can take a look at. So really the pricing is to justify and to be able to make and continue to make those product features and enhancements. And I would say that on the Microsoft side, it's been probably a pretty long while since they've made pricing changes to their paid licenses, but there have been some changes in what was donated, what was discounted and things like that. It does feel like a period of change for sure on the Microsoft side, but the actual product pricing has not shifted in quite. So what we're recommending and why we wanted to have this webinar today was for a few reasons. One, as we mentioned, we just want people to be aware of these changes to make sure that you can budget appropriately and make the right decisions for your organization. So that's first and foremost. The second is how do we prepare for this change, particularly if you already have a license. There are a few things that we would definitely recommend. One is to review the usage of the licenses that you have. So there's a link here and I will send these resources like we mentioned after the meeting. But there is a way that you can go into your admin center, your Microsoft 365 kind of dashboard and take a look at the licenses that you have, how many licenses you have and how often people are actually using the license. And that can be a really good indication number one to make sure that you are getting the right licenses that you need. And if there are licenses that are unused or people that are not using the licenses that you can remove them. So the first thing that we would say is just take a look at the current usage of the license. And you might also want to understand how are people using the licenses. If people are just using it for email, if people are only using it for certain features, there might be different ways or different licenses that you might want to recommend to recommend for your organization versus the current licenses that you have now. The other thing that we wanted to highlight is with the pricing changes that are happening in the past Office 365 E3 was actually a bit cheaper than the Microsoft 365 business premium license, particularly if you have less than 300 users. And so with the pricing changes, the pricing change on E3 is the most significant. And so if you have E3 licenses, you may want to take a look at seeing if the business premium license is actually going to meet your need. For the vast majority, the Microsoft 365 business premium license has most of the security features and most of the product functionality that E3 does. There are some differences, so you might want to check that out, but we want to highlight that specifically because the pricing on business premium is a little cheaper now. And then for those of you who may not have an Office 365 or a Microsoft 365 subscription and you're considering it or you've been thinking about it, we just want you to be aware of it because up until September, you're going to have one set of prices that you would be able to lock in for a one-year period. But if it's after September, then you're going to have slightly higher prices, again, that you would lock in for a year of pricing as well. Okay, and we're going to try to turn it over to questions in a few minutes, but just to make sure everybody is aware of how to request these licenses and where to get started. We just wanted to make sure that you are aware of some resources that are available to you. One is that we went over about six license types, but there are many more that we didn't go over. We have put together a tool, which is a Microsoft product recommendation tool, where you can answer two minutes worth of questions, five or six questions taught about your organization and how you use the licenses. And then we can provide a recommendation to you about what's the best license type that might be the best mix for your organization. So if you're trying to figure out and navigate which licenses to use, I definitely recommend that you start there. Hopefully we can put a link in the chat right now to that resource as well, but that is available to you. That's free. You can just take a look at that and get a little report that provides you some guidance on licensing that might be useful for your organization. The next thing we want to remind everybody of, and we've mentioned this a few times, but I always think it's helpful, is that there is a utilization requirement for anything that you're getting as a donation from Microsoft. So that includes the business basic license, E1 or E2 license that you have, or those 10 free business premium licenses. Microsoft has a requirement that if you are getting a free donation from them on the cloud subscriptions, that you have to at least be using those products at an 85% rate. So that means if I requested 10 licenses, at least eight and a half of my staff have to be actively using that license. And active use means that they're at least using one cloud solution or application over a 90 day period. So it's not that they have to use it every day or everybody has to log on at the same times or anything like that. Really, it's just making sure that they're able to distribute the donations to those organizations who really need it. And it provides them an ability to manage that cost a bit so that they can make that available to as many organizations as possible. We need a license. So I always like to make sure that everyone is aware of that because you might get emails, you may get questions about from Microsoft saying, hey, this is where you are on your utilization or your utilization seems lower. Are you still using the license? And we want to make sure you're aware of that. And we do have a few resources here, one to help you understand what your current utilization is and a guide to help you create those reports so you can manage that. For the most part, if you are using your license, if you are using email, if you are using SharePoint or Teams, I wouldn't necessarily be worried about this in any way. I would just, it's a kind of a way just to make sure that you're thinking about that as a decision we can criteria when you're looking at your licenses. And the process for requesting these cloud subscriptions, they've changed a little over the last couple of months. So we just want to make sure that we can provide this slide as a resource and you can ask questions about it. But there's a three step process basically to be able to get a cloud subscription. One, all organizations have to get validated for a Microsoft nonprofit account with Microsoft. So even if you've been validating and gotten multiple office standard licenses in the past. Now, if you want a cloud subscription license, you will have to go to Microsoft and create a Microsoft account. That account will be validated and deemed eligible for charity. But that Microsoft account is where you're going to be managing that cloud subscription, managing those licenses. So it's really important that you start there first is getting that Microsoft account and making sure that's eligible for nonprofit offers. Then once that's done, you can come provide us that information and then we can go ahead and create your cloud subscription and set you up and assign those licenses. We can have opportunities and ways to do that completely self serve so you can take care of that yourself or if you want any support through that process, we're actually we're happy to help you through that. And as I mentioned before, we're here for you wherever you are in that process. So if you have licenses and you've been using it for a long time but you want more or if you want resources to help your team members use it more effectively. We have training, we have content, we have a huge array of courses that are available to your staff and volunteers. We also have consultations and tools to help you get set up with the right licensing. We can also set up your Office 365 or Microsoft 365 account. We have set up implementation services. And if you're one of those organizations who are in the process of moving things to a different system or migrating, we definitely can help there. We have email and data migration services and upgrades available as well as ongoing support through managed IT services and help desk services. So I'm going to stop talking right now. I'll just make sure you're aware that there are tons of additional resources here. Again, these slides will be sent to you and so you'll have all the access that you need to these so you can take a look at it. Make sure that you're getting everything that you need and supporting and you'll have these resources so you can see all of the price changes as well. But I will stop sharing right now and start going to your questions. Okay. The first question we have for Michael, the nonprofit I work will receive the donation for Microsoft 365 Business Premium in July. The question is, what do I need to do to continue our donated subscription? Really good question, Michael. The way that most of the subscriptions work, particularly for the Microsoft 365 Business Premium, if you're looking at a donated license, usually it will auto-order. So for the vast majority of the licenses, if you've got them through TechSoup or if you've got them through Microsoft, those will auto-renew. You'll probably get an email notification saying that renewal is happening and you can either choose not to, but for the most part, it'll auto-renew. So there's no necessarily action that you have to take unless you want to add licenses, remove licenses or discontinue the subscription altogether. Karen asked, we have an Azure grant. How and will that change? And the answer there is actually the Azure grant is not changing from this at all. I think I lost you guys. The Azure grant itself is not changing. You will still have a $3,500 of credit that's available to you. The Azure process, you have to log, the Azure process, you do have to log in every year to request that and renew that for the next following year. So there is a process on the Microsoft. I think it's microsoft.com backslash non-profits. Once you log in to the Microsoft non-profit hub there, there are instructions for how to renew your Azure grant. That grant will continue to be available. There are no changes there. There's a question from Victoria. The difference between cloud subscriptions and regular subscriptions regarding access to documents and files if the internet goes down, access to documented files if the subscription ends, downloading to individual laptops. You can turn the install from a physical CD era and never understand this cloud access thing. That is a really good question. And there's not like one answer to it. So I apologize in advance that this is not completely answering it. But there's a few different ways that this works. If you are on a cloud subscription that is only cloud. So that was like the cloud services only. And you're not looking at using both a desktop application and a cloud based solution. What happens is everything is stored onto that cloud. Working on a document that's going to auto save everything that you're doing is auto saving to the cloud. And it's going to be able to be accessed and stored through either your web browser or your web application or mobile application. If the internet goes down, it is auto saving all of the time. So once your internet comes back up, you're going to be able to go back and see that file. There are also opportunities to have offline capabilities of them. So if the internet goes down or if you're on a plane, for example, you can continue to write and continue to work on your document. And once you are back online, it will sync and you can have, you can say I want to work offline. It'll save it and then you can sync it back to your online application as well. The other thing is you can download any of those files if you want you to keep it on your individual laptop or individual computer, but then you're saving it on your individual device. So if you take it and then work on it, edit it and it's fully locally saved. That's not going to automatically upload it into your cloud based solution, unless you're working on it in a cloud environment. So for me, I use a desktop solution plus the cloud solutions, but I have everything on my desktop basically auto saving or auto backing up to SharePoint. So everything that's basically on my device is also in a SharePoint file. So if my device broke down, which it did a week ago, it's not really hard for me to restore. I can get another device and in the meantime, I just have to log on to my office.com and get all my files from there because everything is auto saving to there. I very rarely save things only to a desktop because my laptop sometimes is unreliable. So that's how it works. If your subscription ends, that's a really good question. So if your subscription ends, there is depending on the license type, usually a 30 day period where you can always recover them and download them. So even if your subscription ends today, you will have a period of time where you can still access all of the old files that you have in order to store them and make sure that you can download those or library them to somewhere else that you want to save them. So it doesn't mean if you miss Piman or if you miss them, say that all of a sudden all of that is going to be gone and you've lost that you will have the ability to have an opportunity to back that up or to see that or to migrate it like I said to something else, which happens. So we have a lot of organizations that are either moving from a desktop solution or installed solutions to cloud or migrating a Google workspace to an Office 365 workspace or vice versa. And so through that period of time, you do want to save things to migrate them effectively. Okay. The next question is from Lori. Lori says, what do you recommend if you only want Word Excel PowerPoint and do not need OneDrive or email? Can the admin restrict users from using OneDrive? And is it possible to save Office 365 cloud software files to a Google Drive? I think Kevin and Marilyn answered some of these things in chat as well, but I'll just raise it again because I know it's a very important question. So you can definitely disable user access to OneDrive when you're creating roles and when you're creating and assigning licenses. You have opportunities to assign specific applications to users so you can control how organizations or specific users in your organization have access to applications. You can also choose to, you know, store your files in Google Drive if you want to. You can, if I am using a Excel file right now and I upload that to Google Drive, I can do that. You can use the Google let's you do that. And actually honestly, vice versa too. So if you have a Google document, you can, you know, download that as a Word document too. Most of them have some compatibility because there's an assumption and an understanding that many of us are using different platforms. The other thing I would just mention here is if you are only using Word, Excel and PowerPoint, there are a few other options available. You can and you might want to look at just the on-premises solutions where you can just get those specific functionality that's available as a discount. Or there is also another subscription product called the Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise. And that really only comes with those Office applications and it only comes with the downloadable versions of it. The other thing about that is though, it is still a subscription. So you are able to, you know, get any feature updates that are made to those solutions and you don't have to get upgrades to the licenses. So you're still paying per user per month, but they're just the downloadable applications themselves and it doesn't include any of the cloud-rich components. I know particularly if your organization is using, maybe you're using Google Workspace for a lot of your collaboration tools, you need Excel because Excel is what you use for your database or for, you know, the desktop Excel features. That's a good license as well to consider because it is the desktop-based solution that's available as a subscription so you can get any of the updates that come out. Okay. The next question is from Andre. How are on-premises licenses converted to cloud? Really good question, Andre. So right now there's not a direct conversion of those licenses, but there is compatibility and the ability to use those licenses together. And most of that is done through your user account itself. So if you have and you're using an on-premises solution, you can also have a cloud subscription. And you can choose to sync those so that you can have your on-premises account, sync or back up and use the storage that's available on your cloud account. Many organizations have that hybrid, but if you are just looking to convert it, it's different licensing. So there's not a way to just say, like, my existing on-premise account becomes your cloud solution, for example. You would have to get a separate cloud subscription and have that available to you, and then you can definitely interface and use those two products together and conjunct. Tony asks, do Microsoft cloud-based solutions featured in today's presentation function the same way with the iOS environments? Great question. I forgot to mention that. And yes, there are some feature differentiations, but for the vast majority and for the most part, the cloud-based solutions operate on both windows and iOS platforms. And Mac devices. Brad asks, we have many Mac on-premises installs. Will we need to go with the cloud offerings to go forward? There are still the office standard for Mac. There are still solutions that are available in the on-premises install version that are available for Macs. And all of the cloud subscriptions are both for Windows and Mac as well. So you can still choose, and it doesn't necessarily limit the stuff of the operating system that you're currently using. Suzanne asks, there was a question in chat. I think there was a slide on slide nine that said Windows 10. And the question was what about Windows 11? And I think I mentioned this, so I apologize. But yes, Windows 11 is the most current Windows operating system. And so anything that includes an update or an operating system should really be Windows 11. I just want to caveat there that the Windows 11 is only available for those who meet the physical hardware requirements. I say that only because I don't know about some of you, but as a nonprofit ourselves, we use a lot of refurbished machines. Some of the hardware devices are a little bit older and so don't necessarily meet the specifications required for the Windows 11 upgrade. In that case, you can still use the Windows 10 upgrade. And if you have Windows 10, you can actually check for free online, whether or not your organization or your device is actually eligible for the Windows 11 upgrade. If it is, you're able to go ahead and get that for free yourself. Sarah Tucker asks, are E2 the same license as E1? Very good question. Yes, essentially E2 is the same license as E1, particularly what was available for organizations as a donation. The E2 license was, I think, the first donation, Office 365 license, probably in 2013 that was available to nonprofits. Over time, that E2 name and the E2 product itself has actually been retired. So now it's all consolidated into the E1 license or the E3 license. But essentially the E2 and the E1 have pretty much similar license functionality. Carolyn asks, what is the difference between Microsoft 365 business and Office 365? Both are cloud, both have the same apps. Completely right, Carolyn? The real differentiation, as I talked about before, is that the business licenses are really meant for organizations under 300 seats or under the need of 300 licenses. So Microsoft 365 business has a cap of 300. You cannot get over 300 seats, whereas Office 365 does not have that cap. And so you can get more than those licenses if you need them. Franco asks, could you mix business premium Azure-controlled computers with business standard users? I think this was also mentioned in chat, but you can definitely mix and match the poor licensing to match a organization's needs. So you can get some business premium licenses. You can get some business basic. You can manage all of that through one centralized kind of Azure Active Directory. And you can be able to look at your Microsoft 365 admin center to assign specific users to specific licenses as well. Daryl asks, how do you recover documents from a former employee's OneDrive whether email no longer exists? Daryl, that is a very good question. There are different ways that you can do document recovery, particularly if that user profile still exists on your admin center. And there might be ways that you have already basically set up your rules to have auto archiving in place. So it depends on your own setup a little bit, but maybe if you can put your email in chat, we can reach out to you and try to help with your specific issue and walk through that a little bit. There's a question from George here. Are we able to include people who are outside of our organization in things such as teams or sharing documents via share space? Great question, George. So you are able to add guest users and guest access to your teams. That has to be set up and enabled from your admin. So if you're the administrator of your Microsoft 365 account, you can allow guest access and allow guest users. And you may choose to restrict that ability to only certain people in your organizations or you might want to let everybody be able to do that. And once you do that, you can invite somebody as a guest into your team's environment. And basically in teams, you can denote where and which channels that guest would be invited to and what access that they would have. But you are able to do that similarly for a share point link or things like that. When you're sharing, there are settings that you can say you can share this externally. You can share this with guests or that you can choose to share it internally within your active directory. So you can do that depending on where you are, either through teams or through the specific and native environments that you're working on, whether that be SharePoint, Excel Online, PowerPoint, Online, etc. John McCarthy had a question. When I tried to add a new user and choose the nonprofit portal, it showed that there was a trial version. Why is it a trial version? Also, it shows that I have access to 10 premium and 25 nonprofit portal. What if we need more? This is a really good question. So there is like a trial license that just says nonprofit portal. That actually doesn't have a license associated with it. It's really just access into Microsoft's like nonprofit hub area where you can go in and see all of the different nonprofit offers that are available. But that itself does not actually provide any like Office 365 or Microsoft 365 licenses. It's the other than maybe like the trial version. So if you actually need more licenses, there's a few ways you can add a subscription. And when you're searching for those subscriptions, you want to search for the subscriptions that have the nonprofit staff pricing associated with a nonprofit or if it's for volunteer use in parentheticals in the name because that's the one that will have the discount or the donation. So if you already have the business premium license and wanted to add more, you can add that as a subscription as a paid discount subscription and then add the quantity of licenses that you want. So that nonprofit portal itself is not a subscription. And if you want more, like adding more of those licenses isn't going to give you more of the license that you actually need of the subscription you actually need. So you're going to have to add that particular subscription level product that you want and then add the quantity of licenses within that subscription itself. Marianne, I need HIPAA compliance. So should I stay with an eight level? That's a really good question, Marianne. We typically, we've seen many organizations who have to be HIPAA compliant, gravitate towards those licenses that have some of those additional security features that can make it easier to manage against the HIPAA security compliance rules and functionality that you need. So E3 is obviously a license that has that E5 has that as well. I will say that Microsoft 365 business premium may have the features that you need in order to look at that. So I would definitely take a look at that license to business premium has many of the security features that you might need to be HIPAA compliant and similar to the E3 license and we've recommended that in the past. These also a Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 solution suite. So outside of the business premium, probably the enterprise uses where you need to stay, but I would definitely take a look at the business premium. Particularly now the pricing is going to be a little bit more competitive to the E3. Our business uses desktop computers for daily work. Excuse me. If someone uses their personal laptop to work at home, does their desktop and personal laptop each need a license? Great question. And I probably should have said this before. So thank you for reminding me a cloud subscription can be used on up to five devices. So I use I have a Microsoft 365 account. I can use that on my laptop. I can use that on a desktop if I have one, but I do use it on my mobile device. I can use it on and that means I can install some of the desktop products on up to five ways up to five devices. But if I'm just using the web browser, so I can go to a library if I want to and log into my office 365 account or log into my office 365 account for my personal computer, I can do that and gain access to everything through the cloud solution as well. So you do not have to license per device the same way that you have to license per device on the on premises installed type of software. When you're talking about cloud subscriptions that is not device specific. It's based off of the user themselves. So whatever device that user is using, they are able to access their files, their work, where everything Wayne asked on the utilization requirement question. Microsoft require reporting from admins. No, Microsoft is not requiring reporting for any of the admins. It's really it's one of the things that you're actually like selecting as you get a license that you're agreeing to the terms and agreement. But it is part of the terms of using a donation license. And so there's not a specific reporting requirement that admins are required to do. Microsoft does like the kind of auditing on their own and they will send notifications to organizations where they feel like the utilization is not being met to give them an opportunity to right size their license or to explain why they can't utilize it for right now. But there's not a specific reporting requirement on the admins. The tools and the usage guides that we've provided are really just to provide visibility on how you can take a look at that. If you're worried about it or if you're thinking about your own compliance in any way, but I wouldn't necessarily say that you have to create or do your own reporting on or have to send that back to Microsoft. Anita asks is VoIP telephony available for organizations using business premium licenses. There are what plans available. I need I'm not sure if you're in the US that's definitely available. It depends on your country because obviously it's tying into existing plans that exist and phone plans that might exist and that's a country by country specific, but there are telephony plans available. There's also the audio conferencing dial in options that are available if you're just using it for meetings or if you're using it for teams integration. But if you actually want to integrate your current telephony system with business premium licenses that functionality is available that it's add on there's some additional pricing involved in that. But if you're interested, you can definitely reach out and we can talk through some of those options. Okay. The next question we have, excuse me, is from Christine. What are the limitations to acquiring a license? I applied for Microsoft through TechSoup but was declined because we are a nonprofit pro life pregnancy center. Christine, great question. So there are eligibility rules and areas for every single almost every product that we have so especially those that are managed or that are Microsoft programs or a Google program or Adobe, all of our program donors have their own goals. Typically, you can see the eligibility requirements on the TechSoup website. You can also see it on either the Microsoft or whatever product solution you're looking for website as well. I'll put that link within the chat as well so you can see it. So it depends on the program type. So every different program that we have has different rules. They're not always the same. Some organizations have some more constraints. Some organizations have fewer constraints and they all are dependent on their own programs. I think particularly on health areas and their education and the government, there's a lot more in terms of the ability to have like a clear definition of any nonprofit that's a 501C3. You also have to have specific mission objectives that align with the program and donor rules. I'll pop that into chat here but that's a really good point for seeing. So just because you're a nonprofit or just because you're a nonprofit that is eligible or on the TechSoup platform doesn't necessarily mean you have eligibility for every single product. There's no program offering that is in there because many of our programs have their own rules. Orace asks, I enrolled for Microsoft 365 and received an email from Microsoft approving my organization but we were unable to complete the enrollment. Email sent to TechSoup but no one ever reached out. I'm sorry about that. But if you can send us your email in the chat here, I'm happy to reach back out and see how we can help. If you are able to go into and you have I'm approved for Microsoft. A lot of times if you're trying to come back to the TechSoup site, we just need to make sure we have that specific account information and that on the back end everything is approved as charity as well as you approving us as a provider. So Microsoft doesn't allow us to provide you licenses until you tell them that you want to allow TechSoup to do that. So it's really for your own protection and privacy. But until we have all of those kind of things checked off, we're usually not allowed to be able to provision the licenses. But I apologize for the delay and reaching out but happy to make sure that your issue gets resolved. I think we probably have a question number for another couple of questions. Carolyn Carson asked, how is Azure Credit actually applied because it applied and it was awarded but never applied to our invoices. That is a really good question, Carolyn. Microsoft actually manages the direct management of the Azure grant itself. I will click in the area where you can go to to learn more about how to apply that Azure credit. And if you have more questions on that or you're not seeing it applied to your bill, you can also go to the Contact Us page on Microsoft's nonprofit site and they should be able to provide you with more help and support on that. Okay, and I think we have probably time for one last question. Lori, sorry, Heather asked, what's the best way to request an update from Microsoft 365 Business Basic to premium? We have older apps but we want to have the desktop apps instead. We would say there's two ways I would answer this. I think Marilyn already responded with one. If you have your licenses through TechSoup, you can log into your cloud manager and you can just add those business premium licenses to your account. And once you do that, you can assign your users to that business premium license and then unassign them from the applications. They're no longer using and remove that subscription. That's pretty much a similar process. If you have your licenses directly with Microsoft, except you would go to your Microsoft 365 administrative center to do that. All right. So I know that there are many questions that we did not get to. It wasn't too many and that you got some of your questions answered in chat. I will also say thank you so much for everybody for joining us today. It's super helpful for us to hear your questions and we want to be here as a resource for you.