 We will do our best to answer all of your questions, but I will give a brief overview about what Microsoft offerings are, and I know that there are a lot of questions about that, a little bit of overview of what Microsoft makes available to the nonprofit sector, and talk a little bit about how you can interact with those and some of the changes that are coming up, particularly in the next few weeks regarding the program. So before we get started, I know that you all know a little bit about TechSoup because you're here today, but we are gonna focus a lot today on the Microsoft solutions and offerings, but TechSoup, our mission as a global nonprofit ourselves is really to connect you and the sector at full to donated and discounted products and services, but really to help you in your technology adoption because we wanna make sure that you get all of the tools that you need and the flexibility you need to be able to conduct your missions. So we offer software, hardware, both new and refurbished. We have courses, we have mobile hotspots that are very in demand, and we also have IT services, including IT consults and managed services if you need that as well. We work in partnership with over 400 corporations and foundations who help provide that technology that we have and funding opportunities that we have that we can make available to the community. And we're here to support you no matter where you are in your technology journey. So if you are still using traditional desktop solutions and you're looking for install software, or as you're migrating and trying and adopting new solutions to maybe a fully cloud-based solution, we're here to support you throughout that journey. So whether that's access tech technology, resources to help you get the most of that technology or managing that technology on your behalf, we're happy to help you and our mission and our goal, like I said is to really make sure that we're available to support you in your own technology adoption. So as I mentioned, we're gonna talk a little bit about the Microsoft program and many of you may have received emails or seen other webinars that we've done particularly about the Microsoft program changes. So I wanted to talk about that first. Those are coming through in the next few weeks. Talk about that impact and then spend a little bit of time talking about what offers are available for the nonprofits. I also wanted to point out and we'll talk a little bit about this in the Q and A as well is that public libraries have a little bit of difference in terms of the availability of the program. So if you are a library, some of this information may not fully apply to you but I'm happy to answer questions on that once we're finished up as well. So the first thing to note is that on April 4th we will be changing a few of the product availability. So on that date, Microsoft is really shifting to a cloud first donation program. And so traditionally they have offered a lot of donations in the on-premises or desktop solutions. So that's like office standard, office professional or server licenses or Windows server themselves. And those products will still be available to nonprofits but they will only be available at a charitable discount. All of the donations that Microsoft will make available will be primarily in their cloud solutions. And we'll talk a little bit more about what those cloud offers are and how you can use them as well. You still, if you need any of those on-premises solutions like I said, they will still be available but until April 4th you have an opportunity to request those at the current donation admin fees and administrative fees are fees that TechSoup uses to be able to provide the operations for our sustainability as well as to provide the ability for us to put on programs like this and create education and actually be able to create the courses and the services that you need to adopt the solutions. With that and I'll talk a little bit more about what exactly those products are that will be moving to a discounted model. But as I said, none of the products are fully going away. You'll still have the ability to request those licenses moving forward. But we wanna make sure that you're aware of these changes because if you request them after April 4th there will be a higher cost associated with it. Typically Microsoft makes charitable discounts available at 60 to 75% off of their commercial pricing. So it's still a significant discount but it is a higher rate or higher cost than you might be currently budgeted for or currently used to for some of the on-premises solutions. There'll be a few things that you will still be able to get on an on-premises solution that will be available after April 4th. One of them is a new Windows Pro license. That license is actually not yet available but in April we'll be launching a new Windows operating system license that will be fully donated and it'll allow organizations to upgrade their operating system. And obviously that is gonna be necessary to use many of the cloud solutions that are also donated. So that will stay as a donation within our catalog of offerings. And for those organizations and nonprofits that need on-premises licensing to serve public access computers. So organizations that run computer training labs or have community access points that they're hosting they will be able to qualify for additional on-premises licenses that can be made available as a donation. This does not impact any of the current cloud donations. So if you're on an existing donated cloud license like Microsoft 365 or Office 365 that is not changing at all. This change is really only for desktop solutions. And so I'll talk a little bit about the differencing in terms of what is changing. So right now Microsoft offers a few different opportunities to engage with their software. One is the on-premises solutions. On-premises solutions are those solutions that you buy once or you purchase or you request once. And then you own that license forever. So they call that a perpetual license. With typically with those licenses you're downloading it to a desktop or to a specific device. So your licenses are device based. So if you've got another laptop or if you've got another computer you would have to get an additional license for that additional device. With these there are some upgrades available in terms of patches and security releases. But if a new version of the product were to come out you would normally or typically have to buy a new license to get that upgrade. These traditionally and right now are available as both a donation for some of the standard products. It's also available as a discount as well. And like I said there's a standard 60 to 75% off of discounted rate off of the commercial prices. And the other thing in the donation program that you might typically be used to is there have been quantity restrictions where you could only request 50 licenses of those products. Now until April 4th those still are in our catalog at that donation rate. After April 4th what you'll see here is it's really just the operating system that's available as a donation and everything else in that bucket of on-premises moves to a discounted model. There will be unlimited licenses that you can get as many licenses as you need of these products. You will be able to get both the standard level like office standard or professional if you need those upgraded licenses as well. And you'll also be able to choose whether or not you get a license only or if you get a bundle with software assurance. Software assurance is typically a three year benefit that comes with your license that allows you free upgrades during that period of time or that three year period in case a new version does come out. Microsoft also offers all of their cloud subscriptions. So that's what you get in this blue bucket here. And on the cloud subscriptions these are paid subscriptions or the donated subscriptions that you can have on a monthly or annual basis because they're subscriptions you're subscribing to ongoing updates. So you never really have to upgrade your license you don't have to necessarily get the newest version of the product because those are automatically updated. You're getting all of the feature updates as they're created and as they're built out and most of the development and most of the new features that Microsoft is working on is really rolled out into their cloud solutions as soon as they're ready versus having like yearly or every two years like one big release. So you get a lot of functionality a lot of different applications that you can use in that cloud subscription. And I'll talk a little bit about more about this but all of the cloud subscriptions really have the same functionality for the most part as what you have on your on-premises solutions but there are some additional benefits usually with that which include the updates that you get a lot more applications that you're gonna get within the Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suite but what you'll need with the cloud subscription is going to be a consistent internet connection. You don't necessarily have to have a consistent internet connection to use the applications all the time but you will need that consistent connectivity to be able to get those updates to share those if you wanna do collaboration within the suite of solutions that they have or use some of the specifically cloud-enabled features you will need internet connection for that. Many of the licenses and subscriptions that are available as a cloud license include downloadable and desktop applications and I'll highlight that in the differences as we go through those cloud offers but as Microsoft retire some of the on-premises donations most of those features, most of the functionality that you would get are already available as a donation within the cloud solutions as well. The cloud subscriptions are available both as a donation and a discount and I will talk through the specific licenses that are available as both a donation and a discount and what features are available. One of the important things I always think to call out is just recognizing that you can mix and match. You do not have to have everybody in your organization have the same type of license and there are a lot of types of licenses. Super clear and it sometimes can be quite confusing given how many choices there are so we'll try to make that a little bit easier for you today and we'll definitely provide you some resources to show you kind of the differences between them but there are people in your organization who might be volunteers or might be certain staff members who only need certain levels of applications or certain access to certain things. You can get basic licenses for them and then you might have somebody who's playing an IT administrator role or your ED who might need a lot more functionality and you can get additional licenses for them and it doesn't mean that you can't have both of those license types and that can be really helpful when you're obviously trying to budget and trying to use some of the donated and discounted mixes but it's also really helpful because you are paying as you go so if you have an organization that has a group of volunteers come up in different time periods you can request additional licenses for them at that swell of time and then deactivate it when you don't need it so you're not necessarily having to pay only for your peaks you're able to do that as you need them. So there's a lot more flexibility with the cloud subscriptions but the key distinction obviously between the on-premises and cloud is also that the cloud licenses are user-based licenses. So they go with the individual and they can be used on up to five different devices but for example, if I were to use an Office 365 license I'm logging into my personal account or my Office 365 account I can use that account and sign in on that account on my laptop, on my phone if I had a desktop I could do that too but it's assigned to a specific user it's not assigned to a specific desktop. So if you have a desktop or a computer lab in which you really can't have different people have their own accounts then you might be really thinking about an on-premises solution where you can have something that's more of a device-based license. So I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the process for requesting and accessing your products because that process has actually changed since January on the TechSoup side and with Microsoft as well many of you who may have already gone through this process may have had some troubles or just been surprised by the complexity that exists now. So I wanted to just make sure that you're aware that the process that we used to have on our site where you could just add a product to your cart and move on the first time you do it after this past January looks a little bit different that's because Microsoft in the end of December had retired one of their long-standing kind of licensing platforms which we used to use to distribute the Microsoft on-premises licenses and now all of that is moving to one of their standard licensing platforms which is called the Cloud Solution Provider Platform. And with that change the fulfillment had to change on the backend as well and how we distribute the licenses to you and how you access and download the licenses has also changed. So now if you want to request any product or a Microsoft product from us you're going to first need to have a Microsoft non-profit account created and validated as eligible for charitable offers. We have links to that and we have guides created so that can help you through that process. And that account that you create or that account that you already have will also be used to actually send the licenses too. So you will log into that account and you can actually directly download the licenses from your Microsoft 365 account. So if you're getting any of the donation offers you will be doing that directly through your Microsoft 365 administrative center and you'll only really be using the volume licensing center which we used in the past if you have older licenses or if you're getting any licenses with software assurance. That process for downloading because you're going to get that from your admin center you're going to be able to download it directly from your admin center function itself. And one thing to call out here is that you'll have five days to download that software that you requested. If you go beyond that five days you can still request that to us we can generate a new link to you. And you can also download it and have the files installed but one the installation later because I know that's something that people request. I know I'm going to get a laptop in a couple of months but I need to get that product now. You can do that, you can request it and either you can ask us to regenerate a new link for you or you can download the installation files and then just install it at a later time period. The other thing to note is particularly if you are an organization that has been with us in the past the traditional donation on premises products used to include software assurance that no longer is the case. Software assurance is only available as a discounted offer for new bundles of software that you might request. So the donation licenses that are available today do not include software assurance and are just for the licenses themselves. So I'm going to spend a little time just talking about all the cloud offers and I saw a bunch of questions that people had just trying to understand what offers are available from Microsoft. The first suite of offers I wanted to go through were the Microsoft 365 ones. Microsoft 365 is a suite of solutions that provide a lot of some of the basic office applications that you probably know and use and each of these licensing types have different kind of functionality with it. So the first one is Microsoft 365 BusinessBasic. This is a cloud solution only so you would have to be connected to use any of these services. These are free for up to 300 users and includes Exchange, Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, all the things that you probably use on a day-to-day basis but they do not include desktop applications. So it's really only on a web browser or only through cloud solutions. There's also the Microsoft 365 Business Standard license. This solution is $3 per license per month for up to 300 users and that includes the cloud solutions as well as the downloadable desktop applications. So you get the same suite of offers but you also get publisher and access and all of those applications like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, you can also download and use them offline as well. And then the other license that I always want to highlight to everybody because I think it's one of the best offers out there and particularly for organizations who are looking for cloud solutions, I always recommend that you start and use the Microsoft 365 Business Premium licenses. These are completely free for up to 10 users and then if you have additional licenses you can either choose to get more at $5 a license a month or you can mix and match if you want to manage your budget and think about if you need a business standard or basic license for the additional staff members that you have. But the Microsoft 365 Business Premium license covers everything that I had previously talked about. It includes cloud and desktop applications but it also includes security features including Intune, some of the features that you may have gotten in the older enterprise mobility solutions and security management. So it does a lot of things for access management, device management and it also includes the rights to upgrade to Windows 10 or Windows 11 Professional if you've already had Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1. So it's a pretty comprehensive suite of offering and because it's available for free for 10 users and you can mix and match, I always recommend that organizations start with that so you can get all of the suites of offers that are available and if you have additional license things you can mix and match for the rest of your team. There is also additional licenses that are available to nonprofits under the Office 365 suite and the distinction between Microsoft 365 and Office 365 is vague but really the Office 365 licenses and these are the ones with the E1, E3, E5 and some of you might even be on an older retired E2 license were typically enterprise licenses so they were ideal for organizations that had over 300 people but if you have less you can still use it but they're typically more suited for larger organizations. All of these licenses are currently available at a discounted rate, none of these are available as a pure donation but the Office 365 E1 license which is just cloud services is available at $2 per license per month. This was something that many people previously had as a donation. If you have this as a donation it is not going away, your price isn't going to change. It's just if you've never requested this before it's now available only as a discount so for those people who had received this as a donation in the past your grandfathered into that so it's not like that will change for you and that's the same for the E2 license as well. There is a cap on those licenses so you cannot go above 2,000 of those licenses as a donation but if you can still add if you have a donation on those licenses or subscriptions as well. There's also an Office 365 E3 license and a lot of times we see organizations who have needs for additional security who are working with sensitive data get this product because it does have some inherent security features within it and at $4.50 per license per month it can be a cost effective solution to get versus the business premium license which is a little bit more costly. And then for really advanced security features there are E5 licenses as well as Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 licenses as well. These are really for incredibly complex more complex security needs so they include Azure information protection some of these include Power BI as well so the more you need there are definitely suites of software available as well. I also wanted to note like I said it's pretty all of them are named the same thing they have really different like just small little distinctions between them so it is confusing and we totally understand that. So we've created a PDF here and we'll share this link obviously with the resources that we have. So you can take a look at it and understand what license might be best for you. We've actually also created us a wizard so you can answer a few questions about your organization and we can recommend a license type for you as well to help you make that decision a little bit better for your organization. The key distinctions that we recommend thinking about is what are your security needs how many licenses do you need what applications are you most needing and using and what's your environment, right? Are you going to be somebody who has the ability to be connected might you not be having an internet connection all the time and what is your mix of staff and volunteers because Microsoft's donated solutions are only for paid staff and their discounted licenses are really more for volunteers. Here's a little snapshot of the tool you can click this link when you get there and you can use that tool to navigate the solutions and take a short little two minute kind of question answer and then we can recommend some licenses for you as well. What we want to do today is spend more time on your questions and I'm sure there are plenty of questions that are coming in. We've done this a few times and we've gotten many questions from organizations all over the world and we have a few of the top questions that we've received that I'll start off with and then we'll get directly to your questions from today. The first question that we get is are there any changes to my existing software licenses? So if I have a office standard license today what's going to happen? And those are perpetual licenses. So the answer is nothing is going to happen to your existing licenses. You can still use any of the existing licenses that you have. They will be available to you as long as you need them and as long as you want to use them. If you have software assurance benefits on them those only usually last for about two years so they might expire but the licenses themselves will not change. The changes that are happening and are coming in place are really if you're requesting any new licenses. So it will not impact any of the existing licenses that you have. The same is true for the cloud licenses. So the changes that we talked about today that are going forward on April 4th will not impact any of your cloud licenses or any of the current cloud pricing that you have. You can still use the cloud subscriptions that you have you can still add to it and things like that and it will not change that. One of the big questions obviously is what if you don't have dependable internet connectivity and that's not always a given in many of the places that nonprofits are or that the communities that they serve. And so I just wanted to stress again that the on-premises solutions will still be available to nonprofits after April 4th. It's just that there will be a price differential so there's a charity discount level for it and so we wanna make sure everybody is aware because we all know that budgets can be very tight at nonprofits as well. And then cloud subscriptions like I mentioned particularly the Microsoft 365 business standard or business premium license and the Office 365 E3 license they all include downloadable applications. So you can use them while you're offline but if you want to use some of the cloud features or if you wanna save things through the cloud or if you want all of those updates you will have to log in and have some sort of connection or stability at least infrequently to be able to get the most out of it. The question that I had anticipated earlier on that I just wanted to flag is how our libraries impacted. So during those fulfillment changes that happened that Microsoft put in place at the end of December part of that was that libraries actually are no longer eligible for the nonprofit charitable offers. Instead libraries are eligible for academic discounted offers and those academic discounted offers include both the desktop solutions for public access computing and cloud solutions. Right now we're gathering your requests for solutions if you are a public library to help you but that process is taking a little bit of time to get through and we are working with Microsoft to figure out how we can get public libraries qualified and eligible on the Microsoft side for those academic licenses. But once you're through that we can certainly help you and distribute those academic licenses to you. The other question that we get a lot is what if you need more than the five days to download the on-premises software? And like I said, we can always help generate that new link for you and you can download your software when you're ready for it. And then if you already have a donation offer of E1 or E2 like I had mentioned before so that's the Office 365 E1 or E2 license that is not going to change. You can continue to use these licenses as a donation. There is a cap of 2000 like I mentioned and there is also a utilization requirement. And Microsoft does have a requirement that for organizations who are using the donated licenses that includes the two licenses, Business Basic and Business Premium as well as the older E1 and E2 licenses. If you are using those licenses, Microsoft has a utilization requirement that says that at least 85% of those assigned licenses, the licenses that are assigned to a specific user need to be used and the usage is defined as at least using one cloud service once every 90 days. So really they're putting that rule in place just to make sure that you actually need the licenses that you're requesting and so that they can make more offers available to the sector. Because each time people use those licenses, they're incurring costs for it and so they just want to make sure that those are actually spread and managed across those who are really needing that license at that time. And I do want to just flag there is just because you might not be using it, you don't necessarily have to assign a user to it. So if you're an organization who has 10 Business Premium licenses that you've requested but you're only using three of them right now, you could only assign three of those licenses and it's really just those three people that need to be using it. It's at the time of assignment of those licenses. So if you're waiting for your fourth member of your team to come on or a fifth member of your team, as long as you don't assign those license, then you should be finding our utilization. And we have some resources in here that'll help you through that and understand how do you calculate your own utilization or what are some ways to make sure that you are mindful of that. But for the most part, I wouldn't necessarily worry about it. Microsoft will send you an email if they feel like you're not meeting that utilization requirement and you can take a look at your account and make sure that you're managing those licenses at that point. One thing I also wanted to point out here, this is not really a question, but one of the things that we're seeing a lot of people struggle with is the new kind of process to link your Microsoft account with your TechSoup account so that we can actually distribute these licenses to you. With the new fulfillment, we have that new process in place. And so this slide, I would just bookmark it when you get it if you're placing a request for any new product on our site and you're running into problems or running into questions, this is a good source for you to be able to look at and understand how to troubleshoot it. The key things to note is you need to make sure you have a Microsoft nonprofit account that's already validated as eligible for nonprofit offers that you have your account name and that you know what that is and you can access that. And one tip that I will just say is the person who created the account is usually by default the administrator of that account. So unless that default user has changed and provided the admin privileges to somebody else, that's usually the person who is going to be your default administrator. So once you actually create your Microsoft nonprofit account and give us that information, then we can go ahead and distribute the licenses to you. One other thing there is you're gonna need to go into your account to get those licenses, but you'll also need to go into your account to accept TechSoup as your provider so that we can distribute that to you. Like I said, we know that's been a little bit challenging and it's just new and different and it's not as quick. Once you do it once, we won't ask you for that information multiple times. So it's really the first time that's a little bit more of our verbal and then after that you should be good. But we have created a step-by-step guide which is available as a PDF as well as a video if that's easier for you as well. We have a ton of resources in this slide deck and so I would just encourage you to look through these. When you have questions, remember that this is something that you have to go to and to use as a resource to help you through the process as well. So I'm gonna just pause here and actually go to your questions and make sure that I can get through as many as possible. Okay, the biggest question I think that we had was from Dave. I'd really like to spend some time on discussing the Microsoft for non-profits offering. What is it? How does it differ from E1, E3, E5 and Microsoft 365 licenses we already have? Is it a replacement for those licenses? It's something that can be deployed in conjunction. We have 25 of them and we can't figure it out. So Dave, this might be a question that was answered already with the licenses that we talked about and what is available with all of the different offers but you might also be talking about the Microsoft Cloud for non-profit offering which is a little bit different and on top of the licenses that I talked about. Microsoft is making available something called the Cloud for non-profit which it uses a lot of the licenses we talked about as well as Power Apps and some of the other features within Teams to be able to provide some more configurable workflows for volunteer management and donor management. It requires customization. It's not something that's just like an out-of-the-box solution where you get those licenses and then you can just start using Microsoft Cloud for non-profit. Usually it requires some customization, some building of a Power App solution to be able to integrate the workflows within the existing licenses that you have within Teams or within Power Apps so that you can enable some of the suites of offerings there but there is available licenses for Cloud for non-profit and I think there's some trial licenses available as well and I'm happy to add some resources and the slides as well to provide a little bit more information on that if you're interested. The next question was from Marshall. Is on-premises the same as locally installed on one's hard drive? That's a really good way to put it. Yes, on-premises is really something that is locally installed. That's exactly what we mean. There's so many words for it and it's been super confusing so I apologize, we use desktop. On-premises, perpetual, locally installed. So yeah, but they all mean the same thing. It's a device-based license that's installed on your hard drive so thanks Marshall for the clarification. Mark asks, will it be possible to get previous versions of Microsoft products like Windows Server 2016 rather than the current version? That's a really good question, Mark. So we've had this question come up a bunch. So with the new kind of way that you download and receive your licenses in your admin center when you go to download it you will have an option to doubt like to choose the version that you want to download. Typically it's only the last previous version that's available. There are some licenses where you can go up to two licenses before but what we've seen most often is it's just the last or previous version of the license. So it does depend. I know you're specifically asking about Windows Server so we can check on that specifically but you'll be able to see what version is available for you to download when you're in your administrative center. And that is it changes by location and it also changes about what's available by the product type itself. Jay Dubin asks, we need assistance with deciphering Microsoft's licensing guidelines specifically with regard to Windows 10 enterprise on premises licensing. Is there a team here that provides more in-depth Microsoft licensing assistance beyond what the customer team offers? So we can certainly try. If you send us an email at reachus at techsoup.org we will send us your exact question. We will certainly try to do the best we can to answer your question. If not, like I said, we work with a lot of different service providers and we work directly with Microsoft so we can make sure to get your question answered. So we would be happy to try to help on that. Matthew asks, are donated Office 365 E3 and E2 licenses being revoked? Is there a date that will happen? Matthew, just to clarify, there are Microsoft Office 365 E1 and E2 licenses that were previously donated. They are not being revoked. They are grandfathered in so you can continue to use those licenses. Well, at this time, they're not being revoked. What they've said is you can continue to use those licenses and you can go up to that 2000 limit on them so you can't add additional subscriptions or you can't add additional licenses beyond the 2000 but you can continue to use that if you've already had that and you already are using it currently. The only thing to flag there is you do need to be in compliance with that utilization requirement that I had mentioned. Okay, Denise asks, where do we find the wizard to help us decide which products we should get? And hopefully somebody can put that in chat but you'll get a link to that in the slides that we send out to you. Paula asks, can we issue any of the awarded licenses to program recipients that we serve or just to staffing within the organization? That is such a good question, Paula. The licensing and the eligibility for the licenses or the kind of licensing guide or user guide for it is the licenses do need to go to your own staff and to your own organization. If there are projects or program recipients or if you're a fiscal sponsor, those beneficiaries are not eligible for using those licenses, unfortunately. So the licenses that you're getting and the allocation of donations and discounts are really meant for your specific organization's staff and potentially volunteer needs. Shannon asks, are there people who can help a new organization get set up with the best solution? Absolutely. One of the things that we offer and I will just pop that up in terms of resources that are available. That's the long thing. Am I showing the right side? Yeah, some of the different services that we have. So the first one is actually the cloud consultation service. There's a link here. Hopefully somebody can put that in chat for me as well. We offer a free consultation. So you can sign up, schedule some time for a free consultation. Our team can work with you to understand what might be the best license for you and get you set up with those licenses as well. We also have, like I said, a wizard that can help you self-service there if you want to be able to do that on your own. We have lots of guides and blogs that we put together to help you through that decision-making process because we know it can be complex and it might be helpful to have a helpful ear just to understand your unique situation. So we have help that can help you on that choosing which license. After that, we also have setup and implementation support so we can help you actually set up your account. We have an Office 365 setup package. We also have a cloud starter kit which allows us to then have a managed service moving forward where we can help you manage your account moving forward if you want. And then we also have digital skill center courses which are courses designed really to help your team including your staff, your volunteers be able to understand how to best use the solutions. Again, there's links in here for all of these. And then if you have higher level needs, email migration that you need to do, data migration, if you want to upgrade all of your servers or move your servers into Azure we have services that can help and support that as well. And then on the last part, the ongoing support we do have if you need helped us services and full managed IT services available as well. Okay, Daryl Howard asks, TechSoup Global has removed your delegated admin roles on March 2nd. This means they can no longer manage your account. As a nonprofit, what do I need to do? I'm so glad that you raised this and it makes me think I should have said this up front too and should have posed that as a question. So thank you so much for asking the question, Daryl. But many of you may have received an email from us saying that we have removed our delegated admin roles. Delegated admin roles was a benefit or kind of a privilege that TechSoup, if you got your licenses through us, your cloud licenses through us, that gives us the ability to have access to your account and be an admin in your account. So what we did from a security perspective is we removed that our own privilege from your account just to make sure that nobody at TechSoup has access to your account, access to your user information or anything that we didn't explicitly need. So unless there was something that you wanted us to do within your account, if you wanted us to help set up your account or if you wanted us to help manage your account, we removed that so that we are not having any risk of your own security of your data. When we removed that, it did absolutely nothing to your account. You do not need to do anything. You are still an admin administrator on your own account. It does not change that at all. All it did was remove TechSoup from also having administrative privileges in your account. And really why we did that is we wanna limit any potential security breach that can occur where somebody else has access to your account. This is your data. This is your account unless you provide us explicit need for us to do something or that you want us to do something, we just chose it would be safer for your organizations and for our teams as well to make sure that you kind of administrated that account unless there's something you specifically need. So I know that email was weirded a little bit, worded a little bit weirdly for Microsoft and it was a little bit more alarmist. Thanks for bringing up that question but really there was no impact to your licenses, no impact from our ability to provide more licenses or do anything with you. It's just that we don't have access as an administrator on your account anymore. And we could always get that back if you want us to for any reason. Okay, Judy asks, what is the process to switch from our current Microsoft licensing to use Microsoft products through TechSoup? Great question, Jodi. So many organizations might be on commercial licensing or they might not have been on licenses that afford the benefits of the donations and discounts that are available. You can reach out to us, you can request any of the new donation or discounted licenses that you want and add those into your account and you can do that with us. You can do that through signing up for a cloud consultation service. When you do that, we'll probably assign those new licenses and then we can deprovision the old ones that you had so that there's no loss of service and that there's no transition that you have to go through but we're happy to help you through that. Jennifer asks, if we needed help sorting out what we have, do we contact TechSoup or Microsoft? Really good question. The easiest answer, and this is not a great one as it depends. So we can only see the licenses that you have done through TechSoup. So we don't necessarily always get to see any of the licenses that you may have gotten if you got them directly from Microsoft. So if you're getting your licenses directly from Microsoft, unfortunately, we don't have visibility into it. We can only really see those that we've distributed. We're happy to help you and show you how to navigate within and we have a few resources here to show you how to set up your account and how to do things. Or like we had mentioned in the last question, if you wanna move your licenses, we can have that moving forward so we can help and support you ongoing. Okay, a few questions on the on-premises process. Michael says, we had off the standard licenses unfulfilled from 2019. Can they be transferred to the new system? If you have licenses that you already received in 2019, but you just didn't download them, you or the 2019 version of the license, you can still go into the Volume Licensing Center and request and download those licenses. You did not lose access to the Volume Licensing Center. So if you have older licenses that you have that you're still managing, you can still access those from the Volume Licensing Center so you don't necessarily lose those. I think there's a long period of time where if you haven't touched it in a long time, they may expire, but I would try there first. There is not a way to migrate those existing licenses into your Microsoft 365 account, unfortunately. So for a little bit of time, you might have to manage in two different places. Marshall asks, past Perfect Museum software requires a local installation of Microsoft Word and Excel, not a cloud-based solution. Does the TechSoup option include this option for local installation of both softwares and what's the cost? Totally understand that. There are a lot of organizations that we work with, particularly organizations that are getting government funding and things where you have to log into specific systems that require specific versions of products that you use. There will still be the local installation of Microsoft Office available. Up till April 4th, that is available at about $36 right now per license. I believe after April 4th, when it moves to just a discounted license, that'll be closer to about $118 a license for each device that you need. Don asks, are there licenses for both Windows, for Windows for Mac? We do have software that's available for Office for Mac as well as Office for Windows devices. So you'll have in our catalog, you can see differentiation between the suites of which ones are for Windows PCs and which ones are for Macs. MIS dispatcher asks, can you be a secondary provider? I know with a change to the license distribution, you have to pick a single company as your provider. So actually on that, you can have multiple providers as long as they're for different licenses and different subscriptions. So if you already have an existing provider that's maybe managing your Azure or that's maybe managing your cloud solutions, but you want to have an additional provider help you and get access to the on-premises solutions or an Office standard type license, you can have multiple providers on your account that you just can't have multiple providers on one subscription or one type of subscription. Melanie Ingway asked, can TechSoup help us create a Microsoft non-profit account? I tried to create an account and at Microsoft reports that we have an account but no one has a login credentials and it's not clear how to find username or reset a password. So there is a link here and you can, two things that you can say. One is that you can use the contact us on Microsoft feature and you can raise a ticket with them but I will say that there's not really a great answer that Microsoft has when you actually have no one who has admin rights to the account or if nobody could do it. And so honestly, the easiest way to do this a lot of times is by creating another account, it's not ideal and I obviously wouldn't recommend it if there was any way that you could get access to the account, but there's nothing stopping you and you can create a new account. You just have to change the domain or things like that and you can have multiple accounts created under your nonprofit. That might be the easiest solution but Melanie, if you send us an email, we can try and see if there's any support that we can provide. We as TechSoup have pretty limited information on that account information since it's Microsoft but we can certainly try and help. Debbie asks, if we add new staff members can they use existing software licenses we have after April 4th? So if you have additional staff members and they are using the existing software that you have and they're probably that software exists on a device as long as that device already has the license then you should be good to go. If you need additional hardware for them or additional devices that don't have an existing license that's when you're gonna need another license for any new member of your team. John asks, are there cloud offerings compatible with Apple offerings, Mac, iPad, iPhone? Yes, the cloud solutions can be used both on Mac and Windows devices. So you will be able to see that in some of the product solutions but you can use both devices to use the cloud options. Tina asks, we received Microsoft 365 Business Premium on September 11, 2020. Do the current changes affect this subscription? Nope, not at all. The changes are really only for those installed, desktop, on-premises solutions like Office Standard. If you're on a cloud subscription like Microsoft 365 or Office 365 you will have no changes after April 4th. Cheryl asks, do you have a video or recorded webinar showing nonprofits or libraries how to set up the new Microsoft account and get verified with TechSoup? Yes, we do. We have a few resources available and I will just share my screen really quickly to show that. We have a wonderful team showing videos of a guide, a video guide to requesting those licenses, downloading it. We have also a guide of how to request those licenses or request the nonprofit account on Microsoft side. We also have that available as a PDF because I know different people learn in different ways. I always like to have something printed next to me versus doing it by video but we have all of those options available. And I think we have a few guides or at least some articles on how to register at TechSoup if you're completely new to us so that you can get set up with your validation and your account. I know we have only a few minutes left so I do wanna just show you that in these slides that you're getting we do have a lot of links for a lot of the additional resources that includes those links to the libraries page it includes the pre-consultation, our product catalog the courses that we talked about the guides that I talked about as well as some key articles that we created that kind of provide overviews of the changes that are happening this distinguishing between the licenses and some articles to talk a little bit about the utilization requirement as well. Okay. We have a question from Daniel I understand that licenses are for employees do board members such as chairman and secretary qualify? Very good question. I'm gonna bring up Microsoft's eligibility because they have a kind of a nifty little table that I actually think is pretty helpful in being able to show who's eligible and not. So let me share that and I will say I wanna be sharing my entire screen so my apologies if it's a little chaotic for a second but hopefully you can see this Microsoft makes their products available for paid employees and they in their paid employees say paid staff includes employees on mandatory unpaid time off but remain employees they also have this distinction of unpaid executive staff so unpaid executive staff can also take advantage of the donation offers and then they make the distinction between volunteers and temporary staff where volunteers and temporary staff can only use the discounted offers unpaid executive staff and paid employees fall under their own bucket. Stop sharing that. Let me see. Gene asked in February 2020 I purchased office standard using volume licensing now it looks like I will have to purchase multiple office standards paying the individual price is that correct? So the volume licensing was the open licensing it was like the fulfillment platform that we were using to actually transact that. So if you do need to get another 21 licenses then you would be requesting those as individual like 21 new licenses if you want the upgraded version if you wanna go to office 2021 you would need to get the 21 additional licenses you have one thing I would note though I'm just February. Yeah, it's past the two years of your software assurance there's a two year when you got the licenses in February 2020 you had that with software assurance that is good for two years and that would provide you a benefit. So if you had licenses in the past that you've used and it's still within a two year period you might be eligible for a free or upgrade with that existing software benefit that you have. So definitely take a look at that first before you make any requests so that you can understand if you already have an ability to upgrade your licenses or not. Jean asks, can we purchase the upgrade subscriptions and our software assurance bundle to add to the on-premises purchases? Jean, yes, you can request licenses with software assurance those are only available at a discounted rate. And so when you see the prices between licenses and software assurance bundles you will definitely see that there's a definite price differential there and just take a look at those if that works within your budget and if you need software assurance of course you should be able to get that. Excuse me, as a benefit with the license bundles itself. Because it's a new licensing platform we don't have any software assurance only licenses it does have to come with a new license agreement as well at this point. Okay, Samir asks, are cloud-based office applications as feature rich as the standalone versions? For example, we've become quite accustomed to all the formulas and visual basic features available in Excel will some of the same formulas be available in the cloud version? Very good question. I am also a very specific user of Excel and need a lot of the features. So I will say that dependent on the license that you get. So if you have a cloud subscription that includes the desktop application so that'll include the donation of Microsoft 365 Business Premium or the discounted license of Business Standard. As long as you have the desktop application will be as feature rich as the current standalone products that you have if not more so actually. And I will say that because I'm a heavy user of Excel and because I'm on the cloud version but also use the desktop application I can have the best of both worlds. So there's different things that I can bring in formulas that I can bring in or data sets that I can bring in really quickly and easily within the desktop application. If you are using only the cloud and web browser that is a little bit more limited. So if you're using it without the desktop application on your cloud solution so if you have an E1 license or a Business Standard, Business Basic license that will have a little bit more of a limited functionality in terms of the Excel functionality that's available on web only. All right. I think I have time for a couple more questions. Terrilyn asks, I have Microsoft 365 Business Premium 10 donated licenses. Do I need to do anything by April 4th? Nope, you do not. That will not change. You can use that license as you need to. And there's also a question about dynamics. Can I request Dynamics 365? Is that available at a discounted rate? Depending on exactly which type of license you want for dynamics, Microsoft does make available. I think it's for the dynamic sales and I'll follow up with you directly on it. There are five licenses available for free and then each additional license is available as a discount. So there are some offers available in Dynamics as well. We only have a few seconds left. So I just want to say there are a few questions about what is software assurance. Software assurance is a benefit that has been provided on an on-premises license that provides additional support and additional kind of benefits on the license itself. Like a two-year warranty, if you will, but what benefits you get are really, you can use that. And what we've seen most people use it for is within that two-year or three-year period that you have software assurance for, you're able to get free upgrades if any additional license or new version is available during that time. All right, so I think we have one last question, which is how long does a Microsoft validation process take after creating an account? Typically it is, they say it can be anywhere from five days to 20 days, but typically those, I think it's about 90% are done within one to two business days. So it's pretty quick turnaround. If you've already had a TechSoup account and if you've already been validated by us, it's even quicker. So usually it's hopefully only like 24 to 48 hours. So I know that we probably had a few questions that I did not get to today. I'm sorry, and I hope that a lot of the questions that we were able to get to answer some of those. If not, like I mentioned on the slides that we'll get to you and the email we'll send, there's an email address, reachusatexsoup.org. Feel free to reach out to us. We're here to help, we're here to help you navigate some of these changes and make sure you're making the best decisions for your organization and we're happy to help. So please do reach out to us and I hope this was helpful. So have a great day and thank you all for your attention and your engagement today session.