 I'm Becky Wiegand. I'm an editor here at TechSoup. I'll be your facilitator for today. And we have Ginny Mives who is a content curator at TechSoup who will be joining us as our key presenter today. And we'll have assistants in the chat from Kevin and Cameron. So feel free to ask us your questions as we get started with our discussion about Windows 8. Take a quick look at our introduction of what Windows 8 is. We'll look through some of the features and considerations that nonprofits and libraries should think about before upgrading and helping to decide if they want to or not. We'll do an actual demo of some Windows 8 features. Look at the new look and feel that you may have seen in commercials for the new surface. And we'll look at some differences between Windows 8, Windows 7, how to find some of your frequent functions, and how to get donations and upgrades through TechSoup. So before we get started into that, a little bit about TechSoup, we are part of TechSoup Global. We're working toward a day when every nonprofit, library, and social benefit organization has the technology, knowledge, and resources they need to operate at their full potential. We are a nonprofit organization and we serve nonprofits both in the United States and Worldwide. Today we'll be talking about the donation program for organizations in the United States. With that, we can go ahead and get started with Windows 8. So I'd love to bring Ginny on the line with us to talk a little bit about some of the features and what's new with Windows 8. So welcome Ginny. Thanks Becky. So I've been using Windows 8 for the past few months. And I just wanted to walk through some of the new features and benefits of upgrading to Windows 8. Now you've probably seen on TV the new commercials for the Surface tablet and just for Windows 8 in general, it does have a very new look. And sometimes change can be a little bit daunting, but that's what we're here for. It actually brings some really great useful features for your nonprofit or library and an overall performance boost to your entire operating system. So let's walk through some of the benefits that are for office use. Like I said, there's a faster performance. Windows 8 has a very, very small footprint comparatively so to Windows 7. And we actually tested this out. We installed Windows 8 on an older machine, which is actually the machine that I will be using today to demo Windows 8. And it works really well. So you don't need to upgrade any of your machines. You don't need a touch screen. It will work on your older IT equipment, which is a great cost benefit and it's a great benefit for using green technology because you don't have to throw out your old computers. Another big benefit is that it comes pre-installed with Windows Defender Security. So let me explain this. You might be familiar with Microsoft Security Essentials. This is Microsoft's free software or security software for Windows 7. Windows Defender is pretty much the same as Microsoft Security Essentials just with a new name. It includes your basic malware detection. It includes spyware detection. It comes pre-installed. You don't have to do anything with it. And it will start running. And if you have a preferred security software already installed on your computer, you can turn Windows Defender off and it will not interfere if you have Norton Security running. So that's a really great benefit because it's free and you don't have to do any work for it. Another benefit is the enhanced built-in hardware failure protection. And we can point you to some resources about that. You might have heard of the SkyDrive cloud storage that's integrated throughout Windows 8. This is Microsoft's cloud storage service and you will be able to save your documents, photos, whatever to the SkyDrive cloud service and then access it from your Windows 8 PC, your Windows 8 tablet, your Windows 8 phone, whatever you are using Windows 8 on. Very useful. Windows 8 has new features for multi-language use. It's very easy to switch between different languages. And it's really easy to share information between your colleagues, to your donors. You can send pictures really easily. And it's got some great new features for searching which I'll show you later in this demo. You can also set a default mode for public access computers, great for libraries. And as we said before, you can use your existing equipment. You don't need a touch screen. You can use Windows 8 with a mouse and a keyboard. That's kind of been a concern I've heard from the nonprofit and library community. You can use Windows 8 easily with both a keyboard and a mouse. Great. Thank you so much, Ginny. That's a quick highlight of some of the features and we will get to demoing some of that a little bit later in the presentation. But we also want to be aware and make you aware of some of the considerations to think about before you make the switch to upgrade. So if you are currently running Windows XP or Windows 7 or Vista, here are some things to think about. We also have a lot of resources that we'll share at the end of the presentation that walk you through some of the questions about should you upgrade and how to do so. So know that this is not a comprehensive list, but here are a few things to consider. And I'll hand it back to Ginny. So one thing you might be concerned with is especially if you are upgrading from XP, if your existing software is going to work with Windows 8, Microsoft has a really great resource on their site, a Compatibility Center, where you can search your software and see if it will work with Windows 8. So we definitely recommend using that before considering making the upgrade. If you use a lot of software that is not supported by Windows 8, you might need to rethink upgrading. Number two, this may look, it's going to require a learning curve for your staff and users. As we will show you later in the demo, Windows 8 has a new start screen. It takes a little bit of getting used to, and so it will require some additional training. Number three is low resolution monitors or graphic cards will reduce some of the enhancements in Windows 8. There are certain features you can do that won't work with a low resolution monitor. So if that's the equipment that you currently have, you might need to consider upgrading it or just not upgrading to Windows 8 right away. Great. That's really helpful things to think about. So especially if you're key critical programs, if you're financial software that you need to balance your books every year is not compatible yet with Windows 8, then that's definitely something to really think about before you make the upgrade across your office. So with that, we'll go ahead and get started with a live demo. And we'll show you a few things in this. We're not going to have time to cover everything. So we just want to take a little bit of time to walk you through. And Ginny is going to be nice enough to show us how she has her Windows 8 setup and show us some of the differences, and hopefully answer a lot of your questions along the way. So after that, we'll talk a little bit about our donation program and share some more resources. So with that Ginny, you can go ahead and share your screen, and we'll get started with the live demo. Okay, so I've just pulled up the fabulous Start screen in Windows 8. This is sort of like the marquee feature of Windows 8, one of the biggest changes between Windows 8 and Windows 7. So you might be familiar with Windows 7 or any of the older versions of Windows where they have the Start button in the lower left hand. This is the Start button on steroids. It's basically everything that you would find in your Start button blown up into an entire screen. So what you're seeing here are live tiles, which there are specially made Windows 8 apps that will show information on these live tiles from the apps. So you can see right here in this corner, this is my People app, and it's pulling in the photos of all of my contacts on my email address in Gmail. So it keeps updating with that. And then you can see down here there's a news tile that's updating with news about the current election. And you can program some of these tiles to update with relevant information. So let's say you have stocks that you want to follow. The stock ticker will update with that relevant information. So I'm just going to do a quick little tour around the Start screen. If you want to get to your desktop, there are a couple of different ways to do that. You can click on this desktop tile and see I have my Word document open. So here's your standard desktop that you might be familiar with from Windows 7. But to get back to your Start screen, you can just drag your mouse to the lower left-hand corner, and you'll see a little thumbnail of the Start screen, and you can click that, and that will open up your Start screen again. You can also do that with a keyboard shortcut. It makes things a little bit easier. You can just hit the Windows key and then D to get to your desktop and go back to my Start screen. And then if you pull your mouse over to the left-hand corner, you're going to bring up all of the apps that you have open. So I opened up a bunch of apps just to demo this. So let's see, I have my travel app open, and my games, and my news, and whatever. So this is a really easy way to switch between your different applications. So let's just go pull something else up. So I'll pull up the news app, and so I can easily switch between my different applications by pulling this up. I can go to Bing, and let's go back to the Start screen. And then on your right side, if you pull your mouse over, you're going to see these little icons. Now these icons are called your Charms, and these are really, really important buttons to learn because it makes it really easy to do certain things in all of your different applications. So you'll see the search icon here, and we'll get back to search because this is a big part of Windows 8. You have your Share icon, you have your Start button, Devices, and Settings. So let's go to Settings, because one of the things that we've heard a lot from our users is that Windows 8 makes it really hard to find certain things that you're used to finding in Windows 7. And one of those things is the Control Panel. You're used to getting the Control Panel from the Start button, but instead you're going to have to access it in a different way, but thankfully it's really easy. So I just went to Settings from the Charm button, and you go down here, and here's your Change Your PC Settings. This is everything that you'd find in your Control Panel. So you can Personalize, you can add different users, you can Share, you can change your Share Settings, you can add Devices, Privacy, etc. So this is a really good thing to know. You can also get to your PC Settings by just doing a simple search. Let's say that I wanted to find my mail app. So I'm just going to search mail, and here it is. So you don't necessarily have to click on that magnifying glass to get to search. You can just start typing. You can also search for within other apps. So let's say I wanted to find something about the election yesterday. So I can start typing election. It's not in my apps, but I can go to Bing, click there, and it will start searching for relevant results in Bing. Thanks, Ginny. So yeah, that Start screen does look very different than what I'm used to using on Windows 7 or on XP, but I do see a lot of familiar icons. So Microsoft Office's Word and PowerPoint and Excel, those icons are all there. Do they work the same way as icons on my regular desktop, and how did they get there? Sure. So you'll see some links to your standard Microsoft Office 2010 applications. And when we installed these, these shortcuts appeared automatically, and they function exactly the way you'd expect them to on a Windows 7 desktop or on a Windows XP desktop. I can jump straight to the program just by clicking on the tile. And you will see a document that I set up in advance. And I just wanted to show a pretty neat feature. So when you go up to Save the document, I'm going to hit Save As. And you'll see under my favorites, SkyDrive is an option. And that's again, that's Microsoft's cloud storage service for files. And so I can select that, and I can hit Save. I already saved it there, but I'll just replace that existing file. And then that's in my SkyDrive account. And I can access this document from any Windows 8 device, or from the SkyDrive web account. So that's just a really handy feature for saving your files to the cloud if you want to access them later at home, or if you're working from a different device. So that's great. And I imagine that it comes in handy for shared documents where you have an annual report that you want a board member to review, and you want to save the draft to SkyDrive and allow somebody else to review it. That kind of cloud feature I imagine would be really helpful for something like that. Yeah, and it makes sharing photos really easy as well. And I wanted to share some of the other sharing features in Windows 8, going back to those charms. So I went back to the Start screen, and I'm just going to open up my Bing news. So let's see, right here. And let's see. Let's go back to the main page. And I've got some articles about nonprofits here. So I'm just going to open this one up. And if you have a Twitter account, and you tweet from that Twitter account, and you like to share news on it, Windows 8 makes it really easy. So bringing up these terms again, you'll see the share icon. And if I click that, I have the option to tweet it using MetroTwit. I can also email it using my email account, and I can share it with my contacts in the People Hub. So this is a really, really quick and easy feature to share information among your colleagues, or share information with your Twitter followers. If I had Facebook on here, I could also share it on Facebook. It just makes information sharing so much easier. And I really think that's a huge benefit for especially people who are doing their own social media work in their organization. That sounds great. So are you installing apps yourself? Can you install all kinds of other apps from someplace? Because you mentioned if you have Facebook installed, where would you go about getting those? So Microsoft has its very own store for apps, for Windows 8 apps. And that's this green tile right here, the Windows Store. So I'm going to click on that. And I just installed some apps. So it's showing me that right now. Let's go back to the main page. So while you're doing that, I see Travel and Kayak. So it looks like you can search all kinds of apps from within the store and install. If you travel a lot for your job, or you have field organizers, or you have conferences to attend, you can install all kinds of things that would help those folks too. Definitely. And one of the apps that I just wanted to show really quickly is the Skype app. It's a brand new version of Skype, just for Windows 8. And it looks like that wasn't loading. But yeah, there's apps that are productivity apps. There's apps for travel. There's apps for RSS feeds. We actually compiled a whole list of our favorite apps for Windows 8. And we can point you to that resource after this webinar. Great. Thank you, Ginny. And that list of apps that Ginny actually put together, that blog post is specifically geared toward apps that would be useful for nonprofits and libraries, or foundations, people working in an office environment, and the needs that they have that are different from maybe your personal needs at home. Some other things that I'd love for us to look at is you mentioned in the charms that there is device installation, or one that's called device. It would be great to see since we don't have the same type of control panel as what many of us are used to with the Start menu, how easy is it to hook something up and just have it installed? Like is there a printer section, or something that just detects devices like phones or iPads? Sure. So that's actually a really easy feature. So let's go back to these charms. And I'm going to go up actually into Settings. There is a separate devices term, but to add a new device, just do a quick walkthrough. So I'm going to go to Change PC Settings, and I already have the Devices page open. So I'm going to plug in a new device, and let's see. That will just take a second while we do that. Alright, so you can see that something has appeared at the top. It's unknown. Windows 8 is working to recognize it. Below you can see that we already have a Dell USB keyboard. We have OneNote. We have the optical mouse, and slowly it is recognizing that device. But I'm not installing anything. I'm not having to install new drives. I'm not looking through search or looking through knowledge-based articles on how to install this new device. Windows 8 is recognizing it on its own. There we go. It is a BlackBerry. Great, that's really easy. I wish everything could hook itself up like that for myself in my own life. And there are ways to do those other things too if you have to search and install files, or put a disk in to run something, right? There are other ways, but for most of the devices that you'll be using, I think that you won't have to do that. I think that the way Windows 8 is designed it's designed to recognize a whole variety of devices. And if it's like a Bluetooth-enabled device it will pick it up. You shouldn't have any problems, but if you do, there's a lot of Microsoft support articles out there that can tell you how to hook up that device. Great, thank you. So we've covered a handful of things that the look and feel in this demo. There's a lot more that people can see. So what I want to do, unless, Ginny, if you have other things you want to show before we switch off and talk about the donation program, we can do that. Otherwise, we'll go ahead and start talking about where people can get Windows 8. I just wanted to show really quickly just how to change around your Start screen because I think one concern is that these tiles are static and you can't adjust them. But it's really easy, and I'm just going to show that very quickly. So let's say you want to move your Bing tile over. You just click onto it, hold down your mouse button, and drag it. And you can see that the tiles all sort of adjust themselves to make room for this. And you can sort your tiles by application. You can sort them by projects that you're working on. You can pretty much arrange them any way you'd like. And if you want to delete a tile, let's say that you don't really want to have a sports ticker up on your page while you're working. You can right-click on that, and you'll see these options below, Unpin from Start, Uninstall, Smaller, Turn Live, Tile Off. Let's just unpin it from the Start, and it's gone. It's simple. We didn't delete it. It's still there. You can add it back to get to all of your applications. You can just right-click anywhere on the Start screen and then hit this All Apps, and they're all right there for you. Wow, that's really cool. And it's very similar to the kind of functionality I think we're all getting used to using more and more with smartphones that are touch screen based. And like you said earlier, that people can use this without a touch screen and with their existing equipment. So that's great for folks who are in an office, but it's also probably good to be looking at this type of technology since it is going to be the next wave, or it's the current wave, but it's coming I think for all of us, even for offices pretty soon. So thank you so much for giving us that live demo. I really appreciate the walkthrough and it's been educational for me as well since I don't use Windows 8 yet. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and take the desktop back, and we're going to pop back into some of our slides and just talk a little bit about our donation program. So Windows 8 is available through TechSoup for donation to eligible nonprofits, public libraries, and foundations. You can check the donation program eligibility by looking at this link here which will be sent out in the follow-up information. You can see what your organization is eligible to receive and request. We have four different versions of Windows 8 available. There is Windows 8 Professional or Enterprise in both 32 and 64-bit versions. So you can click through on those links afterwards to check out the actual products. If you are running home editions or versions of operating systems that you don't have legal rights to have installed on your machines, and you're trying to figure out how the heck to make them legal and how to get them into the professional or office grade versions, you would want to check out our Get Genuine program through Microsoft. And that is a one-time only program to get your equipment upgraded to the right most recent programs. You can also upgrade with Software Assurance if you have received donated software through TechSoup from Microsoft. In the past two years, you may be eligible to upgrade for free with Software Assurance. And most of our donated programs with Microsoft come with Software Assurance and they provide a variety of benefits including the upgrades, but also things like e-learning and trainings for your staff, many of which are geared toward nonprofits. So definitely check out those benefits to see if you are eligible to upgrade totally free. Also you can go to this page on our site which is our Windows 8 for Nonprofit Foundations and Libraries page where you can see the product information for both Windows 8 and also Windows 7 if you are not quite sure if you are ready to make the leap to 8 and you are still running Vista or XP. Also below this you can't see, but down below we have a lot of resources including some of the articles about how to upgrade and should you upgrade. A lot of blog posts including the test run that we did here and installing it on a 7-year-old computer, details about keyboard shortcuts, the Microsoft Compatibility Center where you can see if your programs are compatible with Windows 8 yet or not. That will help you make the decision about whether or not Windows 8 is right for your organization. So with that I'll go ahead and just jump us to some resources, some of these I've already mentioned and these will also be shared later. So take a moment to look these over and we have a few more here on this screen as well. We've just launched the Windows 8 apps for social good contest where organizations and developers and individual coders and hackers can create apps that are intended for social good for the Windows 8 platform either mobile or desktop platform and compete to win up to $15,000 in prizes to make those apps more widely available. So go ahead and look some of these things over. And with that I'd like to thank our presenter. Thank you so much, Ginny, for giving us this great walk-through. And I'd also like to thank ReadyTalk for giving us this product to use to host our webinars. And with that, thank you so much and I hope you'll join us again for a future webinar. Thanks a lot Ginny, and we'll be glad to answer your questions in the forums. Please join us there.