 thank you all for joining us for today's webinar. The webinar today is designed to give you details of products and options and some of the services and courses that can help you get the most out of your Microsoft solutions. I'm Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup, and our presenter today is none other than Shruti Ramaswamy. She is TechSoup's Vice President of Strategy and Strategic Relationships. She's responsible for Microsoft programs. She works closely with both nonprofits and Microsoft to ensure that the sector, I love saying this part, around the world is able to derive the most impact from program offerings. Prior to work here at TechSoup, Shruti was the technology consultant for IBM. Shruti, I'm excited to turn this over to you and look forward to learning. Thanks everybody for joining today. What we wanted to do today is really provide an opportunity for everybody here to ask any questions that you have about the Microsoft program offerings. I'll kick off today's session talking a little bit about some overview about what offers are available to the nonprofits and libraries for Microsoft, as well as talk a little bit about some of the program changes that you may have heard about in previous webinars or that you've been aware of because of emails that you might have received from ourselves or from Microsoft directly about what is happening with their donation program and how they're evolving their offers. So hopefully I'll spend no longer than 20, 25 minutes going through that and then the rest of the time we really want to devote to answering your questions. And so as Aretha said, there is a Q&A function on the right hand side of your toolbar or screen, if you will, that says Q&A and you can submit your questions there. We recommend you do that because then you can get a chance to see what other people have submitted and if somebody's already asked your questions, as Aretha said, you can upvote it and just click that so that we can make sure that we're getting to those questions first. If we don't get to any of your questions today, you'll see that in pretty much every slide that I have here, there's going to be a little bit of an email address reach us at TechSoup.org and you can feel free to email us directly and we'll try to answer your specific question in case we don't get to it today. Aretha also said all of this is going to be recorded, the slides will be provided back to you, so within a few days you will have all of these materials so you don't have to feel like you have to write everything down or digest everything I say in this next 25 minutes. You will have your chance to be able to do that and we've also done this webinar a few times now. So if there are other things that you want to look at in terms of slides, you can always feel free to access some of our previous recordings as well. Okay, with that I will get us started. So I know all in a little bit about who TechSoup is since you're here today, but I just wanted to remind, even though we're talking a lot about Microsoft today, TechSoup and our mission as a global nonprofit and charity ourselves is really to connect you and all of the nonprofits around the world with donated and discounted products and solutions and give you the tools and help to really enable your own missions to work quicker, more productively, more securely, and so we have software, we have hardware, new and refurbished hardware, we offer courses, we offer lots of educational programming such as the webinar today but also blogs, how-to guides, articles, lots of things that we fit together around all of the product solutions that we offer, we have IT hotspots and we also have consultation and actual services, managed services for anybody who needs it. So there are a lot of things that TechSoup has to offer. We're going to focus a little bit on a narrow point of it today for the Microsoft offerings, but if there's anything else that you need, TechSoup is here and we're happy to help you. We do this and we're able to do this in partnership with over 400 corporations and technology companies and foundations who help us bring that technology to the sector at large and we're here to support you no matter where you are in this process. So we know that not all of us are at the same level of technology capacity or need to be completely honest and so there's a lot of stages of digital development so wherever you are if you're using a paper-based system and maybe have some installed software, if you are migrating to cloud solutions or if you need ongoing kind of support for web services or platform as a services, we can help you wherever you are and help you throughout that process and if you have questions, if there are ways that you are struggling or things you just want to know more about, please do feel free to reach out to us, learn more about some of the solution offerings that we have. Like I mentioned, we're going to focus a little today solely on the Microsoft offerings that we have. We know that's a critical importance to many nonprofits around the world and there are a lot of changes happening so we want to make sure that we spend some time and talk a little bit about them today. The first thing I wanted to talk a little bit about is some key terms that we use and that Microsoft uses to describe some of their products and their solutions and talk about what's available today. Then I can talk a little bit about what's changing so you have a better understanding. So Microsoft offers two basic types of solutions to the nonprofit sector. One are the on-premises solutions and then the other is cloud-based subscriptions. So the differentiation there, there's a lot of differences between the two but some of the primary things I'm going to talk about are really the on-premises solutions are things like office standard, windows upgrades that you might be getting from us or if you've received in the past a full windows operating system through get genuine but on-premises licenses are typically licenses that you download to a device and the licenses are device-based licenses so you're requesting a license and downloading that license onto a specific set of hardware. You only pay one time for that license and after you pay for that license you can use that product you can install that product on your device for as long as you want to. There will be free patches available if there are security updates but if you want a new version or if you want new updates to that's not really a security related update you would have to buy or request another version of the product. So products like this include office standard like I mentioned that's one of our bigger ones. Server licenses that many people get are some of the on-premises licenses that we offer as well as the windows ones that I talked about. These on-premises or desktop licenses are available in two primary ways from Microsoft. One are as donations and the other are as discounts. So the donations have a few restrictions around it but they are offered as a full donation from Microsoft. There are still some associated administrative fees that you might have to have some associated costs for. Those typically go to TechSoup to help us distribute, manage and support these programs but these are available to non-profits who are eligible. They usually the donated products are usually the standard level products and right now they do not include any software assurance. So these are just licenses that you can download on your desktop or your device. There are some limitations as a donation you can only get up to 50 licenses typically per product. There are some products under servers that will have a smaller amount of licenses that you can get but there are restrictions in terms of how many and quantity you can get as a donation. If you need more than those licenses or if you want some of the professional level products or other products that might not be available as a donation those are typically provided by Microsoft as a charitable discount and those discounts usually range from about 60 to 75% off of any of the commercial prices and that's been a pretty standard discount that Microsoft has had. So what they make available to the charitable community is usually under that discount range and there's an unlimited licenses amount available. So if you want 100 licenses or if you want more than 50 you can use the discount program to get additional licenses that you want. In the discounted options you also have an option of getting the license only products that we have in the donation. You also have an option of choosing or selecting bundles of software that includes software assurance. Software assurance is a three-year long benefit that provides organizations an opportunity to upgrade for free if there are any newer versions of products that come by and there are other kind of rights including kind of support that you get and things like that that come with the software assurance as well. That's now only available as a discount and that is a change if you're used to our program from a couple years ago or even last year where most of our donation licenses came with software assurance that is no longer the case anymore. Donation licenses are only license only and I'll talk a little bit more about those changes in a few minutes. So everything I just talked about are the on-premises or desktop solutions. That is in one offering that Microsoft has but where Microsoft is really going towards where Microsoft is really moving all of their grants all of their donations and all of their focus and actuality is on the cloud licensing. The cloud licensing has been obviously available to the nonprofit sector for over 10 years now so it's not necessarily new but these cloud subscriptions have changed over time in terms of what's available and I think can actually be some of the most robust solutions available. So the cloud licenses are a little different than the on-premises licenses. Cloud licenses are typically licenses by user so it's not limited to one device it's limited to a user specifically so me as Shruti if I have a cloud license I can use that same license to access the software on my laptop on my phone on my iPad if I had one which I don't but I wish I did but I could use it on multiple devices. That license is licensed to me as a user and not necessarily to my device. The other part of the cloud licenses are cloud licenses are subscriptions so they are ongoing subscriptions that you are signing up for essentially and it can be on a month to month term or an annual term but it's something that you're not necessarily owning yourself it's something that you are going to be paying for usage towards. One of the benefits I think out of the cloud solutions are there are regular feature updates so you never really have to get a new version of the product you never have to get the latest update that's there that's automatically being pushed to your subscription part of it being a subscription is that you are requesting whatever is in the future for this suite of software so if you have a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription you're getting all of the same Office apps and when there are updates or new features or new apps that are added you're automatically getting those into your to your subscription and you don't have to take any actions to do that. One thing that I will note is that in order to use all of the full services with these cloud licenses it often does require some sort of stable internet connection particularly if you are working in the cloud so if you're doing collaboration documents if you're using web-based applications many of the cloud licenses do come with downloadable desktop in applications as well and to use those you don't necessarily need the internet connectivity but if you want to update if you want to save anything to the cloud or if you want to collaborate like I said you would have to wait until you're online to be able to take advantage of some of those functionality. On the cloud subscriptions Microsoft also makes some of these available as a donation as well as a discount similar to what they do in the on-premises world. The distinction between the two are basically the license types itself so there's a lot of different types of subscriptions and I'll walk through what's available in the cloud offer shortly but there are a few primary ones that are available as a donation and those are purely donation it's zero dollar for organizations that are eligible and then the discounted licenses are same provided at the 60 to 75% off of commercial rates. One thing that I think is really important to know is that you can mix and match licenses so if you have some of your team that you think could use some of the donated licenses but you want some of your other team who are maybe in IT admin roles or are project managers or program managers to have different kind of access rates you can have them have different licensing it is completely mixed in match you don't have to have everybody on the same license the other good thing is that these are subscriptions so you can get them as you need them so if you have five employees right now or five staff members but in the summertime you guys increase double in size to help for child services or whatever that kind of nonprofit is focused on you can do that you can add licenses at the time period you need to add licenses and then actually remove those licenses afterwards so you really only have to pay for what you need when you need it and so there's a lot more flexibility offered in some of the cloud subscriptions that's useful to highlight I'll pause here and then what I'm going to move on to right now is talking and I've also put a slide here of the advantages and disadvantages of both of these we've talked a little bit about this already but I wanted you guys to see that it is there if you want to go back to it for any reason in the slides when we move forward what I wanted to talk a little bit now is what is changing to these programs and to these offers some of these changes have actually already been implemented and some of these are about to be implemented in the next few weeks on April 4th or after April 4th I should say there are going to be some limitations particularly on the on-premises offers that Microsoft makes available again the on-premises offers are those that were on the left hand of the screen here so those are the licenses that are the device-based licenses that are installed on your desktop or on your hardware most of these on-premises products are no longer going to be available as a donation after April 4th that does not mean that the solutions themselves are not going to be available they will be but they will only be available at a discounted rate there are a few exceptions to that but I'll just spend a couple of minutes talking about what that impact really means so if you're an organization who is still using some of those on-premises or downloaded technology particularly off the standard or some of the server licenses or some of the user-based licenses for the servers those licenses will still be available after April 4th but they will have and be at a higher cost they will not be available as a donation for Microsoft any longer they will only be available as a discount for 60 to 75% off of the commercial rates so it's still a significant you know reduction in cost to the organizations but it is not as significant as maybe the donations have been to date all of the functionality and there's a slide here that talks about this as well all of the functionality of the licenses and solutions that are available on-premises will be available as a donation through the cloud subscriptions and that's really where Microsoft is focusing they're moving towards a cloud first donation program a cloud first grant program as they talk about it where really the efforts of what they are providing as a donation to the nonprofit sector is really concentrated in cloud subscriptions as that's where they're moving forward again you'll still have access to these subscript the products it'll just be at a discounted rate there are a few exceptions to that the one exception is that there will be a full windows professional available as a donation so we know that for many organizations you need to have a full operating system before you can actually leverage some of those cloud solutions so that will continue to remain available as a donation to the sector and then there's a specific carve out if you're an organization that might have some public access computers computer labs a device where multiple people are using it because you're making it available for public consumption where there is a carve out and an opportunity to still have some access to donations there i didn't call this out on this slide but i'll talk a little bit about it just in case we have any libraries with us today there are also changes that have already gone into play for libraries libraries are unfortunately no longer available to access charitable or non-profit discounts or donations from the microsoft non-profit discounts they are eligible for academic discounts and we have a new program that we've launched to help provide those academic licenses to libraries and those academic licenses can be used for the public access computers that you might have as well as your staff computers as well we just had a webinar i maybe last week or the week before on libraries and so happy to send some information on there and we have a little FAQ about that as well and some resources and after april fourth as i mentioned when these changes go through i just want to be clear that there are no necessarily changes to any of the cloud subscriptions so if you're on office 365 or right now or if you're on microsoft 365 and using that there are no changes to those subscriptions this change only impacts those on-premises or desktop based solutions that are available currently as a donation that same slide that i had provided before i just showed here that the real only thing that's changing is the movement of the donations so really the only thing that'll be made available is that windows operating system everything else still remains the same but it's really primarily a lot more on the discounted front for on-premises whereas most of all of the donations are going to be focused on the cloud-based solutions a couple of other changes that have just recently gone through that i wanted to highlight as well is that the process for requesting and accessing your products at techsoup has also changed and if any of you have tried to request products in the last two months you've probably already noticed these changes i'll just give like a one-minute background on that we december 31st microsoft retired its previous licensing program of open licensing was the solution and platform that many of you may have been used to actually go into the volume licensing center the vlsc and go and download your licenses microsoft retired that program and is really moving everything into their cloud solutions provider platform to make it a little bit more consistent with what their approaches moving forward and reduce how many different licensing platforms that they have so part of that retirement meant that the way that we administer and the way that we deliver licenses to you had to also change and so a lot of the changes that you see in the requesting and the way that you request and access your products are as a result of that and i'll talk a little bit about what those changes are and what that might mean for you and we've had a ton of questions come up about this and we're also learning through this process as well so we've learned a lot in the last couple of months on how to navigate these new systems and make sure that you guys are set up can get access to the licenses that you need and you're set up for success so the first one is that in order to actually get your licenses you're going to need a microsoft account the reason you need that microsoft account is because that microsoft 365 administrative account that you set up and create is actually going to be where you get your licenses from moving forward so the first thing that organizations have to do is actually create a microsoft account and have that microsoft account be validated for charitable offers directly from microsoft so many of you may have already done this if you have then you don't have to do this again but for anybody who has never been to the microsoft nonprofit site you will have to go through that verification process to kick off any future license requests that you might have one thing to note here is whoever creates your account is by default set up as the account administrator once you're created the account you can obviously add administrators or remove or move those this administration rights but i just wanted to flag that because a lot of people have created it in the past and they don't remember or they don't know who it's always good to just start off with the person who created it is probably the default administrator on the account once you create that account you can come to tech soup like you normally do and add any of the solutions or products that you want to your cart once you do that you'll be prompted to start linking your tech soup account to that microsoft account so the first thing we'll ask you is hey can you give us your account name that you had at microsoft so we can link the two together and then after that what we will also do is ask you to accept tech soup as your provider and make sure that you provide microsoft the consent to let them know that you trust tech soup to actually provide your products to you and your solutions to you so that we can actually distribute those solutions that you request directly to your microsoft 365 account once we have that process go through we will go ahead and send those products and the way that you download those licenses particularly anything that you're getting as a donation or without software assurance is going to be directly from your microsoft 365 administrative account so you will no longer have to go to the vlsc necessarily to get these licenses these licenses will be directly delivered to your administrative center and we have guides and some pictures over here to show what that process looks like but you can download directly from there your licenses a few things to notice there with that changes that have gone through is that there's only a five-day period for you to be able to download and for those links to be active for downloading in your administrative center if it takes longer than five days or if you need more time that's fine you just have to come back to tech soup and request that we reissue that link for you there's also because it's not the same as the volume licensing center what's available in terms of what you can downgrade to is limited based off of the product so right now for office standard you're going to get the newest version of office standard available which is office 2021 but if you wanted an older version you can select 2019 in your download but there's no previous versions before that anymore and as I had mentioned before software assurance is no longer included because these are all part of the cloud solutions provider program and software assurance is no longer available as a donation okay so for anybody that's having problems or having questions about any of the new processes we'll go through that in a little bit more detail in a few minutes and there are slides and references guides videos that we've created to help you through that process as well so happy to spend some time answering questions are going through that but before we did that we just wanted to quickly just walk through some of the cloud offers that are available to you again there are no changes to these so if you already have these licenses there's no changes to these licenses we're just calling out what is available as a cloud subscription to nonprofits the first one is the microsoft 365 business basic license this is a license that is just cloud services so it's only web applications but it allows you if you have internet access to get teams sharepoint one drive word powerpoint excel outlook everything that you need and that's completely free for up to 300 users there's also the microsoft 365 business standard license this is also available for up to 300 users but it includes everything that I just talked about in the business basic plus downloadable desktop applications of all of those as well so you can get access to all of the web services all of the collaboration tools all of the storage of cloud but you can also access and download them directly onto your desktop and because of that it also includes publisher and access and then the license that I recommend all nonprofits try to take advantage of is the microsoft 365 business premium license particularly because the first 10 licenses are completely free to nonprofits and it's a really amazing suite of software and solutions so even if you're going to get another solution for over 10 licenses for if you have you know 10 seats that you're looking for 10 users that you're looking for licenses for I would definitely recommend getting this because it has all of the cloud services that we talked about it includes the downloadable desktop applications and it also comes with advanced security features so with this you can also get in tune for device management defender azure information protection you can have conditional access rates so there's like a lot more ability for you to have more secure frameworks and security settings in place that you can manage across your users one thing to note here is it also does come with a windows pro upgrade that's only useful if you already have a windows pro license so if you have windows 7 8 or 8.1 pro and you want to upgrade to 10 or 11 you can do that within this license you have an option to do that again that's free for the first 10 users after that it's five dollars per license per month but if you have over 10 users and you want other licenses you can also like I said before mix and match so you don't necessarily have to go to the five dollar version if you don't need that you can get the business standard or the business basic license microsoft also makes available office 365 licenses and for many of you who had gotten cloud licenses a long time ago you probably are on the office 365 e1 or even an older e2 version these are online cloud only applications they come with everything that I had mentioned the business basic comes with so your basic productivity apps including teams you have to have online access in order to use them the one change I'd mention here is I think as of July the e1 licenses are no longer available as a donation so if you're a new organization or getting this as a new subscription these are two dollars per license per month if you already have it as a donation it will remain a donation you are grandfathered in that's the same for the e2 license it's really if you're getting new subscriptions or if you've never had this before that it's at a discounted rate and then similar to the same kind of step ladder function I had before office 365 e3 and office 365 e5 are also available and each of them have building kind of security components and features e3 and e5 licenses also include downloadable desktop applications so you're also getting not just your cloud base and cloud storage you're also getting your desktop applications as well we do have a full kind of matrix of all of the licenses that are available and within a week or so we should also have a handy tool and wizard that you can use to say here's like what my organization looks like a few simple questions and then we can make a recommendation to you about what license might be right for you it is a little overwhelming there's lots of different license types and license solutions available they all have Microsoft or Office in the name so it can be incredibly confusing so if you have questions you can feel free to reach out to us we're happy to guide you or look at these resources where we've tried to compile and make that a little bit more clear for you as well. One thing I wanted to just call out with the Microsoft grants or the donated licenses that Microsoft makes available is that Microsoft does require that any organization that's using a donation subscription so that includes Office 365 e1 e2 Microsoft 365 Business Basic or the Microsoft 365 Business Premium licenses that if you are getting these solutions or subscribing to these cloud offers that you need to be actually using at least 85% or have at least 85% of your users using the licenses that you've requested. There's a few different ways they calculate and manage that but at a very high level I just want people to realize that you can request licenses and then after you request those licenses you have to assign it to a user. Once that's assigned to a user Microsoft is under the expectation that user is then going to use the license so that's what they're donating that ability for you to use that licenses use that license for your charge so after you've assigned your licenses to a user say you assign it to 10 people but only five of them are actually using it that would not meet the utilization requirement Microsoft is requiring that at least 85% of your users that are assigned to licenses are actually using it and they define usage in different ways it's all detailed on these slides but usage is really looking at that you're at least using one of the cloud services at least once in a 90-day period so it's not a significant amount of utilization they really just want to make sure that if you're using it or if you're requesting it that you're actually getting some use out of it because it allows them to provide more donations and more offers to the nonprofit sector this is definitely not something I would worry about particularly if you're an organization who's actually using your licenses I would also say is if you are an organization that has some cyclicality in your your user base you can always unassign that license from a user and then it's not counted against your utilization so if you're not planning on using that license for a three month period you can always unassign that license you'll still have the license when you need it but you don't have to assign it to a user until somebody is going to use it we've put together a few resources a blog about explaining a little bit more in depth about what this utilization requirement is what it means for your organization as well as a guide to how to figure out in your reporting and your own administrative tools what your utilization really is again this isn't something I would necessarily worry about Microsoft will send you an email if they think that you're not using your utilization or not meeting it most people are meeting it most people are using these services and solutions this is really thinking about organizations that might have requested tons of licenses maybe forgot about it and hasn't used it in a while and you'll have an opportunity to reduce those or unassign those licenses as I said all right so now we want to spend the rest of the time answering your questions we did get a few questions and we've heard a few questions come up over and over again so we wanted to go through those frequently asked questions first hopefully that will kick off and answer some of the questions that you may have had and then we'll go directly to the ones that you've submitted today so the first question is are there any changes to my existing software licenses so I have an office standard license now I've been using it I have a server license now is anything changing after April 4th the answer is no you are still going to be able to use any of the on-premises products that you have such as office standard these are perpetual licenses you own them you can use them as long as you want changes are really if you have any new requests what's available to you after April 4th is different than what might be available to you if you had a new request today if you have existing software assurance benefits that's also fine you'll be honored until the contract term that two-year period or three-year period ends this is really again for any new request that you might have the same is true for any cloud or current cloud subscriptions that you have the changes that I mentioned on April 4th are not going to impact any of the existing cloud subscriptions that you have you can still use your cloud subscriptions with no issues that is not going to be changing at all one question that we get a lot is like what if you don't have dependable internet connectivity and cloud-based solutions might not be the right thing for you and we totally understand that not everybody is in the same place and not everybody has the the infrastructure in place around them to be able to have access to continuous internet connectivity so there's a few things I wanted to mention one is that on-premises solutions are still going to be available for you after April 4th they are just available at a higher cost or higher rate for you it's at a discounted price we want you all to know that because we know we're a non-profit we do our budgeting at the beginning of the year and we have assumptions on what that cost is going to be so for anybody who has had budgeting and who's had that we want you to be aware of it so you can make the right decisions for your organizations but those products and solutions are still going to be there if you need them they'll just be there at a different cost the other thing to mention is that the two cloud subscriptions that I talked about the Microsoft 365 business standard and Microsoft 365 business premium license do come with desktop applications so you can completely download and use them you don't necessarily have to have internet connectivity to leverage and use some of those features and functionality on your desktop when you do have internet connectivity if you do then you can use it to be able to upload to the cloud collaborate or save things but it's not required for you to use some of those productivity applications the next question I talked a little bit about this or how are libraries impacted and as I mentioned with some of this kind of changes and shifts in the way that Microsoft had to fulfill everything one of the areas that was really impacted was how we serve libraries in the past we were able to provide non-profit donations to libraries for their public access computers now all of the offers available to libraries will be served through Microsoft's academic discounts that will include on-premises offers for public access devices it'll also include cloud solutions and software for your staff so if you're a library we have a link here and you can request solutions that are actually under the academic discount from us we just launched this so please bear with us we're still learning on this process as well so it's a little slower than we would have hoped but we're here to help and we'll try to get you the solutions that you need one of the other questions is what if I need more than five days to download a non-premises software no problem you can contact us we'll help you regenerate that link for you to download the software when you're able to we know a lot of organizations as I mentioned before probably already have an office 365 e1 or e2 license as a donation offer as I mentioned for you for those of you who are on those donations that will continue to be available for you as a donation there is a cap of 2000 seats so as long as you are only within that 2000 limit you can still add licenses to your subscription it's really for organizations who've never received these licenses or never had the subscription that it's now only for new offers available as a discount and then the last question that we've spent a lot of time on over the last couple of months is really and this is something if you have not gone through it yet you might just want to bookmark and come back to this slide that if you are trying to make a request for an on-premises licenses right now you might be struggling to link your Microsoft account with your TechSoup account so there's a few tips and tricks that we put together as well as a few resources the first thing is if you're going to make any request for an on-premises product you need to make sure that you have a Microsoft non-profit account so if you have not created one yet you can do that directly with Microsoft and make sure that you are eligible for the non-profit offers we've created a guide you can get that guide on the slide we'll put a link here for you for that so you can walk through that process usually it says it takes about seven days but if you're already validated by TechSoup and we know that but usually is a much quicker process so usually within 24 to 48 hours you'll have your results and you'll be able to move forward once you create that account you just have to remember that account name and then provide that to TechSoup after you add a product to your cart like I mentioned before as a default the person who's creating it is usually the administrator your account might look like TechSoup at on Microsoft.com if you've had it for a while it might just look like TechSoup.org it really depends on how you guys have set up your account and then after that you have to accept TechSoup as your provider make sure you give Microsoft consent and consent for customer agreement so that we can distribute the licenses directly to you and then you can check out so there's a few things that obviously have to go on it is a little bit more painful than it has been in the past where we can just automatically check you out because there's a couple of other steps but on a good news is once you do it once we'll have those accounts linked and we won't have to ask that information from you again this is really setting you up for everything that you need moving forward and the new way that Microsoft is distributing licenses so even if you get a discounted product or a donation product moving forward we're still going to need to go through these steps yeah we know it's a little you know clunky and it's not ideal obviously but we have created a few resources to help you we've created a step-by-step guide if you just like visuals to walk you along we also have a step-by-step video so you can just do it with us if you'd like to and as I mentioned and is on every slide here if you're having struggles if you need help you can just reach out to us at reachus at techsoup.org and we'd be happy to help you as well okay I feel like I've talked for a while and hopefully gone through some of your questions and now I'll just switch over to some of the questions that you guys have been submitting here today so the first one I got that has a lot of different people uploading it is from Donna our paid office 365 subscription renewed January 2022 how can we switch this to the free subscription through TechSoup and can we get a prorated refund of the recently paid subscription price really good question so for anybody who was on a commercial license and actually didn't know that this offer was available to you you can absolutely switch it over to the nonprofit subscription there's a few ways to do that the first one is that you're going to have to create the Microsoft nonprofit account if you already have an account there'll be a way that when you go there to the Microsoft site you'll be able to just sign in and it'll merge and it'll recreate your account really as a nonprofit and get you eligible for that nonprofit offer I'll just show that to you really quickly so you can see what I'm talking about let me share my screen and you're going to see all my screen here so hopefully you can see the nonprofit offers on Microsoft there's two options here it's whether or not you can register as a new nonprofit or sign in if you already have a Microsoft account if you click sign in here it'll link your account ask you a few questions to make sure you can be eligible for nonprofit and once you're eligible and you get a notification from Microsoft that you're eligible for these offers then you can send that information to us there is a resource in here about a specific you can get the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 offer directly in our cart and then we can add that license to you so you can get the new subscription at a non-profit discount or as a donation in terms of the proration usually what you are you will get it prorated as much as you've used so it won't necessarily give you like the last two months for free but as soon as you have that new offer you'll only have to pay for the subscription for the days that you've used the subscription and then moving forward you'll have the nonprofit subscription to be able to apply to it and a few resources at the end of the slide that talk through some of the links that you can go to I'll just share it right here so there is a free consultation and then if you go to our product catalog where you can go and get that done but the first step would be to create a Microsoft account okay the next question is from John had a number of uploads as well with regard to donation licenses is it one license per computer one license per location one license per institution or something else really good question so it depends on the license unfortunately so if you're talking about the on-premises downloadable licenses those are one per device so that's going to be one per the actual computer or device that you're putting it on so if it's a server it's going to be a server software or hardware that you're using there it's going to be a device based license if you're using a cloud subscription you can use that account on up to five devices so each person like me can use that same office 365 or Microsoft 365 account on up to five devices so there are no licenses that are per organization or per location it's really based off of a user or based off of a device so those are the two options that you have Laurie asked how can we learn the best practices for collaborating with SharePoint we have a ton of sites with no structure or governance very good question you're definitely not alone with that so i'll offer a couple of resources to help with that so what we try to do is make sure that you have obviously not just access to the technology but you know how to use it and to get the most out of it so throughout that we have a couple of different options the first one is we have a consultation service that will help you pick the right license for you but what you're talking about knowing how to get the most out of the solution that you have we have training that's offered under the Microsoft digital skill center there are courses that are really devoted to learning a little bit more about how to use different parts of the suite of tools you have we have one drive courses we have excel we have SharePoint there we also have services that can help you in terms of data migration and managing your SharePoint sites so if that's something that you're looking for help on we can definitely point you to providers who are particularly focused on working with non-profits and helping create a new structure and getting you support and actually doing that and on the slide here you'll see that there's a services link here all of these can be opportunities that you can have to engage with us and we can point you to some resources that'll help you there as well we have a question from john that says how with regard oh we already answered that question actually sorry Celia asked about we are a library is there still a way to get Microsoft products yes Celia there is still a way to get Microsoft products they are just available as an academic discount we have a link in the slide deck and hopefully somebody can put the link in the chat right now we have a form that you can fill out and let us know what you're interested in and what you need and we will reach out to you and try to help you get set up with the academic licenses both for your public access computers as well as for your staff like I mentioned we're still learning this process we're new at being able to provide education licenses and from the work that we've done with Microsoft so far that education licenses has obviously typically been used for large academic institutions and so they're also figuring out how to make sure it's best suited for libraries but we're happy to work with you and make sure that you get access to the licenses that you need. Patricia asked or Patricia asked where do we go to create the Microsoft account and I'll pop that link into chat here it's that same site that I just showed before that you can go directly to Microsoft and you can either select get started if you've never created a Microsoft account or sign in if you have a Microsoft account but might not be eligible for nonprofit yet and you can go there and start your account there. Ron says Microsoft used to offer Office 365 E1 licenses with a quantity of 300 this was great for nonprofits with maybe a hundred people all free why the change to such low amounts for free seems Microsoft is not as good as it was if pushing nonprofits to cloud why increase the costs a bit for larger nonprofits that's a great question and I totally understand what you're saying there I do want to make sure it's clear that there are a few options still available for larger nonprofits one is the Microsoft 365 business basic solution that is still free for up to 300 users and you will see that the functionality here is very similar to the E1 license it's all of the same cloud apps and it is still available for up to 300 users the only one that's restricted in terms of how many is the business premium license and it's because it has a much more robust solution it has a lot of other things offered within it. The other thing I'll just mention for larger organizations that we don't typically talk too much about on these calls because it's really only specific for organizations that have I think it's like over probably at least 200 organization people or people in your organization is that Microsoft does make available enterprise agreements which are long-term agreements that you can enter into directly with Microsoft for organizations that have really larger needs typically to use those you have to have a significant amount of spend with Microsoft too so it's not ideally the perfect solution if you're just looking for some of the donation offers but I will say that the business basic license is very similar to the E1 license from before it is still available for up to 300 organizations 300 users and it does provide some of the similar functionality but totally understand your point it's not necessarily perfect for everybody okay Mindy asked after creating a Microsoft account and getting approved as a nonprofit how do we proceed with TechSoup and what does TechSoup charge we submitted an inquiry with the person we met with so they couldn't help us with Dynamics 365 we submitted another inquiry about a couple weeks ago we haven't heard back we're brand new to TechSoup and Microsoft I'm sure how to get started thank you for that question Mindy first I'm sorry that we haven't gotten back to you and we will make sure we do that but after getting your Microsoft account set up you can actually go directly to our catalog or so you can go to TechSoup.org you can navigate to all of the Microsoft offers that you're looking for and select the solution that you want you can go in like a self-service marketplace if you need help we're here to help you so those forms that you submitted or maybe you had a request for a consultation you can still submit that and we can make sure that we schedule time with you to go over what might be the best option for you but that's like the best way to get started with TechSoup or with some of the offerings that you're looking for on the question about Dynamics that's a good point so for Dynamics 365 which is a particular solution that Microsoft has for their CRM solutions so their customer relationship management solutions we have a few on-premises versions of the Dynamics that are available out as a discount but for most organizations who are looking for cloud-based solutions on Dynamics we don't necessarily have those products available right now and and the reason is because to be able to provide those licenses usually you want to provide some level of customization some support some help and actually being able to deploy those licenses because they're not usually the easiest licenses to deploy on your own so at this point we don't necessarily have them in our catalog but if you still have questions on those Mindy feel free to send me an email at reachus.techsoup.org and I'd be happy to put you in touch with a few partners that we've worked with who might be able to help you on that the next question is from James how do we get to the resources on the slides you will get all of this email to you so if you've registered for this webinar today all of this will be sent to your email if you need it before then you can of course feel free to send us an email at reachus.techsoup.org and I'm happy to send you all of these resources as well. Opry asks how do I check to see if my organization is registered with Microsoft as a nonprofit that is an excellent question you can navigate to where I put the slide or the link in here to Microsoft backslash nonprofits you can try to sign in and see if you have an account created that you can actually log into if not there is a contact us inquiry there you can contact Microsoft and ask them to see if they have it if not you can also contact us at reachus.techsoup.org we can try to see if there might be an account that you may have created or somebody that may have created for your organization we don't necessarily always see that information we only see the information for organizations who have already gone through the nonprofit validation so you may have had somebody on your team create an account that maybe wasn't for nonprofit so those are a couple of options that you have I will say it's not ideal particularly if you have existing solutions or existing subscriptions that you're using but there is no harm and it's okay to create a new account if you don't have access to an existing account if you have no idea who created it and you're not using anything on it you can absolutely create a new account with Microsoft and still get access to the solutions and the donation offers that you need okay we have a few questions that came in about libraries and public access computers Cheryl asked why were we locked out of purchasing Microsoft's office four months earlier so for most nonprofits a lot of these changes are only happening on April 4th for libraries these changes happened on December 31st I completely understand that question believe me so the reason that this actually happened was because of the fulfillment changes Microsoft made so as Microsoft changed from their old licensing platform of the VLSC and getting your licenses from the VLSC to this new program where you're getting everything through your Microsoft account it all became account related and unfortunately libraries can only be eligible for either academic licenses or nonprofit licenses and so in the new system you can't be eligible for both and so that's really as a consequence of the fulfillment changes had to happen and had to impact the library community earlier than the nonprofit community so definitely agree that's not ideal and it was not necessarily the best outcome for libraries in the short term but hopefully in the long term because all of the educational discounts are still available to you you will still be able to access all of the products that you need the discounts on an educational or academic discounts are actually pretty significant and sometimes are even better than the nonprofit discounts available and there are still some cloud licenses that are available as a donation under academic as well Carly asked we're a nonprofit with public access computers not academics or a library would we still need to go through academic versions of Microsoft for those public access computers great question Carly and we'll probably have a webinar particularly on this in April but for nonprofits who actually have public access computers so nonprofits that are in shelters or providing shelters or domestic violence centers or are doing community center courses that actually have public access computers there will be a small donation offers that are available still for you so that you can still get access to the technology that you need at a donation cost versus a discounted cost for particularly those public access computers Microsoft is aware that a lot of the cloud subscriptions being user based licenses doesn't really meet the need for a public access computer and obviously want to continue supporting those very real needs and there will be just a secondary kind of thing to make sure that you're using it for public access computers but as long as you're using it for that purpose you'll be able to get donations particularly for that need we only have a few minutes left so I'm going to try to get to a couple more questions if there are questions that I did not get to please feel free to reach out to us at this email reach us at techsoup.org and we will do our best to answer your questions Dorinda asks what does it mean by do not include software insurance so great question Dorinda previously so prior to December anytime anybody got a on-premises donation or desktop licenses from TechSoup it came with a benefit called software assurance software assurance was a two-year contract or a two-year benefit that was provided along with your licenses that allowed you a two-year period to get any access to any upgrades that were available within that period for free and for some of the server based solutions or from of the windows based solutions also included some level of support so the current donations do not include that benefit automatically with the license if you want that benefit you would be able to get that through a discounted offer that included specifically the software assurance benefit I will say by and large most nonprofits that we saw use that benefit for that two-year periods of request upgrades so that was the primary benefit that people had used in the past and so that's really the one thing we wanted to make sure that people were aware of I know that we have a lot of other questions in here that we weren't able to get to and I sincerely apologize and I hope that some of the content in here was able to answer some of those questions for you I'll just remind you that all of these slides are going to be provided to you in your email they will include a list of resources and links for you to be able to get access and to see and click on any of these things so that you can get to the resources and the places that you need to make the request that you need there are blogs articles recordings of these webinars in the past where you can look at to get information as well and of course you can feel free to reach out to us as well and so I hope that this was informative and helpful for you and if you do have questions please do reach out we're here to help