 Welcome to Beyond XP, Upgrading Windows Operating Systems. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm your host for today's webinar. We'll also be joined by Bruno Noak from Microsoft and Gregory Seely of TechSoup. To do quick introductions, I'm an Interactive Events Producer here at TechSoup and I've been with the organization for about 6 years where I've worked in a few different capacities as a writer, editor, manager of our blog. And before that, I worked for a series of small nonprofits based in Washington, D.C. where I was frequently the accidental techie who had to purchase new computers, get our software donations through TechSoup, and had to just figure out how to manage technology without any on-site staff. Also joining us today is Bruno Noak who is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for the Windows Small and Medium Business Group in Microsoft. And he's been with Microsoft for about 14 years. And so he is a real expert on this topic and can help walk us through some of the benefits of upgrading, why it's necessary to do it sometime soon because of XP's support going away soon, and he'll also help guide us to some resources that can help us do that. Additionally, we're joined by Gregory Seely who is a Supervisor of Client Services at TechSoup. So for those of you who've used TechSoup services before, you may have called in to us to figure out if you're eligible for a specific donation or needed help with a question about your account. And Gregory is one of the people that helps manage the team that helps answer those phones and help you with your tech questions day in and day out. So we're glad to have him join us as well. You also might see on the back end assisting with chat, Carlos Bergfeld who is a TechSoup Senior Product Web Producer. So he has written a lot of content about our Microsoft donation program and Windows operating systems. And he'll be there to grab your questions, help you with any technical problems, and hopefully help answer some of your questions about the donations as well. So a quick look at our agenda today. I'll do an introduction of TechSoup in case you're not familiar with who we are. We'll do a little bit of a poll to find out where you're at right now that helps us understand who's actually joining us on the line today. And then we'll have Bruno talk about how to get to modern, what it means for nonprofits and libraries, and ways that they can help jumpstart their technology to get to a really modern, efficient platform that works more for them instead of creating more work for them. Then we'll talk about some of the benefits of upgrading your operating system. Do a quick overview of Office 365 and their hardware available that can help you upgrade easier. And then we'll have Gregory talk about how to move from XP to a newer operating system. Share some additional resources and do some Q&A. So a quick intro of TechSoup. We are a nonprofit with a clear focus. We are working to ensure that nonprofits, charities, public libraries, churches, and foundations get the tech products and services they need to make the best decisions about their technology and help meet their missions. We've been around since 1987, and we've distributed more than 11 million software and hardware donations to more than 200,000 charitable organizations in more than 60 countries around the world. I'm proud to work here and I'm proud to have been a user of TechSoup services before joining the staff. We have a variety of things that are available that are new at TechSoup including consulting services to help you do those day-to-day tech upgrades and tech decisions that you might need to make, real live people. And we now also have Windows 8.1 which we'll be talking about today and QuickBooks 2014. So jumping into the topic at hand, a little bit about you. Please click on your screen to tell us what operating system you're currently running on your office computer. I didn't have an unlimited amount of spaces here so I couldn't include everything. So if I didn't include what you are running, feel free to chat it into our chat window. I'm going to leave this open for just a moment so everyone has the opportunity to click. And we did target this mostly toward people who are running XP, but everybody who's on hopefully will cover something that will help you make the best decisions. I noticed a lot of people are using a combination of different operating systems. Feel free to keep clicking on your screen. It looks like about 28 people or 22% are using a combination. So maybe you are using some XP and some Vista or some Windows 7 or Windows 8. And about 50% almost, 46.6% are using XP. So this is great. You are the folks we really want to help ensure that you know the paths to upgrade and when you're ready to do that. And we do think it's important for you to do that because the support for Windows XP is ending soon. And we know from a variety of credible news sources that there are some malicious folks out there that are looking to take advantage of that shortly after that support goes away. So we want to make sure that you are able to make those upgrades when you're ready to. With that I'd like to go ahead and introduce our first speaker Bruno Noak from Microsoft. And he is a Senior Product Marketing Manager with Windows Marketing. And he will be taking us through the process of how to get modern. So welcome to the program Bruno. We are so glad to have you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everyone depending on which time zone you are at. Thank you for joining us today. A quick intro on why I am your speaker on this call. I work on our small and medium business marketing team. And for the past almost 18 months we have been running a series of initiatives to do a final push and help you guys understand what is going to happen on April 8th and why it is important that everybody is aware and has taken steps to make the changes that you need. We have been doing that probably since launch of Vista. So it's important to understand this is nothing new. Our life cycle for supporting any of our operating systems is 10 years. It's the longest in the industry and for XP specifically because of such a large install base and such a faithful install base we did extend that to 12 years which ends on April 8th. Now what do we want to talk about today? I think the first thing, the first point of data that we see from nonprofits and from smaller organizations in general is that they consider it very important to have access to up-to-date technology. And mostly the reason I understand that is because the structure both from a personnel and from even just resources perspective is normally less sophisticated than larger ones it is important to use technology to get the best productivity boost and the best effectiveness possible. Now at the same time we do have a significant number of people still running both on Windows XP Office 2003 and to a lesser extent Exchange 2003 and SharePoint 2003 and all of those products will end support on April 8th. What it means really is that we have been on what we call extended support now for approximately 7 years. We then only provide updates that fix security patches, that fix security issues that we find in the product. So there has been no new feature ads and compatibility things that have been done. And at this point is when we are going to basically release a final set of updates if needed and then stop taking on any support calls and so on. The majority of the globe has now moved away from XP. There are a few data points from different institutes and different research firms. That point was being between 20 and 30% of the install base for small organizations and for consumers being on XP. Beyond talking about really I think a lot of you have probably read and discussed some of the risks and that is probably why you are on this call. I think I just wanted to point out a couple of things just to put things in perspective. Windows XP was first released when USB memory sticks were coming to market and the iPhone wasn't launched and wouldn't have been launched for still a couple of years after that. So it's really thinking about sometimes we do have and I have an older car but it's having a car that suddenly has no more easily serviceable parts or service available from a shop around the neighborhood. It's really something that has taken its course. It has been wildly successful but there are better and more modern options. So what I'm going to do from now on is basically walk you through the reasons why we believe the technology you can use today is better and matches more of the state of technology of today and most people's lifestyles including their professional needs. And then we are going to talk a little bit through what are the steps that you need to follow to be able to migrate successfully and then take both yourselves and your users out of the risk of having to deal with whatever eventual aftermath we may see post-April wait. So let's start through that. So from a concept perspective to us at Microsoft our modern platform means Windows 8 Professional and the Office 365 suite of services and local productivity applications. When we talk about that we really think that the top reasons for doing that is that you will get the ability to run those applications and have that operating system experience in basically any form factor. We are going to talk through that a little bit later and you can be productive from anywhere. You can be running it on your PC, eventually on your Mac. You can be running the same to your Windows phone, iPhone, or Android phone. And the other issue that we try to address when we talk to XP users is the level of security you get and the level of encryption and basically all of the evolution of both the security threats online but also what we try to do in the engineering of the product just make it a better value and something that will keep you safe and you will keep you at ease of what you are using. And we understand that a lot of the users that are on XP still have pointed to us that the belief is that it's really hard to upgrade. It's a complicated process. There is no simple straight up upgrade to Windows 8 at this point so there is really a concern about that. The truth of the matter is the majority of the scenarios that we have seen are pretty straightforward from an upgrade perspective. So you can basically, there is oftentimes if you are going to use the same device, a need to reinstall the operating system and get your applications back in there. But the only real blocker that we have seen is if you have a very specific type of business, I'll give you an example that was one of the clearest ones to me. If you run like a chemical lab and you have a piece of equipment that was built and has drivers and everything for XP and that is connected to a specific application that is a version for XP, that may not prevent you from moving but you have to address both that equipment and the application. From an application perspective, over 97% of the ISVs we work with which are quite a big, large variety across the globe have versions that are Windows 7 and Windows 8 compatible. There is however oftentimes the need to migrate the data from the old version to the new version but those applications exist. It's not so much that the applications are not available. It's really that they need to be addressed, they need to be upgraded and sometimes there is a need to buy a newer version if you are not on maintenance plan or something like that. So there is a lot of resources TechSoup provides. There is a set of offers I can walk you through. I think you may need what interests you guys because you have access to donated software to TechSoup. There are a set of offers for devices. We will get to that in a minute. So let's keep going here. So how do you get that modern and that value that makes you able to work from anywhere and work the way you like to work and so on? At first the thing that is what is driving people to work like that and to work mobile and so on is a lot of the nonprofits are still struggling in finding proper level financing. There is donors and there is some level financing but there is not really at this point in time with the economical situation across the globe a lot of adequate financing across. And then a lot of you guys have been telling us that tablets are a key part of work these days which they certainly were not when XP was launched. And then that 81% of employees bring some form of personal device to work. So the way we address that in our current platform is giving you the ability to be effective in hiring and retain the staff that you have today or that you want to hire to be able to be effective and be successful in your nonprofit. And then at the same time while reducing costs and being able to be constantly connected and having lower security risks as the threats evolve and become more sophisticated. And then the last thing which I think is closest to everyone's day-to-day use of this is work styles have changed dramatically. When I joined Microsoft which was about two years prior to launch of XP, I basically worked in an office. I worked from home on a big old bulky laptop and it became really luxury to be able to connect to the corporate network from my laptop at home. And of course speeds were not great and oftentimes we had to use dial-in to do that. Now if you look at today, our assumption is that we are connected all the time that we can access our data in any device that we are at and that we can do work and balance our work and our personal life quite easily. So if you think about how we address that and I'm not going to go deep into that there is another event next Thursday on Office 365 if you want to follow that. Is the ability to have all of your things, both your files, your data, your settings, the applications you have installed and so on in the cloud synchronized to a myriad of devices so that you can do whatever you need be it at the nonprofit or library while you work with your colleagues be it at home and off hours where you need to address the deadline or take care of an emergency or even off-site as you go and collaborate with partners, search donors and so on. So that really is the profile of the cloud you use that we have today versus really a PC-centric world that we lived when XP was first launched. And for that if you guys could give us some understanding of as you move off of XP how has that journey been addressed in your nonprofit or library? Have you used that software donation from TaxSoup and upgraded the current hardware that you have, or have you actually been using new hardware to update? So I can tell you that. This is a good question for folks to respond to because we're trying to figure out if hardware is really a barrier for you in your ability to upgrade or if it's just that you haven't had time or the tech expertise or what the issues are to make sure that people can upgrade. And so we're not going to spend much time talking about hardware today but it will help us figure out if there are other ways that we can be serving our users by funneling them to other donated hardware sources if possible and if available. So it looks like a lot of people are affected by the hardware. That having hardware that's 7 or 8 years old maybe, or even 5 or 6 years old that hardware may be the biggest barrier for you. But feel free to chat in the window if your answer is something different than what we're asking. Maybe hardware is not the biggest barrier for you. And that's helpful for us to know so we can provide more content to help answer those questions to get you over that barrier. It looks like about 64% are saying that it is a big barrier to them. Hardware is a barrier. Let's see. Some people are saying we can move forward and hardware is not an issue. Let's see. Sorry if I worded my question a little confusingly. I think the point is people are trying to understand if we're asking. I think the question is, is hardware a barrier to you? I think most people got it right. I just like skim through. There's a lot of conversation going on in the chat window. I'll come back and take a look later as we switch presenters. But most of the questions I saw and I think they are perfect and there's a common misunderstanding here is, so can I run this on 512 megs? I would say 512 megs is very tight from a memory perspective. I would say that 1 gig is where you can feel fairly confident that you're going to be able to run a newer version of Windows. Now there is a common misconception that Windows 8 requires more resource to run than Windows 7, which gets people to tend to want to use Windows 7 for that upgrade. The actual case, because we have reimagined Windows with Windows 8 and we have built it in a way that it can be run on smaller tablets like 8-inch tablets and larger tablets like 10-inch tablets, Windows 8 actually consumes less resources. So you're going to see that if you are looking to upgrade and you have a lesser resourceful machine, it is probably the best idea to check on compatibility of all the components. But if you can run Windows 8, you will likely see how better performance out of that PC. So thanks for that piece of data. It's clear that hardware is a barrier. And with that, I kind of want to address what we're doing from a hardware perspective, including driving lower price points to let you guys evolve and move forward. So the first thing is, as we reimagined Windows with Windows 8, we have been working hard with our OEMs, the PC manufacturers and tablet manufacturers, to make available a lot of variety on different form factors and different sizes and different price points. So we know, depending on your work style, what you work on and what do you prefer to work on, there is likely a different tablet or a different PC for your need. And a lot of times you can be a PC with touch or even a PC without touch. And the key thing is, even if you have multiple devices, you may have like a desktop at the nonprofit and then you have a tablet at home and then you have a phone, we have the ability to let you synchronize settings, information, your files, and even your apps across multiple devices. It is really an eye-opening experience on a couple of scenarios that can and do happen. The first one is when you have a couple of devices and then you basically just forget the one that you use the most at the office. But then you open another one at home and you have the exact same start screen, desktop settings, background, everything is just there. And the same for your OneDrive which is our Cloud Drive offering where you can basically save all your files and then you see them in any device including your Android phone, your iPhone, or your Windows phone. So you can basically be more productive from anywhere. The last thing that is really key here is the whole updates, security, and infrastructure just runs smoothly in the background. Basically taking care of itself and let you rest and sleep well at night knowing that you have the latest set of security technologies. And we are going to go a little deeper into that. I don't want to get too technical but there is a lot of improvements that were made even from Windows 7 to Windows 8 to prevent any unauthorized or malicious access to information that you may have on your PC, on your tablet running Windows 8. And that is really something that we are proud of and we want to make sure that you guys understand that you should be looking into it. Okay, let's talk a little bit about that, tablets for every, even PCs for every need and so on. I referred to the fact that there are tablets from 7 to 10 inches. Some of the things that a lot of people haven't used or worked on were hardware lately. We currently support now devices where you have between one and two days worth of battery. We do have a series of tablets that have LTE. And one of the biggest things that we have been working on and there has been a lot of good reception from the general public and especially professionals is the concept of two-in-ones. So this is basically a hybrid device and you can see that on the first picture on the left-hand side. It is a tablet that attaches from a keyboard. When it is attached it just basically looks like a clamshell laptop traditionally. And once it attaches it is just a full-fledged tablet. And the real advantage here is you have one device that behaves in two different ways and that can be used in a lot of different scenarios. And you have to carry a single device. You have to carry a single set of chargers and then you can use it mostly on any scenario you meet. And then last but not least, we've seen a lot of growth on what we call the all-in-one category. You can think of that as the replacement of the older desktop. It is like a modern desktop which is like a computer running inside your monitor with touchscreen. It is really great for in general public areas, kiosks, receptions, even conference rooms. We have seen organizations that got some of those on 27-inch sizes and they can be laid down as a table. And then you can basically collaborate and people can even scribble and take notes at the same time using that. So there is a lot of variety. If you are by any chance in the US I do recommend that if you want to check that out you can go to a Best Buy where there is a big variety or you can go to Microsoft Store. But really you can just look online. There is a lot of different form factors and we have seen people really happy about the fact that they can find something that really matches the way they work and matches the budget that they have. And right now we are seeing, if I'm not mistaken, I'm talking US prices so your mileage may vary depending on where you are. But we are seeing traditional laptops running Windows 8 starting at around $250 and then we do have tablets around the same point, 8-inch tablets and there is like 10-inch tablets or hybrids starting at around $300 to $350. So there is really variety at a low price point that you can potentially try to address and work and find a set of harder works for your needs. So we talked a little bit about how to choose your work style. So what do you do if you use keyboard, touch, mouse, and pen? There is clearly a worry in users that if you move to Windows 8 you are going to have the start screen and you are not going to be able to do anything with keyboard and mouse. Windows 8.1 was a great move and a great way to address that. We have added a lot of improvements. You can boot directly to the classic desktop if you are used to and you can absolutely use mouse and keyboard without the touch screen and have a great experience. I'm actually presenting to you guys on a classic desktop that I run in my desk and I use mouse and keyboard only and no touch screens, no nothing. So I do have a mobile device that has a touch screen, a tablet, and when I go to a meeting I take one of those. Okay, so I said that Windows 8.1 was better than Windows 7 in a lot of aspects including recommending that if you have a less powerful hardware that you should look into running that version instead of 7. Why am I saying that? So let's address some of those items. First thing is it's faster to boot and the improvement is about 30% in most cases. Longer battery life that 10 or 11 hours use over a day worth of standby you are going to get out of Windows 8.1 not out of Windows 7. Better performance in general, it is more secure. You can boot directly to the desktop or to the start screen depending on what you prefer and what you do the most. If you do a lot of moving files, copying files, backing up, and so on we have greatly improved the file explorer to have what we call the ribbon UI that's the same type of user interface you have now in office on that broader ribbon. And then there's a lot of other things like faster Wi-Fi reconnection. So when you go to a different place and the PC already knows the Wi-Fi it just goes faster. If you use VPN to connect securely to the office or to any other central location it just can be out of trigger depending on a certain app that you use that requires that. And then you have the OneDrive integration. You can basically by default save everything to the cloud and if you lose your device, your device is stolen or if it crashes anything you can rest assured that all your data is backed up. And then when the store and modern apps will let you get additional apps that are very touch friendly that will let you do different things in a more productive way. Okay, let's carry on. So a lot about everything in one place and all your devices, what do I mean by that? I talked a little bit about OneDrive and I talked a little bit about StartScreen. So the thing that we think we use that ability in the cloud to keep all your StartScreen, all your recent files you can come back and pick from where you left off. If you open a browser you can see all of the tabs that were open in all of your devices and you can go back and reopen those on the device you're at or your browser settings, favorites, everything syncs across and all your personalization. So the device will always be unique to you once you log in and it will bring all the configurations back regardless of where you're going. If you're suddenly in a trip or in a meeting where you forgot to take your PC and you need to log in, you can log in with your online account to someone else's device and all those settings and personalization, everything will quickly come to that device and you think that you're just using your normal day-to-day PC. Okay, we talked a little bit about apps. I'm not going to go deeply into the details of Office 365 and the client app differentiation. Thursday next week we're going to have another event like this. Just focus on that so I suggest you attend that one if you want. LOB desktop apps, more traditional like Librarian apps or financial apps and voicing apps, donation apps and so on that run on a PC, run normally as if they were on Windows XP or Windows 7 or Windows 8. And then you have the ability if you want to have Windows Store apps which are more modern sophisticated apps in the sense that they are easily to build that they are touch-friendly and they have more modern design in most times. And one other important thing is you can build your own app quickly and easily. We do have a tool called Project Sienna and it lets you with a little more sophistication than potentially using PowerPoint and Excel with Macros, build your own app. So if you're going to run a silent auction or if you're going to run a big fundraising you have the ability to build your own app and your personalized app for your nonprofit to basically showcase it in the best way possible. We have seen smaller businesses like coffee shops build that to have their own menu and so on during the day on a tablet at the coffee stand. And it might be owner just uses that to balance the books and to budget and everything. So you can always think of any touch device that you have that is running Windows always gives you the ability depending on the scenario where you're at of having a kiosk or an automated signage without having to add anything else. Okay, so let's carry on here. Mail, people, calendar, everything in one place. Again, I'm not going to go on the Office 365 piece. I'm going to let it for next Thursday. But you have the ability to sync all of your traditional social networks and email accounts in a single place. So Office 365, Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, your LinkedIn account, your Facebook account, your Twitter account, all of those sync on the same email client, the same calendar application, and the same People Hub which is an app where you can see all of the people in your life and in your work in a single centralized place. And it will let you know if you know that person from Facebook, if you have their contact both on Facebook and LinkedIn, or if that's like a Gmail contact that you email with frequently. So it's really a centralized hub, a way to be really productive and to easily go about work. Now, one of the things we do the most these days is searches. When we go look for something, we don't normally skim through directories and we don't start typing pages on our browsers. We just go to one of our preferred search engines and do that search and then we go from whatever the results were. In Windows 8.1, we use a search capability for the whole OS. So Smart Search lets you just click on a search button, you put search on whatever you want, and it will aggregate the results from both your hard drive, your cloud storage like your OneDrive, and it will show you files that have what you asked, but at the same time it will also give you web results. So what you have here on the screen is a screen capture of a search that was done for New York and it found an Excel and a Word file that had that, but it also happens to know through Bing that New York is a city. So it gives you weather at that exact instance. It lets you go to a map and explore it if you need, and then if you roll to the right which I don't have the ability to right now, you're going to see additional results that came from the search engine and that are just showing you links on the web where you can go navigate and look into that. Okay, let's talk a little bit about being productive anywhere. I basically covered that a couple slides ago, but I wanted to point out that because you have that ability to connect from anywhere, sync all your settings and access your files wherever you have Wi-Fi, 3G, or 4G connectivity, you now have the ability, and you should take that into consideration as you look into buying devices or PCs or whatever you are looking into to go work from anywhere, or even not just work but plan and meet and as I pointed out the digital signature and so on. That's really key with that change. On XP we're in a mindset, hey, this is a PC. It's either anchored to a desk or it is a laptop that has a 2-3 hour battery life and I have to carry that big power supply. Now as we move and evolve into newer hardware, we do have at a really low price point around the $300 price point to start off with a set of devices that have 7 to 8 hour battery life, have more storage and have the ability to sync across everything that you do and keep everything safe in the cloud. What else can I bring to you on that? So stay more secure and always up to date. We discussed that all the updates happen automatically. One of the things that I really wanted to point out is from a security perspective what we have done is from the moment you press the power button on that PC it has already put a lot of security measures in place. So in the past even in Windows 7 in some instances there has been issues with compromising a PC while it's booting. So those have been addressed in Windows 8 so it's secure from the moment you turn that thing on all the way into when it goes in to stand by when it connects to a network. It is from a generic point of view between 6 and 8 times more secure than Windows 8 and about 3 times more secure and more prone to being infected or broken into than Windows 7. Some people think that from a security standpoint, hey, we're non-profits. We're a small organization. We're not a target. But truth is almost half of all non-profits and almost probably a little bit more than that on SMBs in general have experienced a security breach. I know it's been top of mind for everyone because all the big retailer security breaches we've seen lately. But the best way to address that is to just if you can move into the most modern operating system that you can because that operating system brings in a lot of the improvements that help avoid that. So I pointed this out so when you boot your PC you have trusted hardware and the secured system start up. The way it does that I don't want to go into like the nitty gritty detail but I wanted to point out. So the way it works is there is an encrypted chip in each of the Windows incompatible devices that knows all of the peripherals that are part of the build of that PC. And if when it boots it doesn't find one of them or if it has something strange like a new one or something in between two pieces it will basically hold itself and ask for an encryption key that you can recover online from your account before it boots. So it really defends and it looks for you even from a hardware peripheral and component perspective. Of course if you upgrade a PC you will have that key, you're going to type that key in and then that chip will understand and know that that is the new make of that PC and that will not be an issue. While you're working once you've finished booting it has built-in anti-mower and phishing. The OneDrive for Business offering which is part of Office 365 lets you do file sharing not just with you and the cloud and having it all backed up but sharing across the organization making it easier to collaborate, control versions and so on. And then we have the ability to let you do VPN and have a virtual smart card to make sure that you are secure and connected in an encrypted fashion if you need to without having to carry like a smart card reader and so on. So in the past here at Microsoft we did use a smart card reader physical one and our smart cards to be able to go into VPN. Nowadays we just create one virtually inside that chip that I referred to before. It just really increases security without the added bulk or the need to carry an additional piece. One last comment on that and we're going to wrap up. When your device gets lost and that unfortunately happens, sometimes it gets stolen, sometimes you forget it behind or sometimes it just has an accident, first thing you can have encryption in all of your files and it barely degrades any of the performance so you can feel safe that it's not going to be noticeable from day to day use and that encryption allows you to, if you lose a device or someone steals it that they're not going to get access to it. Even if they take the hard drive out and put it in another PC they can't see any other data without a huge encryption key that's really complicated and not easy to break so you can feel comfortable with that. And you can apply that to USB sticks as well and then if you're using 365 you can have all your files stored there for backup and comfort as well. Okay let's quickly cover the end here. The key of upgrading I think is reducing complexity and increasing your flexibility, your ability to work from anywhere to get solutions that most of the Global 500 companies have but at a really accessible price and have the ability to work very effectively, very quickly, and with those dependency. If you have a fear of losing your work, even if you lose your PC we just address that. You can sync everything with the cloud. You can keep everything encrypted in your device so you know that the information is safe either from donors or whoever you are helping at the same time that you can easily work from anywhere in any device. And then upgrading is easy. How easy is upgrading? Let's talk a little bit to that and start to wrap up. So what do I do? The simplest way really would be to get the new PC. Now I understand we're all in a time and date even if we were not talking on profits where access to just buying a new hardware outright is not the easiest thing. The way we're working to make it better and simpler for you is we're having EOEMs, build devices that are cheaper, and at the same time we have a series of offers to most markets across the globe where you can trade in in some cases your older PC and make it even more accessible to buy new ones. Now if you have a newer PC I would normally say something that's newer than 5 years, ideally newer than pre. You can upgrade existing ones with volume licensing and donations. And then you can work with TechSoup if you have anything that's by any chance because you received a donation and didn't have a proper operating system or has the wrong version, you can just look into the get channeling options. And then as you finish that operating system migration you have the ability to be subscribed to Office 365. A key thing here so I saw a lot of you discuss a little bit of Office 365 in the chat window. Office 365 cannot run on Windows XP. There's a couple reasons. One of the big ones is it's not fully compatible with the version of the browser in that OS but there's also others when we talk about the locally installed applications like Word, Excel, Offlook and so on. So it's really key that you move to a newer version so you can take advantage of Office 365. Now once you have addressed that you're going to either move by installing a new version in the current PC or getting a new PC, the single most important thing you want to address is transferring your data in your apps. You don't want to leave anything behind and you don't want to be at a PC where you can suddenly do what you are used to doing and you can't run your nonprofit or your library running. So that's really important. And then with parting thoughts what are the couple of things on the checklist? So the first one is check if you can upgrade to 8.1 on your old PC. There's the upgrade assistance and as I pointed out oftentimes 8.1 will be lighter but run faster on older hardware than Windows 7. Second thing, check the compatibility of your apps. See if any of your apps will need data migration or a more sophisticated version upgrade to make sure that when you get into the new or last year covered. Remember to backup your files in the ideal world. You would be using OneDrive to make that because then you basically upload them once the cloud and they will be available in any Windows 8.1 or 8 device that you have. And as you get that done we recommend you get the latest version of Office to Office 365. It just makes the whole upgrading process and the whole updating and keeping things up to date process really simple and transparent. We want to help you have a smooth transition. We know we are in a tight deadline in general now because we are less than a month away. We just want to make sure that you have all the information that you need so that you can build a plan and stick to the plan. TechSoup has a lot of resources if you have questions and a recommendation from working with the largest government and private organizations around all the way down to really small customers like we've been working with schools in Asia and we've been working with really small organizations like coffee shops here in the US and so on. It's important to have a plan to detect within all of your install base the ones that are easy to move and the ones that are going to take longer and then kind of stick to that plan. If you do that you are going to be able to within a couple of weeks or a couple of months at worst case let your nonprofit or your library have a new level of mobility, productivity, and security. So with that I want to thank you for your attention. I know it was a lot of content for a fairly short period of time. So I'm going to hand it over to Gregory and I'm going to go back into the chat window and help you guys take some of those questions. Thank you. Thank you Bruno. And there are a lot of questions. We are trying to answer them in the chat as much as we are able but I want to move us forward. But Bruno before you jump off one quick question. So a couple of people are asking about is there a way to predict what the lifespan will be of Windows 8 or 8.1 or even Windows 7? Do you have any insight on that from working at Microsoft for a long time? How long people can expect to live with the operating system that they have if they do upgrade? That's a fairly good question and actually that is something that we think about. I don't know if you guys recall at the start of the call we talked to our regular lifecycle for support is 10 years. And XP because of a lot of attenuating reasons and so on it is 12 years and that's when on April 4th we are going to be ending the 12 years of support. For Windows 7 as an example it is 10 years, not 12 which is our regular support cycle and that would be from 2009 all the way down to 2019. So you can expect that if you adopt a fairly new operating system within one or two years of release that you are going to be able to use that operating system for a series of about 10 years. Now I would normally recommend that you be careful with 10 years because then you are really stretching the lifespan of your hardware and so on. One of the other things that we are trying to do is lower hardware requirements so if you have a piece of hardware that really lives long and you bought a quality piece of hardware you can upgrade that same equipment. And the other thing is we are looking at evolving at a faster pace. If you look at Windows 8 and 8.1 and the latest update we announced that will come later this year, all of those can run up to the end of the month. So things are moving quickly. Yeah, we are trying to help everybody stay current without imposing such a dramatic shift as this seems to be to a lot of people. Yeah, well that's great. And for folks who do upgrade, if you upgrade with our regular donation program those new licenses with the exception of the get genuine ones come with software assurance that would allow you to upgrade for free if another operating system comes out within two years of your request. Which brings me to introducing Gregory who is going to talk to us about the process for moving on from XP and how to get those donations through TechSoup. Welcome to the show, Gregory. Thank you. Thank you Becky. And thank you Bruno. I actually learned quite a bit in that. I'm actually a sales pitch here. I was in the same position a couple of years back. I did very fond of XP and used it for quite some time and really felt comfortable with it. And the office here moved up to Windows 7 and Windows 8 and I actually find that it's very intuitive, much more flexible, and really easy, very customizable. So I was very happy to move on. So I'm not going to give you nearly as much in this presentation as Bruno gave you. What I want to go through basically is what you're going to see what it looks like, how to find the operating system, that TechSoup, what it looks like once you've gotten the new product, and the Microsoft site, where you're going to find what to look for and what your options are. So first of all, here we have the TechSoup home page which I'm sure most of you hopefully are familiar with. On this home page now which has been recently revamped, you'll see here we're going to have the section where the drop-downs for when you go looking for product here. And you'll see the top one here is you're going to go under Donor or Partner. And here is a list of all the partners that work with TechSoup currently. And you're going to want it alphabetically. You're going to simply go and find Microsoft. And for Microsoft you're going to go and you're going to end up on the landing page. Now this first page you're going to find is information, almost purely informational. I don't have the whole page there, but if you scroll down you'll find information about the title groups and everything that's with the Microsoft program which I'm not going to go into right now because we're focusing on the operating systems. But if you go and you click on that button there which you can see, it will take you to this is the catalog page for getting Microsoft products. And as you see, there's actually two drop-downs. The first one is covered because I clicked on the top one. But the top one is the one we want. You click on it and you're going to see there you can choose Upgrading Operating Systems. So you choose that. It's going to take you to a page where it's going to give you all the options we have for operating systems. Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and still Windows 7. So we have all three of them available. Technically when you request an operating system with Microsoft they really don't care which version you use as long as they're supported versions. So all of them are going to be available. We call them out individually to make it easier for you to make a choice. When you get to the Microsoft site you're going to find that you're going to have a larger option than you even saw on the TechSoup page. I went in and did Windows 7 on this. When I was talking about 8 or 8.1 again it's going to be your choice to do. I would back Bruno and say I would go with the most recent one but in case you're concerned or whatever. I'm choosing Windows 7 here at this point. Again, you're going to check on the view details there which will take you to the product page for the product there. And you can see here it's going to give you all the information you need that don't have the full thing laid out here. But you're going to see in the various tabs how you can look at the system requirements, what's involved, and what's available here. So here and here you can choose your various tabs and you can go and you can find the information you need exactly which operating system is best for you. The heck of time I'm simply going to say pretend we add this one to our cart here. And again, once you do you're going to see it reflected up here in the cart logo on the TechSoup site. So you add it to the cart there and now we're in our cart. Pretty straightforward. Here's your product. This X right here gets people in a lot of trouble sometimes. This does not mean you're not eligible or that you can't get it. It's the option to remove it from the cart. So do not fear this little X. It is your friend. This means the product is in the cart and you're ready to check out. From there you're simply going to go down. I've only scrolled very briefly here to show you the next step of the thing which is proceed to restrictions. I'm not going to show you the whole checkout process. It really isn't that difficult. I am pulling out there's actually two steps. The first is the restrictions check because TechSoup being a donation program is all about restrictions to whom, how much, and how often, Microsoft easily being our most generous donor. Then we're going to go ahead and click on that and I'm not going to show you the entire checkout process. Here we're going to go ahead and jump in. Let's assume that you were able to check out and nothing went wrong. Not in the not too distant future. After placing your request you're going to receive a fulfillment email. It's a fulfillment email and what you're seeing here, the license, that should be your exact title of the fulfillment email. And this is the information, a lot of information in this fulfillment email which gives you a real sense of what's going on and what to expect. You will be receiving other emails with full fair market value and such. I'm not going to go into that right now because my interest is in showing you how this happens. Again, the process is very simple. It can be lengthy, especially when we get to the Microsoft site and I'll cover that in a minute but for right now I'm going to show you. So anyway, once you hear your fulfillment email, after that you come down. This here is the link that you want. You're going to go to this is the Microsoft's website. It's called the Volume Licensed Service Center. It is an incredible update from what Microsoft had in previous years. The interface is very easy to use. It's very informative. So imagine you get here, also involved, and I've changed these numbers here, you have your request number and the authorization license number. These are important numbers to hang on to. So hang on to this email once you get it, archive it in case there's any problem later on. If anything goes wrong, the hard drive breaks, the computer is lost, whatever else, you can recover with these two numbers. You will recover anything or if you are coming into an organization which has these stuff for available and you are new, this information will allow you to get access with the organization already has. So let's assume that you have just gotten this, you've just received a fulfillment email and on we go to the Microsoft site. Here we are at the Microsoft Volume Licensed Service Center. As you can see, you're going to begin with logging in. When you log in, and this is very important, you want to log in with the email that you used to place the request, the email that you used to log in to where the email was sent, the familiar sent from TechSoup. So whatever that email was, and sometimes it's not the same when you log in with, the email that the address the email was sent to from TechSoup is the same email that you want to use to log in. If you don't have an account with Microsoft yet for this, please contact TechSoup and we'll help you through that. I'm not going to go into that right now. But once you've logged in here, go ahead and you want to sign in. Here again, you want to use that same email address that you used from where you received the fulfillment email and your password. If you've forgotten it, that's an option just down here. Again, if you don't know or are not sure, please contact us and we'll be happy to work you through that. But assuming all the information is right, we'll go ahead and click on the sign in. It takes us to the main interface of the Microsoft website. You see all the various tabs here. I've highlighted the ones that are most important right now. But each of these I'll cover very quickly some of the other functions here. But anyway, Downloads and Keys is going to be your friend. This is where you're going to find the information on how to download and access the product that you've just got. I come here and this is my account actually, so it's a little bit older. You probably will see. I also have been with TechSoup for a long time and have helped up many organizations. So I have access to quite a number of accounts. So you're seeing here more than you're going to see in your account. However, what you're going to see is very quickly here is more options than you requested. So if you requested Windows 8.1 from TechSoup, when you get to this website, you're going to see more than just that. And that's very much on purpose. You are eligible for more than you request from TechSoup. Again, when it comes to an operating system, you're going to have access to any of those that are currently supported by Microsoft. Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, there are also smaller service packages that can be accessed as well. But your key things are going to be here, your download and your key. Very quickly here, your download. When you click on this, this will pop open, the Download Manager option here, your language, and your 32, let me see if I included this slide here. You did, I did indeed. 32 and 64 bit are included right here. So again, you really have both options. So when you do this, you're going to click on, you're going to accept, and I don't know that I have it actually. I acknowledge right here these buttons will wake up and you'll be able to download your product. And if you have any questions again, let us know at TechSoup we can help you with that process. Going onward now is going to be the keys. I've obscured them here for privacy's sake, but once you click on the key option, this dropdown is going to come. Here is your Mac key, multiple access key. KMS is Key Management Services for Operating Via Server, and it's not what we're talking about, multiple access key. And right here you're going to see your countdown, how many you've used out of the total that you've got. And here is going to be your key. So the key you're going to enter is right here. And you're going to be able to put that in after you install the software when you're installing it, the key, but again, found right here. Now the final thing I will say is that under the administration, and I'm not going to show this, I'll just cover it very, very briefly, if you are in a situation where the organization already has keys, already has these products, and you are new and need to access them to upgrade your machine, and our administration, you can actually request the permissions if you are new from the existing keys which are owned by the nonprofit. One final thing I'll say is if you have questions, if you get stuck, if you have a problem, we are here at TechSoup to take care of you and walk you through. We have experience in this. Please reach out to us. If you get confused, get lost, or don't understand what you're doing, this can be complicated, but we have resources here to help you out. And I believe that with that, I think I'm going to hand it over to Becky and we're going to go from there. So with this, I will sign out. Again, if you have any questions, please reach out to it and thank you for having me on. Thanks so much, Gregory. I know we had to fly through that because we're running out of time. We are doing our best to answer your questions in the chat as well, and we'll continue to do that. Just to ask a couple of them verbally, we've had people asking about compatibility, and we've pointed I think a couple of times in the chat, and we'll also include a link in the follow-up email to Microsoft's Compatibility Wizard that you can type in the program that you're using the year, and you can see if it's compatible with Windows 8. So that will help folks know whether your mission-critical programs will work well with it if you plan to upgrade. We also have some questions about Get Genuine. So I want to talk just briefly about what that program is. And so for people who have maybe donated computers that came with licenses, and you don't actually know if you own them, or what those license keys are, it's not necessarily legitimate at this point because you don't know who owned it to begin with. Or for people who maybe had purchased computers at Best Buy and they came with a home version, and you really want to upgrade to a business-grade professional version, those folks can access the Get Genuine program, and those donations are one time only in the life of your organization. So if you need three licenses that you know for sure, but you think you might have a couple of other computers in the storage room that you might eventually need to upgrade, then make sure you're requesting five licenses, or ten licenses, or however many you think you might someday need. And then once you've upgraded through Get Genuine, it does not include software assurance which is the benefit that comes with all of the other Microsoft products on our site. But once you upgrade to Get Genuine, or through Get Genuine, you can then request to upgrade in the future using our donation programs that come with software assurance, and then access those benefits that allow you to upgrade for no additional cost within two years of those licenses. So it is a great way to get yourself on professional business-grade licenses of your operating systems to make all of your software legitimate. So definitely consider that. We are still working to get through a lot of the questions, but we're at the top of the hour. So I'm going to go ahead and just show some of the additional resources here since we don't have time to answer some of these questions verbally today. We will take your questions and put them to our client services folks who will do their best to respond to you. And we'll also put them in our community forums where I would invite you, where there's a link down here, techsoup.org slash community. To come there we have threads open all the time where we have experts responding to these questions and have responded to them in the past for people too. So you may be able to find your answers there. We'll make sure to point you to the resources on our site that include things like whether you need the 32-bit or the 64-bit version and the steps for upgrading in writing so that will help you there. Additionally, these are the two links where you can find our Windows operating system upgrades. If you're on XP or Vista and you want to upgrade to Windows 7, 8, or 8.1, you can find Windows 8.1 Enterprise. And then once you get to the Volume Licensing Service Center, you can then choose if you'd rather be on Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1. You can downgrade to those versions. You can downgrade from Enterprise to Pro, and there's no additional cost. You'll see those options in the Volume Licensing Service Center. And then again the link to the Windows Get Genuine program. Last but not least, here are some of the links that we've discussed in this webinar today. Windows 8.1 Upgrade FAQ page, which we've chatted out in the window. This is where you can see the compatibility on your computer. You can install that little wizard that they have that will assess whether you can upgrade or not. And it will also point you to the link to the Compatibility Center which is linked on this page. Then we have a couple of articles on upgrading whether you should, how to do it, and clean Microsoft Windows installations using ISO files because we know that can be a little complicated for folks. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'd like to thank Bruno Noak, our presenter from Microsoft for taking so much time of his day to share with us his expertise, and hope that you've gotten something out of this that can help you move forward with upgrading your computers. I'd also like to thank Gregory Seeley from TechSoup's client services for sharing that upgrade process with us. We know we zipped through it quickly, but never fear, you'll get the email later today that has the full recording of today's webinar so you can watch it at your own pace. I'd also like to thank Carlos Bergfeld on the back end for helping answer those questions which he's still plugging away at doing right now. And I'd also like to thank webinar sponsor today, ReadyTalk, for providing the use of this platform for us to provide webinars like this on a weekly basis. We have another webinar that we've mentioned coming up next Thursday on Office 365, and we'll be doing an overview of how to do it yourself if you're interested in migrating to the cloud. So thank you all for joining us and have a wonderful day. Bye-bye.