 Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to those who are joining us today for a virtual office hour session. The customer journey with Microsoft. My name is Kevin Mahal. I'm a senior technical customer success manager here at TechSoup. Today, we are very fortunate to be joined first by our team's director and customer success, Jared Morris. I'll say even more importantly, a couple of our customers from Custom Health Systems, Jeff Koski, from Ryder, Bruce Fife, and from Legacy Link, Gary Murray. Some quick housekeeping items before we begin today's session. Again, this session is being recorded. If you are not comfortable with being a part of the recording, you are certainly welcome to step out. This recording will be sent to you in the coming days via email along with the deck that you'll be seeing. You can use the chat function to type in any questions and comments during today's session. There is also a Q&A tab that we added especially for this session. There will be a Q&A session at the end before we wrap. You can of course put your questions in there and we will try to address as many of them as possible. For closed captioning, you can click the Alysis either in the upper right corner, if you are running the desktop application, or if you are using the web browser, if you toggle your cursor towards the center of the screen, you'll see the pop-up bar that you see on the slide. You can click on then and then click on turn on live captioning. For today's agenda, we're going to first begin by introducing our panelists who will be discussing their journey into Microsoft and Microsoft 365. We will be hearing about their adoption stories, and then we will be opening up the end of our session for Q&A. With that, I will actually hand it over first for a brief set of words from our team's director, Gerard Morris. All right. Thank you, Kevin. Hello all. My name is Gerard Morris. As Kevin mentioned, I am the Director of Custom Success for TechSoup. As you can imagine, we've got quite a task ahead of us to move into a place where we can continue to support organizations like yourself and help you on your journey. Traditionally, as you know, you've been able to purchase Microsoft and other products from TechSoup at a discount or donated level. We're in a position where now we want to move beyond that and be able to add more value, even if that's being able to connect you with other folks that can help you specifically as a non-profit, as you use the solutions that you decide to adopt from us. We're in a unique position to be able to do that, and we appreciate the attention and the continued support that you all have given to us. Special shout-out to Jeff, Gary, and Bruce for taking time out of your busy schedules to support us today and share your stories as well. We really appreciate it and thank you to all the attendees here today. Hopefully, this will be a really good session, and we look forward to doing more sessions like this. It's really important that we are able to empower organizations to hear from folks in a similar position than themselves to talk about what challenges and successes you all have had using technology in your organization. We really appreciate it and looking forward to it. Thank you. With that, we're going to move over to our first speaker, Jeff Koski. Jeff is the Director of Management of Information Systems at Chestnut Health Systems. Go ahead and take it away, Jeff. Take care, I'm here, Jeff. I was not on Meet a Minute ago. Okay. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. Appreciate the opportunity to chat here today. Again, as Kevin said, I'm Jeff Koski and actually my title is a little different now. Very recently, we've finally caught up with the rest of the world with regard to the title, the name of my department. I'm now Director of Information Technology, which is clearly a more common term for what we do. That's my current title. Chestnut has been, we're actually experiencing our 50th anniversary this year. We started as a substance use provider here in Bloomington, Illinois in the early days of treatment services. Lots of history from back in those days. Over the years, we've grown from a small Victorian house on the east side of Bloomington to expand services, not just here in central Illinois, but also in southeast Illinois. For those of you who are familiar with the Metro East St. Louis area, we have substantial presence down there as well. Over the years, we've moved from not just behavioral health services, but about 10 years or so ago, we became an FQHC at which time we began to provide primary care services, particularly to Medicaid-funded patients. We've expanded quite a bit in that area over the years. We also have somewhat unique to our organization, I believe, a substantial research division known as the Lighthouse Institute. That group has been, I think, over 30 years. They've been doing research in the substance use field, substantially funded by SAMHSA grants and other funding sources, doing research in terms of trends in treatment efficacy and so forth. We're pretty proud of that part of our organization as well. Currently, we have about 700 employees plus contract employees as well. We've grown quite a bit over those years. I've been director here for half of those as of last week. I celebrated my 25th anniversary here in this job. I've seen a fair amount of changes over those 25 years. When I started here at Chestnut in 1998, there was surprisingly little technology in place, probably half of our employees, and there were probably 350 employees back then. Maybe half of those folks had computers of any kind, a handful of people had even email accounts. Over the years, Chestnut and the IT department have really grown, as you can imagine, to now where everybody has a computer. We have actually two EMRs in place to provide records management and service for both our behavioral health, and primary care sides of our clinical services. When I started, there were three and a half of us positions in the IT department. Now there are 20, and so we've come a long way. Not just before, but actually as a result of COVID funding, we were able to do more especially to address the infrastructure. It was a way to finish off some aspects of our IT infrastructure particularly with regard to network switches, and some other back-end technologies that helped us quite a bit as well as a lot of computer hardware for end users as well. About a year ago, I'm going to say about a year and a half ago, was when we really started to think about whether Microsoft 365 was something that should be part of our environment. I'll be honest, I was a hesitant for a long time, and there were a few reasons for that. One, I was able to get Microsoft licensing through TechSoup. We would buy the licensing we needed for Office. We were standardized on Office 2016. We had on-prem exchange email environment that my staff managed. We felt like we were able to do what we needed to do in-house. Those things worked for us, but a couple of things started to change. I'll say about two years ago, but especially until late 2021. First one of that is what was driven by Microsoft. For those of you who've been working with TechSoup for a long time, you've seen the trend that Microsoft was driving customers away from end-user types of software, Office, Suite, and so forth. It was increasingly difficult to acquire more licensing, for that matter even Windows desktop licenses. That was a factor as time moved on, and Microsoft was easing us as customer base away from that model. Another factor that was driving our move was the increasing security exposure that we felt our on-premise exchange email servers were creating for us. It was very much a challenge to keep critical patches installed on those servers. We're very aggressive with our patching have been for a long time, but when there were at least two instances, I don't remember exactly when they were, but I want to say about late 2021 and then again in 2022, where extreme critical patching was required, meaning patch those exchange servers because they exposed to the internet, like patch them that night, kind of level of patching. It created a stressful situation where although we are very solid with our patching environment, when you have that level of criticality, started to think maybe we ought to let that be handled by Microsoft. Last spring, we made a decision to move to 365 E3. Kevin was there right from the beginning as we started to ramp up. We contracted with a consultant to help us navigate the E3 configuration and there's a lot to think about there, a lot more than I even though I knew it was a complex environment, you don't really appreciate the magnitude of that complexity until you're having meetings with a knowledgeable consultant who is walking you through various configuration decisions to make, particularly in a healthcare environment where HIPAA is driving those decisions. It worked well, consultant got us to full migration along with my team, who was very much engaged in that right from the beginning and have, we've grown as our internal capabilities have expanded quite well over that time. About, I want to say August or so, by the late August, we had all of our staff moved from our old exchange servers into the 365 environment. I think it's gone well. There are a couple of things that we've had to try to deal with and still are actually. One of those is that prior to 365, we were using proof point as our email filtering and email archiving solution. We were rudely awakened to proof points unwillingness to provide a reasonable way to export our archive so that we could import it into the 365 environment, worked with different consultants to try to figure out a way to do that, including the VAR who provided a proof point to us. Now we're working with a third party to help us migrate our email archive from pre-August of 2022 to the 365 environment, and we're doing that for HIPAA and compliance purposes. The other thing that we've experienced is while we have everybody on Teams, we have found or at least a number of our particularly clinical people and people in our research division have found that Zoom functionality had served them better. There were certain features and functions that were more suited to their usage, particularly with regard to telehealth, and we're working through those. Kevin actually helped with some of those things directing me to Microsoft Training Resources, which I'm very grateful for and has been there along the way. I want to comment briefly that TechSoup has been a partner of ours for more years than I can remember. I remember the days of Complementer, which is what TechSoup was called way back in the day, and we've been very fortunate here at Chesna to have been working with TechSoup, and Kevin in particular has been an outstanding and ideal rep helping me whenever I need it. We're happy where we're at. I guess my only final comment in terms of advice is that if you're ready to take this on, make sure you get some good consulting help to get you through the complexities and decision making process about how to set up your environment. We heard that advice from the beginning and it was good advice. It's a very much a challenge, but once you get to the other side, there are plenty of advantages. I've failed to mention that we're also licensed with Defender for Office Plan 1, so that's what's providing our email filtering and archiving solution at this time. I guess I'll stop there. Thank you so much, Jeff. It's been an absolute pleasure working with you. To Jeff's point, there are complexities and we'll of course touch on it later, but that's what the customer success team here at TechSoup is for, is to help where we can fill in some of those answers to the questions that we're certain need that you have. With that, I'm going to move forward here, and I'm going to let Gary jump on the mic and talk about his experience with Legacy Link. Well, good afternoon, everybody. I hope everyone's doing well. I hope you can hear me. Am I good to go, Kevin? Can you hear me? Yes, hear you loud and clear. Okay, wonderful. So as Kevin said, my name is Gary Murray. I'm with the Legacy Link. I am the IT Systems Administrator here. I've been here for about 21 years, and the Legacy Link is a nonprofit organization. And what we basically do is we provide a lot of services to older adults, individuals with disabilities and their caregivers. We've been doing that since 1998. We started with about, I believe it was eight employees. And today we have about 170. We are located in the state of Georgia. And we provide programs and supplemental community resources, as you can see on screen, and generate awareness for other initiatives and existing services for seniors, but not just seniors, but also for folks with disabilities and things of that nature. And we provide things such as in-home care services, meals on wheels, transportation, as well as senior employment services, and a host of other different services. Primarily we did focus, when we first began back in 98, with the Division of Aging on seniors, but we have since grown. And so we kind of focus a lot on different community aspects, not just the senior citizens, not just those with disabilities, but also their caregivers. And not just that, but also even the younger side of life, those people who have grandparents who are the parents for children who may have lost their parents and things of that nature. And we provide services, try to help them along, and try to find a better quality of life for all of them. So that's kind of what we do. And our services are primarily within a 13-county region of Georgia. However, we do provide those different services throughout other regions of Georgia. So we have staff kind of scattered remotely all throughout the state of Georgia. So that's kind of us in a nutshell. And as I said, we have approximately 170 users today. And if it wasn't for TechSoup, I don't think that we would be functioning as well as we do. And I want to say thank you to Kevin and Dorad and TechSoup for having this. And I hope that it does encourage some of you folks to jump on board with them because they have been a wonderful partner in IT for us. They have really, really made it seamless for us to find solutions. I don't know if some of you have the same issues we do, but we are limited in our funds because we're a nonprofit. And here at LegacyLink, for the first, I would say, 15 years in our, in my years here, I was the only IT administrator. I was the only IT staff that we had no other. And so as we've grown, I was the only person handling all of their IT needs. Now, we are a fairly small organization compared to others. However, it wasn't up until about four years ago that they just gave me another guy. So as said, unfortunately, as many of you probably know that sometimes IT infrastructure tends to be one of those things that when it comes to finances, gets a little bit of the latter side of that money. But when HIPAA came out from being a paper tiger to a mean lion, things started to change. And so our organization and our executive director realized that technology was extremely necessary. So just to kind of give you an idea of where we were in our IT infrastructure before we moved into Microsoft and contacted TechSoup, some of you guys might be in kind of the same boat that we were. I mean, we were very hybrid throughout all sorts of different systems. It's just kind of what we could piecemeal year by year based off of the funding that we had. And so that wasn't necessarily what was best for our staff, not necessarily what was the best certainly for us and not the best services that we could provide for our clients. But I'll just give you a few examples. We were on SMTP email systems through our local ISP up until 2018. And we ran multiple security softwares to ensure encryption and data safety to try to meet HIPAA compliance because we do fall under the HIPAA umbrella. We do do quite a bit of services for hospitals and doctor's offices for some of our clients. So that, of course, makes us HIPAA compliant. And we have to follow those high tech standards and encryption. So we had to, of course, put those security measures in place. And then we had to manage multiple Microsoft software licensing. And that was crazy with as many users as we had and then devices. And quarterly user cyber awareness classes to make sure that the users themselves were up to date with understanding how things work as far as technology and spam emails. And I mean, let's be honest, I mean, for those of you who are dealing with the IT world, I mean, that's where many of our issues come from as our users. And so we got to make sure that they're aware of the problems. And then the managed on-prem Windows file server. And that was really our big bugaboo, if you will, because it was a great big file server with just tons and tons and tons of files that just accumulated over the years. And it was NTFS based. And so all of these files and users were accessing. And it was just a hodgepodge of things. And it was myself managing all of this. And it just wasn't, it wasn't manageable. It got out of hand. And so we were to the point where we had to do something because HIPAA was bearing down and things just were getting out of hand, but the organization was still growing. So we called TechSoup and I got on the phone with Kevin. And by the way, everything that Jeff said was absolutely spot on. I mean, when I got on the phone with Kevin and the team at TechSoup, they settled us down, their team brought us in. And we basically said, we need help. We've got to find something that's going to consolidate all these systems and make it make sense of our operations. And we've got to do something about our IT infrastructure. And so they really sat with us. They listened to us. They partnered with us. And I was very concerned like Jeff was. I mean, I had heard I had looked into Office 365. I mean, I knew it was a beast. It was a massive platform. And I was very, very apprehensive because, I mean, I didn't know a lot about it. And I was going to be the one that was going to have to administrate that. And that was going to be not just a learning curve for all of our staff, but that was going to be a learning curve for our IT department, which was me and one other person. And it was going to be me and him that was going to be supporting and teaching and training and preparing and setting all this up. I mean, I was overwhelmed and Kevin and his staff just calmed us down. And they said, look, let's talk about your needs. And we discussed that. And what we come to find out was the things that we wanted most was teams, one drive, outlook, and active directory, Azure Active Directory. These were the things that we needed to compile the most. And we realized that there were more things that we wanted. But the good thing about Microsoft 365 is you don't have to buy the whole thing up front. You can grow into it. So we looked at 365 and we realized that 365 E3 was the best solution for us. So in 2019, Kevin and his team built a plan for us. They built the subscriptions. They helped us with the pricing. And then, as Jeff said, they helped us find a migration partner. And from them, as you see, I kind of threw out a timeline and a kind of a strategy plan as to how it went. And I won't go through the whole detail force, but the migration partner pretty much made it seamless. And I would highly recommend that, as Jeff said, that you find a good partner, a solid partner that's going to walk you through step by step and who will carry you through. And if you do that at the end, it really was seamless. I was very surprised. And since then, it was probably the best decision we had made. And we can't thank TechSoup enough for really pushing us into that. Because again, like I said, we were apprehensive. What kind of cost was it going to be? What kind of labors were going to come from this? All of those worries and concerns for a nonprofit, they come up. And at the end, it made sense. And as we were sitting with them and talking through this, it made sense. But just a few things. The strategy and the planning is so important when you sit with your migration partner. And then the IT data configuration, getting that information and that data to them. And they practically build out the Microsoft tenant for you. There's really not much that you have to do. As long as you provide the information for us anyways, they built out the whole tenant for us. And then the timeline and the scheduling, they worked with us to find what was best for us. And keep in mind that this was our migration partner, but TechSoup was constantly checking in. Kevin and his team, checking in with us saying, hey, how's things going? Anything you need from us? And they were always there for us. And it was just, it wasn't a, okay, we got you. Now we're going to throw you off. And that was it. They really, really were there and they still are today. And then finally, the training and the preparation, which is clutching key for us. Considering that there were only two people for us in our IT department, the training and preparation was absolutely necessary. So I don't know what everyone else's situation is, but if you're much like us, here is where you really want to stop, hit the brakes and focus in. Because it made such a big difference. Because when that migration and implementation comes in, there's going to be a lot of optimization and tweaking that's going to take place. And that's where you're going to want to make sure that you have some time and not handling things such as, how do I do this? And, you know, multi-factor authentication questions and this tech level one kind of support issues is going to come after that. But your migration partner is there for you during that as well. And they will give you that assistance. So all of this they carried us through. And again, is there a cost associated? Yes, but again, nonprofit cost. So, you know, it's something that they will help you through. And, you know, there's multiple partners that TechSoup can help you find one that's going to fit your situation. And ultimately, at the end of this, we sat through this and about two years later, even in the midst of COVID, we sat through and we realized, you know, E3 wasn't enough. So we actually upgraded the midst of COVID to E5. That was a goal of ours. And in the process of that, the reason we did that was because Microsoft Intune is a part of E5. And that included that asset management. That's all of your devices, everything within Intune, being able to asset control all of your devices everywhere, wherever they go. And now you have that inventory, that asset management, that MDM. So this is something that was clutching key for us. And it was a goal. And then, of course, our ultimate goal comes next quarter, which is when we're going to do away with our on-prem server. Is we're going to move all of that massive shared drive that I told you about our data file server. And we're going to stick it in SharePoint. And again, as I mentioned, you don't have to do it all at once. And that's where OneDrive was so clutched for us. When we implemented that in 2019, the staff didn't know it, but we forced them kind of to, we put policies in place where they had to use OneDrive. We removed the ability to attach documents as they used to and outlook and things of that nature. Because we wanted them to start sharing OneDrive links and using OneDrive as means of using that and outlook. And the reason being is because we knew SharePoint was coming. And that kind of prepared them for moving towards SharePoint so that eventually, as well as teams, their shared drive would be pushed into SharePoint and then they would get used to that, be used to that. And that training would already be in place. And that's our ultimate goal. And so, like I said, it's a growing concept. And TechSoup was there for us to get to that point. We started our journey in 2019. And we actually are still going. We're still growing. And we can't thank TechSoup enough for what they've done through this. And we highly recommend that you guys do it. And I guess I step back and I'm not as great of a, I guess you could say speaker as some of the rest of them here, but I would say if you're apprehensive about moving forward on something that's so large of a beast like this to consume a lot of your time or money or anything like that, once it was consolidated, I mean, it was today, we still have just two people in our IT department, myself and our computer support specialist. And he handles tech level one and two and I manage everything else. And I'm able to do that now and get home to my four kids, believe it or not, each night, because everything is consolidated in Microsoft 365. And it does and it has made our lives easier and better and more manageable. So I highly recommend it. I highly recommend you guys on board with TechSoup and give them a shot, at least sit down and speak with them. And with that, I will turn it over to Kevin. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much, Gary. Gary's journey, I think the expression is a one-man arsenal. I think Gary epitomizes what's possible, I think, when you have a vision and you stick to it. Just with Jeff, it's just been a real pleasure working to see what you've been able to accomplish. So with that, I'm going to move over to our final panelist for today. Bruce, hopefully I have your title correct. Bruce Fife is a director of technology for Ryther. So with that, I'm going to hand the microphone over to you. Thanks, Kevin. Appreciate it. Yep, you got it just right. So that's all good. I'm going to go ahead and switch over to my camera. I thought I'd start with the avatar just to kind of I thought it was not cool. This is only the second meeting that I started off with it. So a new feature that Teams is rolling out and just thought it'd be kind of fun to start with that. But I'll switch over to my camera here. And I wasn't going to say good morning because I'm still on the West Coast, but I know a lot of you guys is actually probably afternoon. So I will say good day to everybody. Appreciate everybody stopping in and thanks again to Gerard and Kevin for getting this thing set up. This is definitely a huge benefit that I've enjoyed working with TechSoup on. And as an end customer, it's great to have these opportunities to meet all of you guys and to share stories and things like that. So as Kevin mentioned, I'm the Director of Technology for Ryder. We are located in Seattle, Washington. Ryder has been around in some form or fashion for almost 140 years. We focus on mental health and family support for youth. And that's really our focus is working with kids from very young ages, as young as toddlers, all the way up through adolescence into their early 20s. And we provide them with services, everything ranging from general kind of counseling and support. And we even have an inpatient where we have kids living here full-time in an environment that can support them, their needs, and those kinds of things. So I assume I'm probably a lot of you. I'm fairly new to the nonprofit world. I've been here about three years, but it is heartening to know that I work at a place that makes a difference like that and can really impact your community and things like that. And it's different than the traditional IT environment I grew up in. I spent 20 plus 25 years working in kind of more mainstream industries like construction and technology and that kind of stuff. And so just one of those things I really enjoy about my job. We, as far as a staff base, we fluctuate somewhere between 150 and 250 employees. We're usually right around that 175 to 200 mark. We scale up in the summertime. We have a lot of summer programs for kids and stuff that we have to onboard a bunch of people, usually 50 to 75 users, which makes it a lot easier when we're using the Microsoft platform to do that to be able to scale that well and control that. We have an IT staff of approximately four FTEs. It fluctuates a little bit. One of those staff members is strictly a business intelligence analyst slash report person. So then your more traditional IT is managed by the other two or three people, myself included. I'm kind of in the same boat as like Gary, where I kind of provide tier three support and I have a staff that does our tier one and two support for us. Again, it allows us to keep our staff levels fairly low on IT because a lot of the stuff that we would traditionally have had to have somebody do, things like onboarding, offboarding equipment, things like that can now be much easier to do in the 365 platform. When I got here in late 2020, obviously we were in the height of COVID. I inherited a system that had been in planning and pre-deployment with the idea of going cloud slash virtualizing the environment. So I kind of inherited that. The director that was before me had already left and so I kind of had to come in and figure things out. I'm sure that a lot of you guys have been in those kinds of situations before, but I did have a fairly strong background in cloud and virtualization in my past, as well as 365. So I knew that was kind of the direction I wanted to go, but as a lot of you guys probably know, working through Microsoft licensing, like trying to figure out what do I need, what are the features, those kinds of things, it can be daunting. There's some good resources out there. I know I think Kevin posted some of those in the chat, but it's really hard to sit down and go through all the features and say, okay, here's what I need. And so a lot of times we follow paths a lot, like Gary mentioned, where you start at a certain level and you may either upscale that or the other nice thing is you can downscale it. If you find that you're in something that doesn't have or has too much, you're not using it, that's another option. You can go the other way too. But we started in a scenario where we were using the Equivalent V3 products and we migrated as well to the E5 during our process because what we found was a lot of the features, like Gary mentioned, things like Intune, Microsoft voice, our team's voice, those kinds of things, we were able to replace solutions that we were already using and paying for extra with that Microsoft Cal being on the E5 Cal. And if you really look at that E5 Cal, I'm not trying to be a Microsoft salesman, although I love Microsoft, but for the amount that we paid for the E5 Cal, the value we get out of that is truly amazing. But it does take some planning and some thought about truly embracing it and using it. But I am a fairly staunch supporter of that. So our migration journey started off with email. I think that's where 95% of people start with 365 is getting their on-prem Exchange servers out the door or if they're not using Exchange, if you still have some legacy S and QP, like Gary mentioned and things like that. And getting your email migrated over, it's now, I can say I've done migrations for the 365 platform going back in probably 10 years now and it's gotten way better. There was a time years ago that it was really a pain, but it's gotten much, much better. Using somebody to help you with that that has done it now will make it, I think Gary used the word seamless. It really can be fairly seamless. Your end users will not know. Even if you do a cutover in the middle of the day, you can cut their mailbox over and get them up and running. So that's what we started with. We got email done and then the last, so our cutover essentially migration has started in early 2022. We just finished with the last pieces here in early 2023. So it took us just over about a year to get fully migrated. And by fully migrated, what I mean is that we have our email migrated. We have all of our file shares migrated over to SharePoint slash OneDrive. We have Azure Active Directory set up so that we can leverage both sides of AD. We still have an on-prem Active Directory, but the long-term plan probably over the next three years is to probably get rid of that as well. And so we've got pretty much all of our core IT needs, you know, file services, emails, all of those things moved over to the 365 platform. And once we did that, it started opening up a lot more doors for folks to be able to do stuff. So one of the first things that was really a bonus for our staff was making that file migration over to SharePoint. Got rid of our need to support VPN for them. 98% of the people that had VPN access had it because they needed to get to file shares. And we were able to switch that over so that VPN access went away, which was great because supporting 50 to 100 people on VPN access was getting expensive and it wasn't reliable. And now they have the ability to access that data, where they need it, when they need it, all those kinds of things. Plus, it gives us the added bonus of all the controls around SharePoint and OneDrive, being able to implement governance and policies and things like that that we just, you really can't do well at least with a VPN and a file server. Also, as we migrated our license structure to the E5 platform, we're taking advantage of things like the universal print service. So getting rid of print servers, getting rid of restrictions on people being able to print to printers effectively. That's been a nice enhancement. I think I mentioned we rolled out Teams Voice. We were using Ring Central before. We got rid of Ring Central, saved ourselves a ton of money and migrated over. That was a net win. Matter of fact, in our instance, like I know about everybody else, but simply getting rid of Ring Central or our phone services paid for a huge chunk of the E3, the E5 licenses, just being able to do that part of it. And that came across with a couple of other things, like we use Microsoft Defender now as our endpoint. For both email, but also for our endpoints, our Windows endpoints, and even our iPhones and that kind of stuff, that was included there. We do the MDM stuff with Intune. But where I see a huge, huge benefit, and one of the things that makes me just fall in love with doing what I do for our living, but also doing it in conjunction with an organization is people's ability to adapt and adopt technology and use this stuff. So we've had in the last year, massive growth of my staff member that does Power BI. So she's doing business analytics reports, stuff like that. So the Power BI, Cal was built into the E5. And so we use that to report off of our EHRs and things like that, which our EHR had a horrible interface for reporting. So we rewrote all of the reports in that in Power BI and use that platform to give out information. So we're seeing a huge uptick in people's ability to consume data, but also understand what they're consuming and make good decisions on their work based on those things. We've also done things like when we did the migration to SharePoint, we took the opportunity to kind of upscale and clean up our file shares. It's probably something you should do anyways when you do a file migration, but this really gave us the ability because we have the tools and the technology now to implement things like data classification and governance and policies and retention policies and all that kind of stuff. And there's templates already there for you to follow, as well as if you get connected with a really good partner, it allows you to take advantage of those kinds of things. So within, I would say, 12 to 18 months of us converting over, we now stand on a platform that I feel I can go home and sleep at night. I know that my data is secure. I know that it's sitting in a data center that is far superior to what I can provide as far as just electrical current and AC and those kinds of things that we don't sometimes think about as things that can be impactful to our IT, but and then on top of that, I have the ability. One of the things I've always liked to say is that it kind of has changed the IT's persona from the Department of No to the Department of Yes, because now there are things out there that you can do and you can even do them yourselves with very little need to have to wait through this IT process that might be bogged down for we don't have the skill set, we don't have the money, we don't have all these kinds of things. A lot of that stuff can be addressed. I think one of the last other things I point out as far as a kind of cool thing that we did with the platform is we've actually been able to do a lot of work with their forms and their Power Automate platform and the Power Apps platform, which is kind of all designed around that kind of that low slash no code ability to create business solutions for your staff. So one of the cool things we did originally is we had a grant that was sitting there for us. Due to the nature of what we do, we essentially have a school on-premise and that kind of stuff. And we had a donor that was concerned about giving for getting some solutions in place for alerting and things like that around like an active shooter situation. And so we were looking around for solutions that did it. There were things that did that kind of did it. We're expensive in some sense kind of went over what we wanted. And so we couldn't really find a good solution for what we wanted to do. But at the end of the day, what we wanted to do is we wanted to have a way for us to easily email, text, people. That's how it started. It was email and text people. If there was a situation here at the campus where we can easily send that out. And so we were able to leverage the Power Platform app in there to do that. Since they're tied in together at the back end, it easily worked with our exchange environment. It could email everybody. It could send text to everybody, things like that. And so we created our own solution for that. So now we have an app that we push out through power apps on people's phones. And it gives them the ability to do that. And then we supplemented that as well. So now that application now is able to send out not only issues around active shooters, but if we have a power outage, if we have a snow day, things like that, we've set it up so that people can send out alerts to everybody quickly and easily. And it's really a very low, if no cost solution to our situation. So as far as keys test, I think I'm kind of just going to reiterate what Jeff and Gary said. First off, I think having partners and people you can rely on is super important. TechSoup and especially Kevin, I want to just kind of pile on, thank you very much. It's been awesome to have a partner like TechSoup to help us navigate, especially the Microsoft stuff. I live in Microsoft's back door. I've worked with Microsoft for 30 years. I know the pain points and all that kind of stuff. And I kind of feel now that we're finally getting to a point where it's getting a little bit easier to navigate because Microsoft's invested a lot of time and effort. But also we have folks like Kevin and TechSoup that stay on top of it and let us know what's going on and things like that. So obviously having a good team around that is super important. I did put my contact information, my LinkedIn profile in the chat, if anybody wants to connect on LinkedIn, I use that a lot. Love to stay in touch with people. So feel free to send me a connection request and all that kind of stuff. But having partners is big, right? The other thing I always recommend is making sure that you really understand your business. I think one of the things I've learned as an IT professional over the years is our organizations are in place to provide services of some sort. And they're not in place to run IT. And we've always struggled with that, right? But understanding what my customers need, my customers are our internal people and trying to understand what they need to do their jobs and how we can make it better, that's where I start with things like that. I try not to implement technology that doesn't have a business case for it already. I think also being empathetic with people, a lot of us are tech people and we're used to change. But understanding that change is hard and change is disruptive, making sure that you account for that in your planning. First thing people will, when we tell them we're trying out a new email system or something like that, it freaks them out because they rely on it to do their work. And their first thought is, oh no, IT's going to break something. I'm not going to fix it, it'll be able to work. That kind of is my second or my third point is being able to communicate transparently, make sure that you send out good information to keep people in the loop, let them know what's going on. I think a lot of places do that really well, but I think as long as people know what's going on and you give them the information and you set expectations, even when things sometimes don't go as well as you'd hope they would, it makes it a lot better because people feel like they're encoded and that you care that it actually is working for them. Having some good project management around it is always a good thing that kind of goes back to the communication. I know all of us have plenty to do in our day jobs, but I would say that if you're planning on implementing this, make sure you set some time aside to do that and really focus on sending out good communication. A couple of people, I usually have one of the questions that comes up when we do things like this is any tips or tricks as far as getting people in-house to support IT, right? And we always are struggling to get funding or resources or any of those kinds of things. A couple of things I would recommend that have worked for me in the past. One is make friends with your development team or whoever is out getting grants and funding for you. Make sure that you take care of them and they're very happy with the IT services. Because if they're happy, they're happy to go help you support that and try to get you some money. We were very fortunate last year. Out of the blue, my development team found a grant specifically for IT expenditures and then they ended up getting me $150,000 that I didn't think I was going to get, which helped buy new computers and all kinds of new stuff. So make friends with them. But also look for opportunities to build the business cases with folks that work with your organizations. And by that, what I mean is years ago when I was trying to get some money to upgrade security, things like new firewalls and that kind of stuff. I was getting a lot of pushback and I just happened to be in a meeting with our insurance brokers. And our insurance brokers, this was kind of right when the cybersecurity insurance stuff was getting really big. And so we were looking at buying cybersecurity insurance and he and I started having this conversation about, well, what if we implement MFA? What if we implement this kind of stuff? And then he's like, well, then we can give you this discount. We can give you this discount. And all of a sudden my CFO and my CEO perked up and they're like, well, wait, you're actually going to give us a discount if we spend money on technology. And so having those kinds of resources can be very, very useful. Bringing people in like that. So it's not just the IT department saying, hey, we want new technology to do this. It'll do this. If you can actually get some people like that on board, I have folks internally that I love to death now because they're technology champions and they're like, yeah, we can use this stuff. Yeah, it is making us more efficient and better and things like that. So those are probably my two biggest ones that I think sometimes get overlooked. As far as the last couple of things I just wanted to leave you with, as far as long-term funding and planning, one of the things that I like to do is make sure that you have a way to communicate what I like to call the tech debt cost to your organization. And that's one of the beauties about 365, in my opinion, with as far as licensing and stuff, it gives you very predictable ways to know what it's going to cost you to provide services to somebody. I know, for example, that my E5 costs X amount of dollars per month for an employee. No, nothing hidden, all kinds of stuff. It also gives me an ability to give leadership a number on, okay, if we're going to go out and hire an FTE, what does that cost us in terms of technology for a year, right? I mean, I can figure that out fairly quickly and make a really accurate and long-term projection on what it's going to cost us to do that. And what I try to turn that into then is a way to get out of some of those things where we end up with the old hardware and things like that. If we can get people to start thinking about including that, and we can give them good solid number, they can budget that into when they're hiring. And that way you can build out a three-year or four-year or five-year replacement on hardware. And you know what your email is going to cost you. You know all those kinds of things. And it makes a lot easier to get that money when it comes around. Building a service catalog is kind of part of that. That's another thing I like to have is just making sure that people know that they have a way, if they're wondering what's going to cost them to buy a new laptop, what's going to cost them to add this service, they can kind of go to one spot, hopefully on an internet or something, and see what those costs are, making that transparent to them. And then the last thing I think I put out there is, sorry about that, but the last thing I thought I'd throw out there is using Chad GDP. It's been very interesting to use that. I've been using that for about, oh I'd say three or four months now. And it's one of those things where if you haven't used it, I would highly encourage you to go out and look at it. It's technology, you know, the open AI technology is now getting built into the 365 platform. So if you are already on 365, you're going to start seeing that coming out. But being able to augment your existing IT in-house staff with that kind of stuff has been really eye-opening for us. It's helped us solve a lot of the problems that, you know, we knew were more issues, we just weren't really high on the list, but hey, we figured it out really quick because we could ask a question and get a fairly detailed interaction response back. So highly recommend checking that out. So I know I talked really fast and hopefully that made sense to everybody, but appreciate time, appreciate seeing you all. So I'll turn it back over to Kevin. Thanks, Bruce. Just, I just can't say how awesome it is just to hear from all three of you. We're running a little bit on time. So we are going to skip over Q&A, but that said, within the chat, there is the email for our team, customer success at TechSoup.org, my personal email, kmahall at TechSoup.org is also in there. Any questions that you have? We, I don't know if extensive is maybe, I don't want to try and sound like it's overkill, but I think we worked quite a bit with Bruce, with Jeff, and with Gary. And it's just understanding that you can't know all this, 150 plus different 365 charities use, understanding features, configuration set up, and we still have great dialogue going back and forth. And it's, nobody can know everything about 365. It's an amazing platform, but it also with great power comes a great need for knowledge. And if this is something that we are not able to do, we can certainly do together. It's, that's the, I think the power of engaging with us and understanding that we want to be considered just an extension of your organization. So there's a couple of resources listed up here for those that aren't into Microsoft, the Microsoft universe yet. There's a Microsoft Getting Started Guide, Digital Skills Training Courses, as Gary highlighted, the learning management portion is a key and we can work with you on strategizing ways, no matter how big or small your organization is, to help communicate the products that are within a 365 licensing. There's a digital transformation forum. And then of course, we have our monthly virtual office hours. There's going to be also an additional list of resources, including scheduling a free consultation. Again, our team and my personal emails have been provided. We'd love to sit down and have a conversation with you, learn more about your organization, and then how we can best help you meet the challenges that you'll face moving to SaaS and cloud solutions. Our digital assessment tool, I highly recommend it as well as our blogs. So with that, I'm going to close out. I thank all of you for your attendance today. Just the stories, I absolutely love them. There's just, you know, it is a journey. It's a change. Me coming from a cloud background and getting to talk with people like Bruce and Jeff and Gary. It's been, there's a learning curve for me, you know, SMTP, email servers, operating in Cal environments, general server environments. It's, we can help work with you to define what it is that you need. And then of course, our approach is to advocate for you. When we sit down and we talk on something, it is about getting you what you need, not what we think that it can be provisioned to you. That's, that is not in our DNA. And we certainly hope that you've had that type of experience working with us and we look forward to the opportunity to work forward together with Jeff, Bruce, Gary, and all of you. So with that, I thank you for joining us today and have a wonderful rest of your Thursday. Thank you. Take care.