 Welcome to Windows 8.1 for nonprofits and libraries. Just to give some introductions, my name is Becky Wiegand and I am an Interactive Events Producer here at TechSoup. I come from a background of working for small nonprofits and helping as the accidental techie on many of the technical issues. I've worked with TechSoup for about 5 years and I'm now running the webinar program. So I'm happy to be with you as your host today. We'll also be joined by Jini Meese who is a content curator here at TechSoup, one of my good colleagues. She has been working tirelessly on updating the articles and content that we have on Windows 8 to now reflect the new features and highlights of Windows 8.1. So she'll be talking to us a bit about why it's important to upgrade, what some of those top features are, and some of the options and comparisons available to you with Windows 7 or Windows 8. Then we'll be joined by Todd Rutherford who is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for Windows at Microsoft. And he will be taking us through a live demo tour of Windows 8.1. And hopefully we'll be able to give you a taste of what Windows 8.1 looks like, cover some of those features that you might be interested in for your work at your nonprofit or library, and then help you understand whether it's the right choice for your organization. On the back end you might also see Gretchen Dio from Microsoft, Kevin Lowe, and Don Reed from TechSoup who will be there to grab your questions and help answer some of those as well. Today's agenda will cover an introduction of TechSoup. We'll do a couple of polls to understand what you're using right now and where you're at with technology in your own organization. We'll talk about the need to upgrade soon if you're still on an operating system like XP. We'll talk about the upgrade options. Then we'll get that live tour of Windows 8.1. We'll talk about how to get it and cover some additional resources before we move to Q&A. So launching into who we are, if you're not familiar with us, we are TechSoup. We're part of TechSoup Global where we're working toward the day when every nonprofit, library, and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology, knowledge, and resources they need to operate at their full potential. In part, we try to offer these product donation programs and also webinars like this so you can learn how to best use the technology at your disposal. We are a 501c3 nonprofit. You can see a little bit about the impact we've had around the world. We work in 56 different countries, and we work with product donors from 63 different companies including Adobe, Cisco, Microsoft, and Symantec, and many others. So if you're not familiar with our programs or our donations, please visit TechSoup.org where you can learn more. Jumping into some of the need of our content, this will help our presenters better represent the content that you need to hear today. So go ahead and click on your screen and let us know what operating systems you're currently using in your office computer, whether it's your own computer or system-wide. Let us know. That will help us get an idea of where you're at right now and whether there's a need to upgrade soon, how you're doing with the software you're currently using. If I've missed one, feel free to chat it into the chat window. I'll give just a few more seconds so we can let everybody participate in the poll. It looks like about 50% of you are on Windows 7 and about 15% are on XP. So already almost 15% on Windows 8.1. So that's great. And then a good sizeable chunk on a combination of different operating systems which is pretty common in many nonprofits. One other quick question for you, are you currently or do you plan to move to using touch devices in your organization within the next few years? This is sort of a guess, right? We don't know exactly what we're all doing, but if you have a technology plan, do you think you'll be using touchscreen monitors or tablets, or even embracing phablets or cell phones, smartphones that have touch devices in your office technology in the coming couple of years? So 46% say yes. 30% say maybe. So that's a pretty sizeable chunk. So you are all pretty cutting edge, which is great. So to take us forward in this content I'd like to go ahead and introduce our first presenter, Ginny Mies, who's going to talk about the need to upgrade. And I'd like to welcome her to the program. Thanks for joining us, Ginny. Thanks for the intro, Becky. My name is Ginny Mies, and I am a content curator here at TechSoup. And for the past year I've been writing about Windows 8 and the new Office and all things new Microsoft. So I just wanted to talk about the need to upgrade from Windows XP. And I saw during the poll that about 19 of you still have XP computers, and that's great to see the majority of you on Windows 7 or higher or a different operating system. So I'm just going to reiterate some of these points though. Windows XP was first introduced in 2001. That means it's 12 years old. So think about your cell phone or your computer from 2001. Would you still use it? I had a really bad flip phone, so I definitely wouldn't use any of my technology from 2001. But on April 8, 2014, Microsoft is going to stop issuing patches and security updates for XP and Office 2003. It seems like it's really far away in the future, but we recommend planning to make the upgrade as soon as possible. And it's a big deal, maybe not with this audience, but a third of PCs are using XP still. And if you're worried about running a newer version of Office on your older PCs, don't fear. We've tested Windows 8 on older PCs. In fact, we actually tested it on a Dell from 2005, and it worked fine. So let's dive in a little bit more into these security issues. So without these critical updates, your PC could become vulnerable to harmful viruses by wear and other malicious software, which can steal or damage your business data and information. Antivirus software is not going to be able to fully protect your Windows XP once it's gone unsupported. So the number of vulnerabilities has steadily increased over the few years, and now Windows XP is six times more likely to be infected by malware than Windows 8. And I know it sounds really scary, but upgrading to Windows 7 or Windows 8 will ensure that you have the most up-to-date patches. Another bonus with Windows 8 is that Windows Defender is built right into Windows 8 for free. So I just wanted to give you a look at some of the upgrade options you have through TechSoup. And don't worry, we'll be sharing these slides after the webinar, so you can actually take a look at the slide and link directly to our catalog and see your different options. We've got Windows 7 Pro, Windows 7 Enterprise, Windows 8.1 Pro, Windows 8.1 Enterprise. So whatever your needs are, we can find an operating system to meet them. And I'll just walk through the next slide too. That's our Get Genuine options. We've got both the Windows 8.1 Pro 32-bit and the 64-bit available through TechSoup, Get Genuine. And finally, I just wanted to talk through some of the standout features in my opinion for nonprofits in Windows 8.1. As I mentioned before, Windows 8.1 works on your older IT equipment, but it actually runs faster than Windows 7. And at the end of the webinar, we'll share our resources. There's an article in there that my colleague Jim Lynch wrote. He actually did a test and measured the performance and found that Windows 8 was faster. Another huge bonus is Windows 8.1 saves battery life. It actually drops to a lower power state when you're not doing anything power-intensive. As I mentioned before, security is a huge deal. Windows 8.1 comes with Windows Defender, which protects against the latest malware and spyware outbreaks. And we also have another article that we'll share with you that goes more in depth into Windows 8 security. And another huge issue, also sort of security-related, is that Windows 8 introduces something called storage spaces. This employs a software-based RAID system that will protect your data and ensure it remains available in the event of a computer crash. That's something that I think everyone could benefit from. And you might be starting to move to the cloud or using some sort of cloud-based system to store documents or spreadsheets or whatever. One of the big bonuses with Windows 8 is that SkyDrive, which is Microsoft's cloud service, is built right into just about every application in Windows 8.1. And you can even sync your PC settings to SkyDrive and save files for offline use. If your organization is multilingual, or if you have volunteers that are bilingual, or if you run a computer access lab and you have users coming in that need different languages, Windows 8.1 has better language support than Windows 7. And it's easier to switch between the different languages. For the vision and hearing impaired, there's a much better accessibility feature. And I actually wrote a blog post about this on TechSoup. And again, we'll share that with the other resources. And lastly, Windows 8.1 introduces some support for new technologies, such as 3D printers, near-field communication printing, Wi-Fi direct printing. A lot of public libraries are now introducing 3D printers into their labs. So if you're one of those libraries, you'll be happy to hear that they support 3D printers, or if you're just looking into these new types of technologies, Windows 8 offers support for that. So those are the main standout features in my opinion for nonprofits. And as I said before, I've been testing and using Windows 8.1 over the past year. And I keep finding new little tricks to make things more efficient and easier for me to carry on with my work. Thanks so much for that, Ginny. And some of these features we'll be able to see firsthand with our next presenter, Todd from Microsoft, who will be walking us through a live tour. Before we get to that, I just want to ask a couple of questions as a quick little Q&A here. We'll save the big Q&A for the end, but just to raise up a couple of questions, we have one person asking whether they need to upgrade if they have an existing computer running XP and they want to go to Windows 7 or 8. So does it have to be a fresh install? Like, do they need to get a full CD or can they get just the upgrade through our donation program? Do you know the answer to that, Ginny? Or not sure? Well, let's see. I know we have people on the line who can answer that. I'm pretty sure that from XP to Windows 7 that they cannot do anything that they need to probably get genuine or a full licensed version of it. So we'll make sure that we cover that in more detail when we talk about how to get it later on in the program. So I would like to go ahead and move us forward to introducing Todd Rutherford who is from Microsoft. I mentioned he's a senior product marketing person in the Windows division at Microsoft. And he's going to share his desktop with us to show us a look at Windows 8.1, highlight some of the features, and talk about how he uses it in his day-to-day work. Welcome, Todd. Thank you very much. Everybody can hear me, I hope. So I'll just move right into it. Let me first start by sharing my desktop. Once I have confirmation that someone can see that, Becky, can you see it? Yep, looks good to me. I see your desert landscape there on your desktop. Great. And can you see the charms as they come out on the right-hand side? Yep, those are there too. And I see your bottom navigation as well. Great. Fantastic. You want to make sure the full view of everything is showing up here. So welcome everybody. I appreciate you taking the time to be educated more on Windows 8.1. Obviously, I'm going to say Windows 8.1 only in the context that it's got a lot of changes from Windows 8. But as most of you are currently running XP and Windows 7, what I'm really going to try and focus on is Windows 8 all up and I'll touch on those things that are specific to 8.1 that are upgrades and changes from Windows 8. But for most of you, it is just Windows 8 and 8.1 is a cumulative update from that. Let me start out by saying that, and I think it's a reinforce comment made earlier, is that Windows 8 is really designed for two things in mind. One is that we want to make sure that the evolution of the PC moves along with the evolution of the way people compute with electronic devices and has more smartphones and tablets come into the market. Obviously, the interaction that humans have with their devices has changed. I was excited to see that a lot of you are considering touch. I think that's a big benefit because natural human interaction as we look at voice and touch and other types of input has become more and more important as people get introduced to that experience. But it still has its place and I'm going to do most of this demo with my mouse and keyboard, although I'm capable of demonstrating touch as well if anybody would like to see something specific. But I'll leave that for the Q&A section. The other thing I want to say too is that when you think about Windows 8 as an update to either an existing PC or to PC that you already have and you want to, excuse me, purchasing a new PC, is that if you're running Windows 7 and you've got important desktop apps that you use for business or personal use, all those apps and all those devices that you have, printers and things of that nature, will work great with Windows 8. I think it's important that everybody have sort of that reassurance that the experiences that they are able to do on Windows 7 and the apps that they have and the devices that they have are completely compatible with Windows 8. And moving up to Windows 8 adds new functionality, allows you to do certain things much faster. There's tons of benefits and I'll hopefully demonstrate some of those as we go through the demo here, but it's really about additive over Windows 7 and not replacing. So keep that in mind obviously as was mentioned earlier, security apps and files, but also a lot of new apps from the store and this new interaction model. So let me just get started here. First of all, what you're seeing on the screen right here is my start screen. And this is, by the way, I'm doing this presentation from my work PC which this is complete full disclosure here. What you're seeing is my device. This is not a demo PC. This is the PC that I use on a regular basis here at work to go to meetings and to interact with other people here at work. So the emails that you're seeing for instance pop up in the live tile of my mail app. Those are real emails that I'm getting from folks around Microsoft here. And what I wanted to talk about is briefly, my start screen is really this sort of this home where I have the things that I do most often. I also have my desktop where I can quickly jump and I've got applications that I use here. This is where I'm running links so I can communicate with you and obviously the ReadyTalk application is running here. But my start screen is really about the things that I do most common. I communicate a lot. I have two wonderful daughters, Elizabeth and Emily. I've got friends that I communicate with, but also coworkers that I communicate with on a fairly regular basis. And I put them right up front. Also apps that I use a lot of like Mail and Calendar and OneNote I put right up front as well. Then I'm able to organize and categorize these things. One of the things we've done with Windows 8.1 that I'm really excited about is and it seems fairly minor, but the ability to select multiple tiles was a big pain point. If you've ever had to set up your start screen on Windows 8, you basically had to move one tile at a time. Now with Windows 8.1 I can select a whole bunch of tiles and move all of them at one time into a new category. Maybe I want to name it other stuff or whatever. And it's that easy for me to move things around. If I want to move them back, I just grab them, pull them over. Maybe grab these ones here, pull them over here. And just like that, I'm back where I was. And it's very easy to move tiles around. The other thing you can do too is you can select multiple tiles and easily resize them to different sizes. We have new size available. There's also, let me find an app here that allows it, but there's also tiles like this one here and this one where the tiles are very large allowing you to view more information. For me the big tiles are really about this sort of see more information as a result of the size of the tile. And as a result I never have to actually go into the app. As you can see here in Redmond it's light fog and it's actually raining quite a bit. But these are other areas that I frequent a lot, Yakamon, Seaside, and Leavenworth. So I like to keep information on my start screen that I can just sort of catch up to at a glance without having to go into those apps themselves. The other thing we've done in Windows 8.1 versus Windows 8 is we've added a whole new set of start screen personalization for the background. A lot of folks gave us feedback that the background capabilities of Windows 8 were fairly limited. We had lots of graphics and colors and things like that. But now what you can do is you can literally select almost any color that you want across a wide range of colors. Or you can select some of these beautiful new animations. As you can see here as I move back and forth it animates the background. And I'm just using my scroll wheel on my mouse to move back and forth. I could also grab the slider down here at the bottom and move back and forth very easily. And I don't know how well this is coming across to you in broadcast. Hopefully it's good enough. The other thing that I like personally is that we've now added your desktop wallpaper as a background option. So as you can see here my background as I move back and forth between my desktop and my start screen they're really very well aligned in terms of visual appearance and makes it a great experience. Speaking of the desktop, I know that a lot of people spend a lot of time on the desktops particularly in work environments and they want to be able to go straight to the desktop or they want to be able to interact more with the desktop. You can see here I've pinned all of my apps that I use most frequently on the desktop, File Explorer, and all my Office apps and Browser. But the other thing you can do too that's really particularly powerful is if I go here to Properties and of course I can basically set up my navigation options for my start screen to my desktop, the relationship between those two through these options here under start screen. As you can see here I've got checked that shows my desktop background on start which I already showed you how to do that in another way. But I think more importantly is for those of you who want to go directly to the desktop is this check box right here that basically says when I sign into my PC or I resume or I boot it for the first time, don't go to start, just go straight to my desktop and that will quickly get me to the apps and the services that I'm going to use in my day to day work. I can still go to the start of course by just clicking on the start button but this just takes me straight to the desktop. The other thing that I can do too is AppsView is a really powerful experience for people who use only a few apps on a very regular basis whether they are the modern apps from the Windows Store or their desktop apps. The AppsView is a great way to see a very compressed view of content versus the start screen which is more visual views. So let me show you what that looks like. So I'm going to go ahead and hit OK. Now when I hit the start button it takes me straight to the AppsView. And the AppsView is this very compressed version of all the apps that I have and I can easily sort by name, date installed, most used, or category. So if I'm looking for a finance app, here's all my finance apps. The one I like of course most powerful for this AppsView is just this, excuse me, not date installed, but most used. People at work tend to use the same apps over and over again which is very true obviously of me. I've got File Explorer, I've got Mail, Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint. Your typical productivity apps are all very prevalent in here in this most used area. So it's super fast and easy for me to jump back and forth between start and those apps that I use most frequently such as Mail for instance. The other thing about getting around is the ease with which you can get to the thing you're looking for. And one thing we've changed significantly in Windows 8.1 is the way the search works. In fact, by the way, I'm going to go back and change my settings so I go back to my start screen instead of the AppsView. But I want to show you how search has changed. In Windows 8 we had a search that was built completely on searching within your apps. So you would type in something you're looking for and then you would click down through the various apps and look for that thing. Now what we've done is we've built a holistic search. We've powered it by Bing. So Bing goes out and it looks at your apps and it looks at content on the web and it looks at the files that you have. And as a result it makes it very easy to find specific information or curated information, the thing that you're looking for about a particular topic. So let me give you an example of that. I'm going to be traveling to San Diego fairly soon for a convention. So I'm just going to type in San Diego. Now you'll notice there I didn't have to go over here and click in that red hand corner and hit search. I just start typing. Right from my start screen I just start typing San Diego, which I can't spell. And I hit enter. This is the new Bing Smart Search. And it's designed to find content from the web, from your local files, even from the news app and images, and all kinds of great content about San Diego. So in this case here you can see here I've got, this is a convention, a game of convention. But the point is I've got all kinds of data files, documents where I reference San Diego, even the demo script where I use San Diego in a lot of our demos. I can easily quickly jump to specific information, say if I'm traveling there and I want to launch a travel app I can go there or read about San Diego, get more information. But some of these other things are really great. So if you're traveling there for personal there's lots of attractions to do, there's upcoming events and it actually shows you specific events, usually concerts and things of that nature that will be going on in the area. And of course the most popular apps will be right up front. And the thing that I like about this Bing Smart Search is it makes it really easy for me to find the information I'm looking for, whether it's like for instance just visiting, for instance I can link straight through the visiting page of the city of San Diego here for instance. But the really powerful thing about Bing Smart Search is it's effectively a curated app built just around my search. So when I want to go back to those search results, if I was on any other device, say it's an iPad or if it's on even a Windows 7 PC when I type in search and I get those search results I'm just going to get the web. This search experience is built around my content and all of the apps and services that I have on my machine as well as the web all integrated together. But the cool thing is I can easily go back to that search result just by clicking back or clicking the upper left hand corner. It takes me back to this sort of app-like experience of my San Diego search. So let's get back to topic here. I'm going to be traveling to San Diego. I just click on travel here. It launches the San Diego travel site, which is really our Bing travel app, but it's focused on the San Diego and if I want to find flights or hotels I can do that. This kind of dovetails well into something else I want to show you about Windows 8.1. In Windows 8 Day, in order to do multi-passing where you wanted to see say two apps on the screen at one time or multiple apps, you had to literally come up and grab the app and drag it out and set it next to it. Well, with Windows 8.1, what we've done instead is a lot of apps will launch another app just simply by clicking on content within the app. An example of that is here I've got the San Diego map and I just click on that and it brings up San Diego and the map of San Diego while leaving me in the travel app. So I can continue to browse through the travel app. I can look at photos. Maybe I want to book a hotel and look at when I'm going to go there and it will give me all kinds of results for travel to San Diego. At the same time I'm over here in the map app and maybe I want to find out directions from my location to San Diego to see if it's viable to drive there or maybe I want to find out what's going on in and around San Diego for instance. We have this thing called Nearby where I click it and I just say show me hotels. And just like that it zooms in and shows where all the hotels are in and around the San Diego area. Now maybe I can compare like West in San Diego on the list over here and find out where it's at. So the point of this is that you're able to do lots of things at the same time as you multitask back and forth between different apps as you're planning your vacation and your itinerary. Another great experience of this sort of multitasking world is the way the map or the mail app works. So we've done a lot of updates to the mail app and I'm going to jump to an email I sent myself with some photos here, my daughters going to University of Washington. We recently toured the campus there. And so I'm going to just show you some pictures and it's pretty common that when you open up an email and you see pictures from someone and you click on those pictures like it opens a picture and it kind of takes you out of context of where you were in the mail. Well now when I click on a picture it opens up the picture, her goofy smile there, but it leaves me in context. So I've still got the mail app open over here. I'm able to browse through other content sort of keeping in touch of what's going on in my mail world while at the same time I'm looking at pictures of my daughter and her friend. Now let me show you kind of what we've done with the Photos app as a result of other changes in Windows 8.1. The Photos app in Windows 8 allowed you to easily view photos from say Facebook and PhotoBucket and others. And it was an aggregation of all your photos in one place. The feedback we heard resounding from both customers in the enterprise and business world as well as from the consumers is we really want a powerful photo editing app not an aggregator. We know where we can go to get our photos. We know where the photos are. We want is the ability to quickly edit and modify photos. So we completely reinvented the Photo app to make it easy for people to open photos, look at this photo, just simply say, you know what? I'm going to crop it down. So I see just Elizabeth and Aisha and hit Apply there. It's going to zoom in. I'm going to then go in and edit it. Maybe I want to do a little auto touch up. There's some cool effects that can be applied like for instance, Vignette basically takes the outside of the photo and automatically frames it. So maybe I want to do a little selective focus where it just focuses on their faces and blurs everything else out. And at the same time maybe I want to take and add a little color enhance to the green to dial up the green a little bit. There we go. And just like that I'm able to photo edit right in the experience and you can see I'm still sort of in the mail app on the one side and I've got the photo editing and I've touched up the photo and I can obviously save it and send it back to someone or whatever. So that's sort of the photo app and how it's changed. And the mail app as I mentioned launched the photo app automatically. One thing we've done to make the mail app much, much more powerful is the ability to add some of the functionality that you have on Outlook.com. So if you've got Outlook.com service or even Gmail, the mail app allows you to automatically define certain things for instance, sweep. Or let me show you what sweep is just real quickly, but basically I'm going to say, you know what, this Dick's Sporting Goods like I like their content and everything, but I really only want to see content from them that's recent. I don't need to see the old stuff because usually it's specials and promotions that are well outside. So I can just say do it in the future. And from now on all of my Dick's Sporting Goods emails are automatically sorted out and taken away from my inbox. We call that sort of getting rid of gray mail or things that aren't that important to me. The other thing we've done too is we've automatically sorted emails that are around social updates as well as newsletters. We all know we get newsletters on a regular basis, in this case Scott's Lawn Service or maybe Skype or whatever. And my social updates, things going on on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and others have all been sorted out into a different place. The last thing I want to show you is anybody I add to my favorites such as my daughter or Scott Manchester or other people, it's easy for me to find emails from those people just by clicking on their name because they're in my favorites or frequently sent emails. So if I want to see what my friend Isen is sending me, it looks like she sends a lot of stuff. But anyhow, it's really easy for me to find that content in the mail app. So let me go back and get back to some of the other new features in Windows 8.1. Something else we've done too that's really powerful is we've allowed a new app. We've created some new apps for Windows 8.1. One is called the Reading List. And the Reading List is a great app that allows you to view content that you want to read later, but you don't have time to read it right now, but you found it or it's interesting. So this is, I'm in the news app right now and I found something here. Maybe I'm going to go look for digital literacy. There's digital literacy and see what's in the news going on with regards to digital literacy. Lots of stuff here. Battle for Lucy goes digital. Interesting article, like I want to read this. This is really good. I'm just going to go up here to the upper right hand corner and click Share and I'm going to share it to my Reading List and it'll take that article and add it to my Reading List. I don't have time to read the article. I definitely want to read the article, but I just don't have time right now. Then at a later point, when I do have the time, I just come over here to my Reading List and I click on it and there's that article. So there's a lot of articles that I've shared with this, stuff I want to read. I click on that and you'll notice again it's this app launching another app. Here I am reading that Battle for Literacy article. While at the same time my Reading List is open on the side here and if I want to read other articles, I can just click on them. Some of these are fairly old, but there are articles and things that I flagged at some point in time in the past. Here, Weather for Rent, typical 49 and raining, but you get the point. The Reading List app allows you to easily take content and flag it for later so I can read it when I have the time. Let me get to some of the new Office and SkyDrive integration features. I know we're getting a long time here. I've got about four minutes left, so I want to jump into sort of how is productivity better with Windows 8.1? One thing in particular is we've now built SkyDrive in a deep way into Windows 8.1 where it wasn't there before with Windows 8. As an example, if I go here to my File Explorer, which you're all probably pretty familiar with, you can see here I've got SharePoint, I've got SkyDrive Pro as well as my SkyDrive. And obviously the SharePoint and SkyDrive Pro are enterprise deployed. But in the case of just simply SkyDrive, I have all my content right there on my device. And of course, saving, excuse me, on my SkyDrive, and saving to your SkyDrive could never be easier. So now let's say for instance I'm going to start a new document. Let me just grab something here that I had open earlier, maybe open up this event flyer for instance, and I'm going to go ahead and just create a new event. When I save this content, it's easy for me to just hit save, and I'm going to save it right to the default by the way is from my SharePoint because that's what I've defined. But by default for most users who don't have SharePoint or Microsoft connected services, SkyDrive will be your default. And if I just save that right to my documents, I can easily save it right there. And I'm going to replace the existing file because that was one I had opened earlier when I was practicing this demo. But the real powerful aspect of having SkyDrive built deeply into Office and into Windows 8.1 is that I can easily go up here and I can say, I want to share this document. Actually, let me open up a different one. I'm going to go to my SkyDrive and grab a document I was working on earlier with someone at DemoDocs, and I think it was Winter Olympics. So I'm opening up Winter Olympics, which is this document I have on my SkyDrive. Here it is, an article about the Winter Olympics. And I want to share that and collaborate on this report with someone else. So all I have to do is go up here and hit share, and I'm going to say, let's go ahead and invite people to use it. It wants me to save it to the cloud first. Let me go ahead and put it in SkyDrive. Oops, save. Yep, that's fine. Now I'm going to go ahead and invite people to use this document. And anybody, I'm going to just go ahead and share it with myself so you can get an idea of what this looks like. I'm going to send it to my personal and say share. And the beauty of this is that now that I'm taking this document and sharing it with myself, if I go back to my email for instance and look at Live, I should have a new email. Yep, there it is, Winter Olympics. I'm being shared with myself. And I open it up, and it opens up automatically right in Office Web Apps. So if I was to share this with someone who doesn't have Word or Excel, or they say they're on a device that doesn't have Office installed, it's easy for them to modify this document and collaborate. And the nice thing about it, let's say I change this from, I'm going to go ahead and edit the document right here in Word or in the Web App. And I'm going to change it from Winter to Summer Olympics. And I'm going to go ahead and exit. You'll notice I don't even need to save it because when I shared that document with myself, I didn't need to, I gave myself permissions to edit it. And so I didn't actually need to save it because I'm editing it right there. So I opened it up again, and notice it says Summer Olympics. They're basically editing the document right in its original point of saving. So we're both saving the document to the same place. And so as I make changes and they make changes, and interestingly enough, if we both are in Word Web App for instance, and we're both making changes, we'll see those changes in this all right hand corner as we're making modifications to that document back and forth. So it's a really powerful experience. The last thing I want to show you is the new Windows Store. One thing that we've done with the Windows Store is we've made it really easy to find new content. In the past, we used to just basically show you a list of categories. And those list of categories still exist here. If I right-click, I've got tons of different categories that I can look for apps. But what we've done instead is we've built this whole Picks for You section that basically is saying, okay, you tend to install apps that are of a certain type or you review certain apps. I do a lot of media and photo and video stuff. I also look at a lot of social apps. Obviously you can see I play a few games. But the point is that we've made it really easy to find apps that are interesting or may be interesting to you based on apps that you've installed in the past or reviewed in the past. And so the intent of the store is to make it really easy for you to find content that you might like. And this is true for each of the categories as well. So we go right into the categories and I've got top paid, top free, or I can just simply see all. So those are the big changes in Windows 8.1. I hope it's interesting to you and I hope you've gleaned something from this that would be powerful for your organization or for you personally in your use. So I will go ahead and stop sharing. If anybody… Great. Thank you so much for that, Todd. We have a lot of questions that have come in. So we might want you to jump back into some live demo in just a couple of minutes when we get to Q&A just to show us a couple of things that people specifically asked about. But before we do that, I just want to go over some of the process of how to get it so that people who may need to drop off early have that information. So through the Microsoft Software Donation Program at TechSoup, you can access the different products that Ginny highlighted on a slide earlier. I'll just bounce back to that slide really quickly so you can see which options are available for upgrade. So there's Windows 8.1 Pro, 32-bit and 64-bit. And then there's also Windows Enterprise, Windows 8.1 Enterprise, 32 and 64-bit. Those are the two Windows 8.1 options available. And then you can also access the Get Genuine options of Windows 8.1 Pro, 32-bit and 64-bit. The Get Genuine options are for people who either have pirated software or they're not sure where it came from. Maybe you had donated computers and those products. You don't have the legal licenses for them. Or if you're running say a home version of a Windows operating system and you need to upgrade to a professional version, Get Genuine is the option to use for that. But it's a one-time only ever in the lifetime of your nonprofit or library that you can request Get Genuine. So you want to make sure that if you do it that you're requesting the number of donations that you really need all at once because you can't select a couple of them and then ask for a couple more later. You only get to request that once ever. So those are some of the options which I've listed here. If you already have a version of Windows 7 from the last two years and you want to upgrade to Windows 8.1 or if you have Windows 8 and you want to upgrade through Windows 8.1, you can upgrade through Microsoft's Volume Licensing Service Center for free if it's been within two years of your prior donation. And that's one of the benefits of software assurance that comes with all of the software through the TechSoup donation program with Microsoft with the exception of Get Genuine. So if you've already upgraded or if you already have Windows 8 say you bought a laptop or a desktop at Best Buy and it came with Windows 8 and it was purchased commercially, you can also upgrade to Windows 8.1 through the Windows Store directly. So those are some of the options of how to get it. Our operating systems and donations through the Microsoft donation program through TechSoup are available to 501c3 nonprofits, IMLS public libraries, many foundations are eligible. And we request that you check out the eligibility if you're not sure whether you qualify and are eligible for the Microsoft donation program. You can do a check of your organization's eligibility on our website and you'll receive this slide deck later on today. And you may have already received it with a reminder this morning just to make sure that you are eligible if this is your first time working with the software donation program here at TechSoup. And then before we get to Q&A just to mention Software Assurance benefits that come free with all of your donated Microsoft software through TechSoup. The only exception to that is anything requested through that Get Genuine program it does not include Software Assurance. So if you use that program to upgrade or to get the full licenses of software for Windows 8.1 or any other Microsoft software it won't come with Software Assurance. So your next request would be a regular request through TechSoup and you wouldn't be able to do things like upgrade for free through the Volume Licensing Service Center and you wouldn't get any of these additional benefits. So if you have received donations through TechSoup through the Microsoft program in the past make sure you're looking into these different benefits that are available. Those come free to you. E-learning courses on how to use the different products. There's also home use program that allows you to install that same software on your home use computer while you're working with that organization for a nominal fee. A lot of other benefits come with it so make sure you're checking that out. So I want to leave us enough time for many of these questions that we need to have answered. So Todd, if I could have you pull back up to share your screen again. We had a couple of specific questions where people wanted you to show us a couple of features or where to find things that they're not sure about. So if you're able to share your screen again that would be great. And in particular we had somebody asking if we could see what the control panel looks like. How do you get to that and what does it look like in Windows 8.1? So hopefully people are seeing his screen right now. And I don't hear your voice so you might still be on mute. I was on mute. Thank you. There we go. Okay, so with the settings of course there's so much in Windows 8.1 it's hard to cover everything so I appreciate folks highlighting those things that they want to see. We've done a lot in the PC settings area to improve the experience, to expand, to include a lot of the different things. Is there anything in particular that folks are looking to see? I guess my summary would be those settings that you use most often that used to be in the control panel are now predominantly in the PC settings experience that I'm showing you now. An example of that might be for instance I can add, because I'm a user I can add a user or I can remove a user now right within the settings experience. I can easily go to for instance SkyDrive and I can change my sync settings. One thing that we've added with Windows 8.1 is the ability to sync your start screen across your devices. I actually have it turned on so my PC here at work and the one that I sign on at home which happens to be a tablet, they both have the exact same start screen. If I install a new app on one machine it automatically shows up from the other. It's a very useful way of keeping those start screens of my personalization experience alive across all my devices. Great. We had one person follow up asking, what about system and device managers? Is that something that you can show us how to get to or if there's an equivalent in 8.1? Device manager is managed right through here. So if you go to devices, all your devices that you have connected are right here. System is a different thing. System is just where you simply see information about the system that you're currently running. In my case Windows 8.1 I think when he says device manager is referring to that. So maybe this is what we're referring to. That hasn't really changed in Windows 8.1. It's still a desktop experience. I'm not sure if that's what he was looking for. Yes, that's what he was asking about. So you mentioned the personalization and how Windows 8.1 sort of keeps a lot of those personalized settings for you. But we had a couple of folks from public libraries ask, how would you envision using Windows 8.1 in a library setting where you have users logging on and logging off all day long on public computing machines? Is there a way that you would recommend that they would use that? Absolutely. So first of all, you use Windows 8.1 Enterprise. It has group policy settings that you can deploy that turn off things like the store, that turn off, basically doesn't give anybody the ability to create a Microsoft account connection. So the personalization actually comes from the Microsoft account. If you create a new user on that device, and actually I was just going to, I could do it, but the point is when you create a new user on that device you would just make it a local user and not a Microsoft account user. And then you would not uninstall but basically unpin the store, you would unpin the mail and the calendar app, the things that are personalized, and the rest of the content such as people and things like that would be unpinned as well. But all the other apps would still be very valuable. The biggest problem with removing personalization ability and using the group policy for the store ability to install apps is that you can't have any apps other than those that come built into Windows 8.1. So if you do disable the store, your Windows 8.1 PC that's a publicly used PC maybe has no password or anything of that nature and it just says King County Library or whatever it says up here as a user, that device would only have the apps that are built in. Which by the way the apps that are built in is a very wide selection of apps and I can send you a link of those specific apps. But there's still a lot of great apps such as the browser, such as the help and tips. Obviously all the Bing apps including Bing Finance and Weather and News and the Health and Fitness app and there's even a new app called Food and Drink. And all those apps would be available to the average public user. What you wouldn't see is you wouldn't see calendar, you wouldn't see mail, you wouldn't see people, and you wouldn't have the store. So for those average public users that are using it, say one example here is that there's a residential treatment center for emotionally needy teens. And so would the average user there be able to use those things and would they have to create a Microsoft ID for being able to use it? Or would they just be able to sit down and use it and not have their information stored? If you want to use the mail app, the calendar app, the people app, and the store, it needs to have a Microsoft account associated to that because there's personalized settings, obviously information about what mail client you use, or not mail client, but mail service you use, what calendar service you use, what your contacts are. So if I understand the question correctly, if someone wants to use a device and they're going to be using the device regularly, it would probably be best for them to create a Microsoft account and go ahead and create a user on that device for that individual. In the case of a publicly used device where lots of people are using the device, and if not the same person over and over again, then we would I would say use the group policy, don't turn on a Microsoft account, and don't have those personalized settings. So they would just use a browser to access their mail. Great. So there is some flexibility then at least with public libraries using it, and other folks who might have concerns about privacy settings for individual users that they can sort of lock some of those options there. That's great. We also have some questions for how to upgrade. So the path to upgrade is one that's been a question that a lot of people asked. I'm not sure Todd if this is one that you can help answer or not. Otherwise we could bring Ginny back on the line and see if maybe she can. I actually can. You can. Okay, so can you upgrade an existing computer running XP or Windows 7 or even Windows 8? Does it need to be a fresh install? What's the – So upgrading an XP machine requires a clean install, which would mean your data would have to be transferred using a data transfer mechanism of some kind and you'd have to reinstall your applications. Upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8 can be done where it transfers all of your media and your applications. I'll be candid with you. It's easier to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 and then update from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 than to make the leap directly from 7 to 8.1. What I mean by that is if you install Windows 7, or if you have Windows 7 installed and you've got a lot of apps on there, when you update or, excuse me, upgrade to Windows 8, and I don't mean 8.1, just regular Windows 8, it will transfer all of your apps. It will transfer all of your content and all of your files. If you upgrade directly from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1, say put a disk in and say, okay, I want to upgrade, it will only transfer your files. It won't since transfer your apps. The 8.1 update was really intended to upgrade those who are already on 8 to 8.1, or obviously for a new PC purchase. So the mechanisms aren't there in 8.1 to transfer your files, or excuse me, your apps all the way from 7 to 8.1. I hope that makes sense. Yeah, that does. So for somebody who is on 7 who wants to upgrade to 8.1, and they are eligible through the Microsoft donation program, the best option might be to request 8 and then use the volume licensing servicing center and that software assurance benefit to upgrade to 8.1 for no cost. Exactly. And just so you know, 8.1 upgrade or update, I'm sorry? I was just saying, I believe that that's the correct path that we would recommend people use on TechSoup if that's the path that they want to take, if they want to move from 7 to 8 and then upgrade through volume licensing to 8.1 with their software assurance benefit. Yes, that is the easiest upgrade path to get to 8.1 from 7 is to upgrade first to Windows 8, and then just all you actually have to do is go into the Windows Store and update to 8.1. It's literally like two or three clicks to get to 8.1 from 8. Okay, great. So we have a person saying that they are a new C3 organization and they don't have existing PCs, but that their hardware and software vendor is installing a VDI environment. They sent them to TechSoup to get free copies of Windows 8.1. How should they proceed? I have to say, I'm sorry, but that's beyond my capability. That's a fairly involved question. Maybe we can help that person in the forums afterwards. So if you post your question in our community forums, someone on our end can try and answer that for you more technically. So I'm going to go ahead and bring Ginny back on for a couple of questions. So Ginny, we have somebody asking about group policies to manage rights and security. And I know Todd, you mentioned this a little bit earlier, but are there sections that people will need to rewrite in order to work with 8.1? Sure. And Todd, you can add on to this if I don't explain it well enough. I believe that you can carry over some group policies between Windows 7 and Windows 8, but not all of them actually apply to Windows 8, so you'll probably need to create new ones specifically for Windows 8. And I actually just sent an article to somebody that explains it a little bit better and I can share that with the rest of the group. Great. Thanks for that, Ginny. So we have somebody asking generally, what's the difference between Pro and Enterprise? So I don't know. That seems to be a fairly broad question, but I imagine that Todd, that might be one that you could cover. There's actually a page that I was going to bring up and share with folks here. So there's on thewindows.com. Let me just share my screen here and I'll put the link first in here and then select recipient, broadcast all, send. Okay, there's the link and now let me share my screen and you can see the page that I'm referring to. So to me, one of the biggest differences with Enterprise is the addition of Windows to Go, which is a big advantage. The other one obviously is the App Locker, which is particularly powerful for those folks who have line of business apps for deploying those apps out to their employees. As you can see, there's other ones there too, like Direct Axis is the one we use here within Microsoft. If you use Windows Server, VDI Enhancements, although VDI is possible in Windows Pro, there's some enhancements in, but I'm not that qualified to talk to the specific advantages of each of these. I'd have to get someone from the Enterprise team on. Sure. Well, I think it's helpful just that people know that there's resources there that show them what the differences are. We usually recommend that larger organizations, maybe if you've got two or three hundred machines in your organization that that would be more equipped for an Enterprise environment. I'm sure other people have different opinions and different recommendations, but that's sort of how I've always viewed Enterprise, that you get more features because you have more server-driven Enterprise needs. So I'm going to go ahead and show us some additional resources so we can go ahead and wrap it up today. If you want to learn more about Windows 8.1, you can check out our overview of the new features that Ginny wrote. You can also see Windows 8 in action with a video demo that we recorded earlier this year. And then there's some questions to consider if you're considering an upgrade to Windows 8 or 8.1 at this point, and what some of the differences are between them. So you can spend some time looking at these resources to help you make your mind up. Also, some resources about accessibility, and then the process on how to upgrade to Windows 8. So for those of you asking those questions, that might have the answers for you, and then some other resources linked there. So I'd like to take a moment to just thank our two presenters, Ginny Mies from TechSoup and Todd Rutherford from Microsoft for their contributions today to this webinar. And I'd also like to thank the folks on the back end, Kevin Lo, Gretchen Dio, and Don Reed for helping to answer questions. If we didn't get to yours today, you can join us in our community forums at techsoup.org slash community where you can post your questions, and we will have folks on our end who can try to answer them for you. So please join us there. And I'd also like to quickly just thank ReadyTalk, who is the sponsor of today's webinar by providing this platform for our use in presenting webinars regularly to you. Please take a moment to complete the post-event survey for us so we can continue to improve our webinar program. Thank you all so much, and have a terrific afternoon.