 Welcome to our TechSoup webinar Into the Cloud, and welcome to our presenters. We've got Linda who is the Director of Technology Services at Tech Impact where she manages all aspects of client relations including providing nonprofits with project plan and budget development, implementation oversight, and resource allocation to projects. With recent advances in cloud computing, Linda is focusing on moving nonprofits to leverage cloud solutions in order to lower IT costs while gaining access to best of breed technology. And we'll also be hearing from Antonio from the National Development Council. He's a really well-rounded hands-on IT professional with over 12 years of national and global experience, and Antonio will be talking about his experience with Tech Impact and will share his story of moving to the cloud. We also have Becky who is actually helping with chat, not Kyla like your screen says, sorry about that, and in case you don't know who TechSoup is, TechSoup is a nonprofit just like many of you and is part of TechSoup Global. We're working towards 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. So at this time I'll turn it over to you, Linda, to tell us about Tech Impact. Thanks for joining us. Hi everybody. Thanks Stephanie for that introduction. I chatted everyone on this photo on the one with the eyeglasses. I'm not the one with the long floppy ears. The one with the floppy ears is Roxy. She's our office dog here at Tech Impact. We're located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We're a 501C3 nonprofit organization, and our mission is to help other nonprofits use technology to fulfill your mission. So we've been here for 10 years now. We work with both local and national clients. We do everything from helping you with your computers and help desk stuff. We do strategic technology planning. We have a training center here that we help your staff use technology well. But with the advent of cloud which we'll talk about today, we're really pushing more organizations to utilize and leverage cloud technologies in order to do a couple of things, improve your computing experience, and or reduce costs. So that's what we do. So with that I'm learning that I have to double click the slides to move them. There they go. So here's our agenda for today. We're going to talk about what would you do if scenarios, and work with an overview of what is the cloud, how to move to the cloud, and then I'm going to try to go through some solutions that are available for nonprofits today, and hopefully answer some of the more common questions about each one of these technologies or solutions. And then my very, very good colleague and friend Antonio will be talking about his particular story, and DC's use of cloud technologies. So that's how we're going to present today. I'm going to go quickly. I have a tendency to talk quickly so that we can get to more questions at the end. So feel free to keep those chat questions coming in. I probably won't be able to answer them while I'm talking, but I hope we'll try to get back to you either as a chat or I'll answer them towards the end of the presentation. So what if? What if this happened to you? Remember Hurricane Sandy people? We're located here on the East Coast, and so is National Development Council. We were both pretty severely impacted by Hurricane Sandy with high water, high winds, power outages, etc. What if Hurricane Sandy came to your neck of the woods and knocked everything out for a day, a day, a week, a month, in some cases in New York, two months? What if we had a major snowstorm? Again, we're located in the northeast section of the country. We get this kind of stuff. In fact, for those of you in our area, you'll remember that – let me see, when was spring? Last week? Oh, by the way, we got snow this week. So we're still getting snow, and I see somebody on the chat line also had snow this afternoon or this morning. So what if snow took out everything that you need to do? What if it stopped you or prevented you from getting into your office, getting to a client's site, took down power lines, etc. We don't even have to worry about a major storm. How about if a car crashes into the utility pole down the street and knocks out power, or knocks out power to your building or your neighborhood? How about – I don't know what this picture is supposed to be, but it looks like the IT guy is getting ready to be arrested. Again, I'm from Philly, so that to me looks like the cops just said, put your hands up because we're going to arrest you or something. But what if that happened? What if something major went wrong with your servers, or something happened with your IT professional where they weren't, let's say, so professional? What if there was a pandemic and most of your employees could not get to work? What if you were told by local authority not to operate? What if that flu came around? How would you operate? That's kind of the gist of our conversation today. Could your organization continue to operate? So take a minute and think about that. Could your organization continue to operate if the power went out for a day or two days or a week or two weeks? Could your organization operate if the server that's in the closet someplace in somebody's office stopped working, or your IT professional like that poor guy got arrested and taken out in handcuffs? I don't know. Could your organization continue to operate? Well, probably not if you have on-premise servers. Probably not if your server is in that closet where, and it holds all of the information to your organization, hosts your email, maybe has your client data on it if you're providing services to direct services to clients. So probably not unless, of course, you had this guy as your IT professional. Chat me up if you don't know who this is because we had some internal conversations today. This is the professor from Gilligan's Island, and I hope that I'm not the only person who's really old enough on this call today to understand who the professor is on Gilligan's Island. But anyway, if this guy is your, or MacGyver, MacGyver would be another good example here. If somebody could jury rig something, somebody could make a pedal bicycle generator or something like that, oh good. Thank you people for being with me here. But we don't have this guy, so what are we going to do? Here's an example of something. This is a true story. I have a couple of true stories here. Here's this true story. We're currently working with an organization in Manhattan to restore service after Hurricane Sandy. This is a photo that was in the news of how high the water got. This is a mall underneath one of those high-rise buildings in Manhattan that was completely flooded. The office of this organization that we're working with sustained major impact from the flooding. They were out of work for two months. They couldn't get back into their building. The building was deemed unsafe. They lost literally everything. They had no functioning server. They had no data backup. The backups were sitting next to the server in the server closet. They had absolutely nothing. We're working with them to get them onto cloud services so that they have email, etc. And it was kind of an emergency thing that we helped them out on. So that's just one example of what could go wrong. So what could go right? Well, the cloud could go right. We want you to think about moving your information, moving your computer services into cloud computing. So we're just going to talk for a minute about what the cloud is. The cloud is basically a marketing term that someone came up with to help sell services. It's a general term for anything that involves hosted services over the Internet. You probably already used the cloud to do things in your daily life and maybe not even know it. So if you have an email account like a Gmail account or a Yahoo account or an Outlook.com account, you're already using the cloud. If you do banking online, you've already used the cloud. If you've ever purchased anything from say, oh, I don't know, Amazon or eBay or anything like that, you already used the cloud. So how can we turn the cloud into not just a consumer product but something that our nonprofit organizations can leverage for our business purposes? So what makes the cloud possible for us now? A couple of things. One of the reasons that cloud is so popular right now is bandwidth. It used to be back in the old days we had to pay a fortune for really terrible Internet service like dial-up, modems, or a T1 line that cost a fortune, or DSL that wasn't very good. Nowadays, bandwidth or Internet connectivity is not only widely available at really high speed, but the price point is pretty good. Here in Philadelphia we have Comcast as our cable provider. We start our Comcast connections. This is business class Comcast connections for under $100 a month. And we can get pretty good bandwidth from Comcast or Fios here. Virtualization is another tool that helps with cloud. The reason is because the data centers, if you've ever heard of a data center, the data center is where a hosting company puts a lot of servers together and allows you to basically rent space or services from them. Virtualization allows them to not just buy one server per client, but buy one server and host many client information on it. I know what you're thinking, we'll get to the security bit in a minute. Massive data centers. Data centers now are so large that the volume of customers that they have has brought the price point down. So these are a couple of reasons why cloud computing is now available for nonprofits. I'm just going through the chat and I hope that the audio is being taken care of in the background which it seems to be. I apologize for any echo. I wanted to quickly show a picture of what the cloud looks like. Ta-da! There it is. It's not fluffy at all. In fact what it is is a big warehouse full of user tractor trailer container trucks like you see on the road. Imagine some 18 wheels underneath each one of these things rumbling down the road. These container trucks are filled with these things. Servers, rows and rows and rows of servers. Each one of those blue lights in there indicates one particular server. They're stacked on top of each other and there's just rows and rows of them. This is the way that data centers are put together now. If any one of these servers crashes, your information is already moved to another server either within the container itself or to another container or to another data center that's located in another city. So your data and your information and your solution are constantly being moved around these different servers within different container trucks, within different data centers all across the country. And that's what the cloud looks like. So now you can go and ooh and all your friends and tell them that you've seen the inside of the cloud. I'm going to pause here for a minute. Does anyone have any general questions about cloud? I'm taking that as a no. Okay, so there's two kinds of cloud solutions that are available to nonprofits. These are general terms. I wanted to make you aware that there's basically two kinds of clouds. One of them is called a distributed cloud. In distributed cloud computing, you sign up with different cloud providers for different solutions. For example, you would sign up with QuickBooks Online to do your accounting. You would log into the QuickBooks Online accounting when you wanted to do accounting. And then if you wanted email, you would log in to say Microsoft Office 365 and have your email hosted there. And then when you wanted to do some kind of a database thing, you would log on to a different database provider, maybe salesforce.com as your database provider. This is distributed cloud. This is the way that 80% of organizations we work with deal with cloud. They have their computers on regular computers that they use, and then they connect to different services using different user names and passwords and paying for different services through different vendors. That's distributed cloud. Another way that we can provide cloud services, or you can get cloud services I should say, is through what we call a private cloud. Private cloud means that you take and rent one of those servers in that data center and put all of your things on it. So if you've got a local database application, if you want to host your own email, if you want QuickBooks or SageMIP or the Razor's Edge or any of those fundraising programs, you want it to be on your server, but not be at your location, you can go ahead and do a private cloud. The private cloud puts the server in a data center so that it's secure, so that it's always available with 99.99% uptime. It's backed up and available from no matter where you're connecting. So that would be private cloud. We see probably somewhere around 20% of organizations that want to move to cloud do private cloud. So there's the difference. So public cloud, you're signing up with a bunch of different providers. Private cloud, it's all yours on your server, and I'll just remind you that one of these servers would be dedicated to you in that particular situation. Any questions about cloud solutions? Okay, nobody's chatting the questions. So let's talk about a couple of different things that we work with here at Tech Impact. Dorsi is asking, what are the providers that do private cloud? There's a lot of different providers that do private cloud. There's local providers that you can connect with. There are national providers that you can connect with. We can help you find the private cloud that works best for you. I mean, some of the big names in the industry are like Rackspace, or Amazon would even do a private cloud for you, but you need to know and understand what their services do and what your goals are before you select a private cloud provider. Again, we can help you do that. So Karen's asking, so we're saying about 80% of organizations choose public cloud. That's probably a good number, and that's our experience. She shows us that. Is there an advantage from one over the other? There are advantages and disadvantages in both options. I would say again, find out what your goals are. Find out what applications you need to host. Sometimes you might have a database on your current server that has no cloud option. So somebody may have built you a database from scratch, like with a SQL database, or you might be using a vendor like, oh, what's a good example of it? There's a legal Kemp's Prime database is a good example. If you're a legal service provider you might be using Kemp's Prime. There's no online option for that. So if there's no online option for something that you're using and tied to using, then you're going to have to move to private cloud and host that database for yourself. Linda, this is Stephanie. We do have a lot of questions coming in now. Yeah, they're kind of flowing in now. Good. We just have one from before from Dana who asked what would happen in the event of something like a terrorist attack on one of the warehouses. There's warehouses with servers. Sure. There would be a lot of messed up servers, that's for sure. So if you're in public cloud, this is one of the things that we'll talk about in a minute. We want to make sure that when any cloud provider that you select, you want to ask these questions to PCI compliance, HIPAA regulations and rules. What if the data center goes kablooey? Where is my data? Can I get it back? Do you have a geo-redundant service that you provide? Another question to ask is what if you go out of business? What happens then? We want to make sure that we always tell you to find out if the cloud provider has an escrow account. Most reputable cloud providers will have an escrow account where they've put money aside in an escrow account to continue their operation for X amount of time. It might be 30 days. It might be 60 days in order for you to have time to extract all of your data before the whatever bankruptcy court or whatever comes in. So there are questions that you need to ask the cloud service provider. The solutions that we'll show you and talk to you about today, we've already vetted. So we're going to talk about email and collaboration using either Microsoft Office 365 or Google Apps, infrastructure in the cloud using hosted servers and VDIs, cloud-based database data management, data recovery and backup, and then communications. So real quickly I'm going to pop over to the Microsoft Office 365. We're doing a lot of this now. This is Microsoft Hosted Email and Collaboration Service. It's got exchange-based email so you can get rid of your exchange server. It's got SharePoint Online included so that you can share files and documents. It's like an intranet. You can post public calendars and that kind of thing. SkyDrive is associated with it for personal file storage so that your personal files, those things that you would put in the My Documents folder on your desktop would be available to you from the cloud because it's in both places. And then Link used for presence management and web meetings. So this allows you to do things like share your desktop with your coworkers or with colleagues that are outside of your organization and things like that. So we've done over 300 migrations of different various email things, exchange servers, pop accounts moving from one hosted provider to another. And we've done over 300 organizations and moved them to Office 365. We're pretty committed to that solution. Google also has a solution for nonprofits that allows you to do Google Mail or Gmail and host some files online and do some of that as well. Here's why we love Office 365. Small organizations get upgraded emails so if you have had that web mail experience where you use Outlook and you get some mail and then you go on to the web and the mail is not there anymore, this is an upgraded experience for you. Midsize organizations can get rid of a server because it's a lot of work to maintain your own exchange server. Large organizations can offload their exchange but remain in control because IT professionals can synchronize it through Active Directory integration. And then everybody gets to be more mobile and agile because you can use your email from Outlook on your desktop or from a web browser or you can just get it on your phone and continue to connect with people right on the phone. Here's some other cloud solutions that we would like to talk about. SAS databases, S-A-A-S, SAS database, SAS stands for Software as a Service. Software as a Service or SAS databases. We use databases online to do a lot of things with nonprofit organizations. Fundraising is the big one that comes to mind. Everybody needs to have a donor database. Well, we would suggest that you find a donor database that offers an online solution so that you don't have to have a server for it. It's available everywhere and we can do things like make configuration changes with it. Accounting packages, same thing. Case management and electronic medical records, especially with your electronic health records or electronic medical records, being online with those takes away a lot of technical worry, if you will. What if that server goes down and patients need to be seen or scheduled or whatever? Hosted online, hosted in the cloud. We don't have to worry about having that ever happen. So that's great. CRM, the top thing in the slide here, CRM stands for Constituent Relationship Management. And that means how do we relate to all of those people that we need to form relationships with, whether they are donors, they are volunteers, they are interns, they are clients. How do we interact with them? How do we make sure that we understand our relationship with them? There are two things that we would recommend. One of them is salesforce.com. Salesforce is an online database. It's a SaaS application. They will donate the first 10 licenses to nonprofits through their Salesforce Foundation. So that's a pretty good deal. It's configurable. We can change the way that it looks and acts so that it is customized to your needs. Microsoft also has a product that's called Dynamics CRM. It's also an online application. They discount their pricing. I think it's $9.99 or $10 per user per month for that. So also configurable, also customizable so that it works well with what your needs are. So I know I'm talking quickly and I apologize for that, but I want to give Antonio time to tell us about his own experience with all this stuff. So we've already talked about cloud infrastructure. We say, listen, 80% of the time you can use those things that we just talked about. Maybe you are using Microsoft Office 365, or maybe you are using Google Apps for your email. Maybe you are using QuickBooks Online for your accounting. So that's all great, but there is 20% of that time where you need to have a server in the cloud. And you are going to do this through putting your server in the cloud, and maybe even using something called a virtual desktop to connect to that server in the cloud. So it's pretty cool stuff. Oh, thank you Becky for posting the Salesforce link. That's great. So this might not make sense to you. I'm sorry. So cloud servers are a dedicated server. It's for your organization only. Users will connect to it by putting in a username and password just like they would if the server were in your own closet somewhere behind the IT guy. The administrator will still have to run and operate that machine. You connect through a VPN. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. So your data is always secure going between your computer and the server which is in the cloud that goes through a VPN connection to get there. You would do everything on that like you would normally. You would create your shared files. You would connect to your accounting database or whatever the database is that you need to connect to just as if the server was on premise. It's just in the cloud and it's safer and more secure and more readily available from no matter where you are. The other thing that we can do is create something called cloud desktop. So cloud desktop is also known as a virtual desktop or VDI. VDIs allow you to use computers that may not have Windows 7 on them. Maybe they are still the old Microsoft Windows XP machine but we can make it so that it looks like you are using Windows 7 and connects to the cloud server just like it's a regular computer. The difference is that it's updated and it has all of the applications are actually running on the server. They are not running on the local desktop which allows you to use desktops that are maybe older, maybe can't handle, or doesn't have enough memory for the new version of Microsoft Office or the new version of QuickBooks or worse yet Adobe Creative Suite. You can go ahead and run all of that stuff through a virtual desktop connection. I think Antonio, I think it's probably best for you to jump in here. I can't see what the next slide is. Thank you Linda. Really quickly, my name is Antonio Palumbo and I am the first technology hire for the National Development Council. We are the largest and oldest not-for-profit community development organization in the United States. So we have a saying here, we lessen the burden of government. We have over 90 employees and 60% of my staff do not have an office to call home. We travel across the United States working with low income communities to see where we can invest new markets money. So I was brought on board to help solve the problem of keeping data centralized. MDC I like to think was ahead of its time. We didn't have any internal servers. We used a managed service provider with data technology and it was costing us a lot of money. So we partnered up with Tech Impact and are utilizing a lot of the tools that Linda mentioned, virtual desktops, Office 365, and SharePoint. Really quickly, we use virtual desktops for applications that do not have a web interface. QuickBooks, I know QuickBooks has an online version, however we still like the application. So we use that VDI for that program, Act Database, and a very specific program for loans called the SBA Loan Manager. And I like to think of that as Tessitora. I'm not sure how many people here have ever heard Tessitora. If there's any theater people or opera people, Tessitora is a major software that would work really well in the VDIs. And what I love about the VDIs is that it's low impact. Quite frankly, it saves my budget. As long as you have the VDI app installed on any computer, on an iPad, on a Mac, and you have an Internet connection, not even a solid Internet connection, you can get onto your virtual servers and use the horsepower of not only your local computer, it could be a 10-year-old machine. It doesn't matter. If it has a decent Internet connection, you are remoting into a virtual environment and you can work on your applications from there. It is a great tool if budget is a concern. So we use that for 20 individuals at our company, and it just works flawlessly. I don't have to worry about that. If they lose their computer, it is okay. They can use another computer. If I have to upgrade software, I don't have to touch 20 computers. I have to touch one computer. So it works really well. We've been on VDIs now for two months. I forgot to mention, I just started my fifth month at NBC and we've already moved over three applications onto the VDI. This past Monday, a couple of days ago, we just went live with Office 365. And I had time three days later to be on a webinar because I'm not getting any phone calls. It was a smooth transition from a hosted provider that used Microsoft Exchange, which meant that they had to patch it, restarts. If they had issues, we had issues, and there were a lot of them. We moved over to Office 365. Same scenario, if you have an Internet connection, it does not matter what computer you're on. If it's a company-issued computer, if it's your kid's computer, if it's a computer at the hotel, if you can access the Internet, you have access to your corporate email. Huge. And it's a small, monthly, recurring fee. The economics of it just makes sense. So we just went live with that. And it's working really well. My next project for NBC is moving our file server, which is still with our managed service provider, onto SharePoint, which is completely integrated with Office 365. We are going to be moving the folders, the Excel documents, the Word documents, the PDFs onto SharePoint where end users can work locally on whatever computer they're on as long as they have an Internet connection. So the company is really excited because a huge complaint that I've heard before I started was that we don't have good, solid access to our files because we're not always on a high speed network. We might be in an airport on a wireless card which doesn't work with our DP, Remote Desktop Protocol, which is what we had now. So the transition has been smooth. A lot of communication goes a long way when it comes to moving data from one point to another. And the last thing that I'm thinking about is going to VoIP in 2014 potentially. I love the idea of if my office in Midtown Manhattan loses Internet connectivity, or God forbid there's some type of terrorist attack, or even a flood, or even Verizon jackhammering the street and cutting our cables. VoIP allows automatically for phone calls to be routed to a cell phone, voicemails to be attached to emails. And with Office 365 it's all seamless. It's a single login, your email address, and your password. And you have so much power behind that login. So that's my quick story. I want to make sure that Linda has the opportunity to answer any specific questions. That's it. Thank you for your time. Thanks, Antonio. So it's a really great story. National Development Council took this challenge to take their infrastructure, their existing infrastructure, and figure out a way to make it more accessible for all of their users no matter where they are. Plus using cloud allow for better disaster recovery options, better uptime, and hopefully reduce cost to do support for a lot of that infrastructure as well. So it's a pretty great story. I see some great questions here about personal data into SharePoint. Yes. SharePoint has the ability, SharePoint replaces your server, your file server that everybody has access to. But you also have your own personal profile where you can store things that are relevant to you, just like you would on your desktop or your My Documents. SharePoint gives you that same ability. But great question. And as far as VDI, Sam Chen has asked a question, can you use Thin Clients for your VDI? In fact, you can. Depending on your virtual desktop client, and there's a couple of solutions that are out there, we use VMware View Client for our solution. That VDI client can run on a Thin client, on a Zero client, on a tablet, on an iPad, on a full-fledged PC, on a laptop, any device that is Internet connected, you can have a full-blown Windows desktop with all of your applications running on it through the VDI client. So quick story if there's time. Last week, I was in Kentucky in the middle of nowhere in a low-income area, and I needed access to QuickBooks. Didn't have my laptop with me. Didn't have a hotel by me. I was in the middle of the road. But I had a cell phone connection on my iPhone. Was it the best quality? No. I logged in through my VDI app on my cell phone, and was able to get the information I was looking for while my partner was driving. And it hit me how great, not only having Internet ability is, but the accessibility, the fact that I'm a technology professional, that I can do my job no matter where I am, quite frankly, in the world. It just harps to and speaks to, moving to the cloud, it just makes you more flexible. You're not tied to your building. You're not tied to an Internet connection that you hope stays up 100% of the time. So that's my quick story. That's a great story, on the cell phone, in the cab, whatever, getting to your data. So that's great. We've had a couple of questions about voiceover IP, which are the next two slides are about voiceover IP. It's another part of our daily business that we sometimes cannot do without, and is definitely affected by weather, by power outages, a lot of things can interrupt or affect our voice communication. And there are a lot of organizations that we work with where phone calls are a necessity of not only the back office business, but providing services to clients, to our clients. So we use a voiceover IP system that is really called a hosted PBX phone system. If you think about the way that your phone system works now, how is that running? Well, you buy phone lines off the phone company. Those phone lines come into your building. There's a PBX box someplace again in some closet somewhere with a lot of wires running in and out of it. And that system has been connected to everybody's extension within your office. If you've got multiple offices, chances are you don't have the same phone number and you can't transfer calls between one office and another office if you're a small organization. What we've done is we've partnered with a hosted PBX phone provider. This allows us to run phones not over a phone line that we have to buy from the phone company and how many do we need? Do we need two? Do we need five? How many? But it runs over our existing broadband Internet connection. So I told you earlier on the call that we use Comcast for our Internet connection. Our phones also run over our Comcast connection. All the phone exchange happens at a data center. The data center is replicated. So there's one here in Pennsylvania. There's another one in somewhere near Las Vegas, Nevada. The phone calls come in there. They're routed through to our phone number and to our extension, and that comes right down into the phones here. So it runs on broadband Internet connection. It's a hosted PBX, allows connection from anywhere, gives us voicemail. Our voicemail goes to not only on our phone, but it also goes to an email attachment so I can actually listen to voicemails right from my computer. It gives us unlimited local and long distance calling, so we don't have to worry about who I'm calling that's long distance and how many minutes and what's the price per minute and all that stuff. Direct in word dial or DID means that I can have my own personal phone number here at Tech Impact and you can dial me directly rather than dialing in and then having to remember what my extension is. It also allows auto attendants. So you dial here, it says press one for this and press two for that and gives us a lot of advanced features that we never had in our regular phone system. The really cool thing about hosted PBX phone in this conversation, if the power goes out in my building and you're trying to dial in, you don't know it. You don't get a busy signal. You don't get a BBB temporarily out of whatever. It just connects and you'll get my voicemail. If I know that I'm going to be out of power for a long time, I can contact a company, tell them to route my calls to my cell phone and then all incoming calls just come right to my cell phone or right to a different phone number, maybe my home phone number. I can actually take my phone, the phone that's sitting on my desk, the one that I'm talking to you on right now. I can actually unplug it, take it home with me, plug it into my Internet connection at home, and have people dial me from my extension and answer the phone right from home if I have a broadband Internet connection. So all of that is pretty cool. And again, it's all because the phone is hosted at the cloud. So here's kind of a technical drawing trying to show you that the Internet is connected through a broadband connection and then goes to these other three data centers, Las Vegas, Wayne, Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia, PA. So the phones are like the big thing. Phones hosted in the cloud. You don't have to come to your office ever and you can continue to make and receive phone calls through your company phone. Your email, that's I think the other big thing. You can host that either at Microsoft Office 365, or if you wanted to use the Google solution, you could use the Google apps or Google Docs for nonprofits, and then your database stuff. How can you host your database stuff online? Well, you can either do that through public cloud by finding a provider that has an online solution or private cloud by taking the application that's on your existing server and simply moving it to a cloud server. So that's all the content that I have for us today. So hopefully we'll be able to get some questions answered here. We have about 10 minutes left in the web presentation today. So does anybody have any questions that we haven't gotten to? Stephanie, have you seen any questions that I could ask? Thank you so much, Linda. So much great information. We do have a lot of questions. So let's start with a couple that are about voice over IP since we were just talking about that. So Nancy asked if you recommended any particular hosted voice over IP server? I can say that we have one that we are actually a provider for, because we've been using it for about 7 years now, and we really like it. And they've asked us to partner with them because they don't really want to deal with nonprofits directly. They want to deal with big corporate, whatever. So we're happy to do that. But I would recommend that whatever solution you choose, you should make sure that they're charging you a per user monthly flat fee, that they allow you to run it over your own internet connection, and that they don't try to sell you their internet connection. That's the big differentiator with these types of providers right now. Some voice over IP providers will only deal with you if you also buy their internet connection. You don't necessarily want to do that. You want to find one that you can BYO internet connection. BYO bandwidth, right? So Tom had asked a little bit about cost as well. How do the cost compare to regular phone company? That's a great question. I would say that in probably 75 to 80% of the organizations we work with, their phone bill has been reduced by moving to voice over IP platform versus traditional service. When you add up what you pay to phone company for the lines, what you pay the phone equipment provider to manage the phone equipment, and what you pay for all the other additional services that are layered on top of that, it's usually cheaper to go with a voice over IP or hosted PBX system as long as you're allowed to bring your own bandwidth to the table. We have a flat fee model. I think it's somewhere between $20 and $24, $25 a month depending on whether you want to include equipment in the cost or not. I hope that answered his question. Great. And Karen asked if you've heard of multiple organizations using voice over IP and being able to transfer calls to each other over the system? Or would each have to have their own contract? If you have multiple locations under the same business, you can definitely do that. In fact, we have an office in Philadelphia. We also have an office in Wilmington, Delaware, and we transfer calls right back and forth. So it's under a single dial. It's under a single number. And even with that, it's pretty cool. We have a 215 area code here in Philadelphia office. Our Delaware office has a 302 area code so that local nonprofits can call a local number, but we can still transfer phone calls back and forth just by dialing an extension. Becky, I saw a great question about someone still not understanding what Office 365 really is at the end of the day. And I think I have a good example. So assume you have an organization of 50 people and they all are running Office 2007. So what does that mean? That means that each computer has Office 2007 installed. Remember when software used to come in CDs and DVDs? Someone would have to go to each computer and install this application, one by one by one, if that computer didn't already come pre-configured with it. With Office 365, it's a website that everyone has access to. Now when Microsoft does an update or a security patch, there is absolutely no impact on you and your end users, quite frankly, the bottom line. It all happens in the cloud. So you're not worried about making sure you're keeping track of licensing. You're not worried about making sure you have staff on hand that have the expertise on how to properly upgrade Office 2007 to Office 2010. That becomes less of a burden on you. It assures that your staff is all on the same piece of software. I've come across a number of different companies that some people are running XP with 2007 or Windows 7 with 2010, and that just creates more work for the technology staff because you're supporting different variations. With Office 365, it is the same software. Just like when you go to yahoo.com, AOL, Gmail, when they make an upgrade, it is across the board. It's the same, but you're constantly checking. You go to the same website. So that's what Microsoft is trying to do here, is to limit the burden of having an in-house expert who runs your server, limiting the burden of making sure that you have redundant power, redundant internet connections. You don't need that because Microsoft is taking care of that for you. Great. Good. Thank you. Well, that segues nicely into some of the other Office 365 questions that we have as well. Paula had asked about what if some employees use Macs with that work with Office 365? Yes, you can use Office 365 with Macs in two ways. If you've got Office 2011 for Macs installed locally, you can go ahead and use it that way, or you can connect over the web to Office 365 online and use it that way as well. So yeah, Microsoft has definitely cracked that nut. Great. And also a question about does Office 365 support VBA-based applications? Somewhat. It's something that you have to look at this specific application to see whether or not it's going to need to be rewritten or not before it can be put online. Okay. Let's get through a couple more of these. I did see a couple of questions that came in about confidentiality with information stored on the cloud and collecting client information. Can you address that? Sure. So how confidential is the information stored on the cloud? Your cloud information is really confidential. Some cloud applications, the data is actually encrypted en route to the cloud. So after you type it and send it, it's encrypted and then it's encrypted while it's there. In other applications, it's not encrypted while it's there. It's encrypted while it's going over the line. It's just a matter of how you set it up, whether or not it's really super secure. So yes, it's hard to say. So we'll take Microsoft Office 365 for example. It's very secure. Microsoft has very secure servers and data centers and nobody from the outside can get into your stuff. However, if you've got a user who logs on to Office 365 at an internet cafe and forgets to log off, it's available for anyone to get into. So I don't know. It's hard to answer the question. You bring up a great point and I get asked this question constantly. Is the software itself secure that data going over the pipe into the data center is secure? Absolutely. Now there needs to be responsibility on the end user part as well. Just like when you're in front of an ATM. Is the ATM transaction secure? Of course it is. But it's your responsibility that before you walk away that you're done with that transaction and you are off the system. Because if you walk away, someone else can go in and take it and act as you. So you put it really well. If you're in an internet cafe and you're doing business on your corporate network on SharePoint or Office 365, that communication is secure. But it's your responsibility that before you walk away to make sure you log off because there's no way any piece of software, regardless if it's in the cloud, if it's right in front of you, if you don't log off and somebody is ill inclined and they can step in and act as you. So there is responsibility on the end user to make sure that they do their due diligence as well. So just log off, shut down your computer because security is not just about software. It's also reliant on the end user. Definitely, yes. All right, well I think that brings us up to the top of the hour. So thank you both for lending so much expertise. We got through a lot of the questions, not all of them. Hopefully we'll be able to continue that conversation on the TechSoup forums. We'll send you all a link to that so we can keep this conversation going. So that is a wrap for today. Another thank you to ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor and TechSoup donor partner. And thank you so much again to our presenters and most of all to you, our participants. Later today you will receive an email with a link to the archived recording of this event and also links to all the resources that we mentioned. So thanks again for sharing your time with us and have a wonderful afternoon. Thank you.