Office 365 for Nonprofits a Primer

Office 365 For Nonprofits A Primer

All rights reserved Tech Impact 2 This eBook represents a collection of blog posts and other writings about Office 365 for nonprofits by Tech Impact. These posts are based on our experience moving hundreds of nonprofits, and thousands of users, to Office 365. It is our hope that you will find this information valuable as you consider moving to Office 365.

Chapter 1: Office 365 for Nonprofits------> 4

Chapter 2: What exactly can Office 365 do? ------> 6

Chapter 3: The Remote Workforce ------> 9

Chapter 4: Why Your Exchange Server Is a Time Bomb------> 12

Chapter 5: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Online------> 14

Chapter 6: Office 365, SharePoint, and Disruption------> 17

Chapter 7: Replace Your Shared Drive With o365’s SharePoint------> 20

Chapter 8: What does SharePoint look like?------> 24

For Case Studies please visit http://techimpact.org/our-impact/

You may not remember how earth shattering the release of Windows 95 was. Windows 3.1 preceded it and that was nothing more than another program that ran on DOS. It wasn’t useful. It was a curiosity. It did not change computing forever.

Windows 95 changed computing forever. Specifically Windows 95 paired with Office. Together, they were a set of powerful tools with a completely new interface. The command line of DOS 6.0 was replaced with the point and click of your mouse. It was pretty, and it made computing accessible for a whole generation of folks who never wanted to learn about command lines or code.

A new software package has arrived that is just as groundbreaking (in our opinion). Yet, it gets little fanfare. Office 365 does for cloud computing what Windows 95 did 20 years ago. It makes computing accessible in ways never before possible.

You used to have to build a server to do this stuff. You used to need a computer that weighed 40 pounds (at home and at work). You used to have to remember to take the documents you needed home with you at the end of the night. You used to have to make sure the tape drive loaded properly. You used to have to know how to resuscitate a crashed server.

Office 365 changes all of that. And it is available to qualified nonprofits as a donation. Let us show you what Office 365 can do for your nonprofit.

Fill out this form to find out if your organization qualifies for an Office 365 donation: http://techimpact.org/our-services/cloud-services/npoffice/

In short, Office 365 is about collaboration and productivity. It is your “office in the sky”, so to speak. This is a hosted service, accessed over the internet. All the hard work takes place in a Microsoft data center and is delivered to you. Its core features replace your in-house Exchange server and provide a hosted email solution. It is, however, much more than email. With Office 365 you gain access to the following services: Email and Calendars: The same professional email you have from your server today, presented in the same format that you are comfortable using. Yes, you can still use Outlook on the web or on your computer. It also provides a calendar to keep track of your important appointments and the ability to share your schedule with your colleagues. No gimmicks, no unnecessary advertising, and your mail is not read by a search engine. In fact this service comes loaded with security features and over 25GB of storage. All rights reserved Tech Impact 7 Office 365

Instant Messaging With Lync Office 365 comes with Lync. Lync is where collaboration really takes place. It is much more than just an instant message tool. This allows you to see if your contacts are available for chats, conduct instant or planned group meetings, share desktops, share files, and develop presentations with each other, or a group, in real time. You can even use your PC as a phone and hold video conferences. This is truly collaboration at its best.

Share Files With SharePoint Store your files, share your files, and manage your files. SharePoint is much more than a giant shared file system. This application gives an organization the ability to setup “sites”. You can develop sites that allow teams to share and collaborate on files. Collaborate in real time on documents or check one out to maintain version control. Instead of emailing large files between team members (you never do that right?), just share a link to the file that is stored on your site. You can also use this to manage external teams-think board members and committees. It is the hub of activity for an organization and it takes the dependency of a shared file system off of your server. It’s also highly secure and accessible wherever you are.

“With guaranteed 99.9% uptime, you get to focus on what is important-your mission.”

Replace Your Hard Drive With Sky Drive Pro This replaces your personal drive on the network. It is now your personal drive in the cloud. Easily store your private documents. You can also share them with others if you like. Each license of Office 365 provides the user with a 7 GB drive of personal storage.

Work Remotely We will have another section in this eBook about remote users, but one of the most important features of Office 365 is the ability to work anywhere, anytime. When your files are in the cloud, you can access them from anywhere on any device: your Android or Apple phone, your tablet computer (yes, even your iPad), your office, or even your hotel room.

Get Rid of Server Maintenance Perhaps the best feature of Office 365 is that it just works. Microsoft is now responsible for upgrading the software, backing up your files, and keeping your office up and running. With guaranteed 99.9% uptime, you get to focus on what is important- your mission. Move those support dollars and time to your programs and constituents and let Microsoft manage your email and files. Work smarter, not harder, and save money in the process.

Imagine this.

Your office is on the third floor of a three story building that is shared with other organizations. Someone leaves the coffee pot on overnight in an office on the second floor. It shorts and a small fire breaks out.

Everyone is safe, and your office is completely untouched. BUT, you cannot get into the building. The fire department wants to investigate the incident and there is some water damage and smoke damage on the second floor. You may not be able to access your office for up to a week.

“Stay home”, you advise your workers. “Get into the network using the VPN and stay current on your email”. Continue working on the grant that is stored on your shared folder.

Then the calls start coming in, the team cannot remember their VPN passwords because they have not used them in months. The server is down because the fire caused the electric box to trip the outlet that your server is plugged into in your office. No one is there to reboot it.

What now? Do you give your team time off until your server comes back online?

This is where the value of cloud services comes in. That server in your office is a single-point-of-failure. Get rid of it!

On the cloud, your email and files are not stored on that single- point-of-failure. You can still access your files and your email from anywhere at any time. Your staff can access their work from home, from the road, or from their local coffee shop with the same ease that they can from your office. You can still instant message, collaborate on that grant, and communicate with your board and external constituents. You pick-up and move-on as if nothing happened. That is powerful technology. That is a safety net. That is a disaster-proof strategy.

Now, let’s imagine a different scenario: not about loss, but about productivity. Your field worker goes and meets with a client and takes notes. They come back to the office and type those notes into a form that is stored on your shared folder. Then they email the file to their manager so that they know what is going on with the client. How can we streamline this process?

That is powerful technology. That is a safety net.”

What if that same form were stored on SharePoint? The field worker, using their laptop or tablet computer, can update the notes in real time. Their tablet is their notebook. Since the document is in the cloud, the information is updated in real time. There is no duplicate entry.

Before the end of the meeting with the client, the document is completed, the case history is updated, and an email is sent to the manger with a link to the document. That is productivity and efficiency. Now that case worker can see more clients instead of spending more time in the office. After all, your mission is not to create more paperwork; it is to reach more people! This is just a small example of how Office 365 can increase productivity for the mobile workforce.

Keep imagining! We’re confident you can come up with many ways to use Office 365 to increase your organization’s efficiency.

Office 365 Overview http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5YtJic42wCg

Your Exchange Server may be slowly ticking its life away. When it does, it will take down your e-mail, your files, and set you back.

We often speak with clients who are looking to switch to the cloud because their Exchange Server is unreliable or difficult to maintain. Those aren’t the only reasons to switch. As one client recently discovered, Exchange Servers can reach capacity. And when they do, they crash… big time.

The more users you add, and the more communication it has to handle, the more overworked your Exchange Server will become. Slowly, over time, your server’s hard drive fills up. Maybe you’ll catch it when it’s at 80%. You’ll get a warning; you’ll think you have time. Once you start to reach capacity, vital emails bounce. Then bang, out of nowhere (or maybe because you forgot to install a bigger hard drive) your server will crash. Now you, or your tech person, will begin the arduous task of moving your Exchange Server to a new hard drive.

It’s an expensive mistake, and commonly made. Lost hours of work productivity, and expensive expert IT help, add up.

Office 365 can help you avoid the Exchange Server time bomb. There’s room enough for everyone up there! The cloud scales to your needs.

Let’s say you start out not needing too much from Office 365. That’s fine. But as your organization, and its functions, grow so does your need for email. Add more users, add more folders, and add more email addresses. It’s all no problem. The cloud can grow with you.

The baseline storage in Office 365 can store years worth of e-mail for free. Currently I have about 4 years’ worth of e-mail stored, and I get a lot of e-mail! But if you need to, you can always upgrade the amount of storage available for a couple of dollars per month. It’s the best deal going in nonprofit IT, and it ensures you don’t fall victim to the Exchange Server time bomb.

Still wondering if Office 365 is right for your organization? Sign up for a free consultation: http://techimpact.org/our-services/cloud-services/

One of the many benefits of the cloud is the ability to host your Office applications off-site. There’s no need to worry about constantly running software updates, or having to buy the newest version. And the software that you have access to is no longer limited to what you can put on your work computer. Whether you are at a kiosk at the airport or using your personal computer at home, you have the same access to your Office software regardless of where you are and what computer you can access.

This is becoming increasingly important for nonprofits. More employees work remotely, from the road, or bounce around across multiple computers. And there are few applications used by nonprofits more than Microsoft Office.

“All you need is an internet browser and you can begin creating and editing documents with no need for the software to be installed on your computer.”

Office 365 licenses allow users to create and edit Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents in any web browser. There is no need to download software or type in product license keys. Compatibility issues with users using different versions of Office are eliminated with everyone using the same up-to-date software in Office 365. All you need is an internet browser and you can begin creating and editing documents with no need for the software to be installed on your computer.

If you already have Office installed on your desktop, your Office apps can seamlessly integrate with SharePoint eliminating the need to download and upload files every time you want to edit them. Now you can simply open a document directly into your desktop app from SharePoint. Click save when you are done and it saves directly back into your document library in SharePoint.

The initial reaction to cloud-hosted Microsoft Office products in Office 365 is to brush it aside. After all, most users have Office on their computer. But all of us who do have desktop versions of Office have to run software updates, upgrade versions after they become outdated, and make large investments to buy all new software every time the newest version comes out. Multiply those costs across several users and upgrading becomes an expensive, and difficult financial burden. We see organizations every day who decide to only upgrade some users and not others in an effort to save money. Web-based Office products are a solution for them.

There’s also the option to upgrade your license for a couple of dollars per month. That version includes full downloads of desktop versions for all Office tools. Either way, Office 365 is a great way to ensure all your workers have access to the most up to date Office software at a fraction of the old cost.

First, if you have not been exposed to Microsoft’s Office 365 product or to their SharePoint solution, let me take just a moment to provide some background. With Office 365 Microsoft has taken the most widely used office and collaboration tools and placed them in the cloud.

This includes email, shared calendaring, the Online Office suite (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote), file sharing, and web conferencing. All of these applications are hosted, and no servers are needed at your site.

SharePoint Online (included in the free nonprofit license) is a powerful alternative to traditional shared folders. It also includes collaboration and project management tools to help your organization work efficiently, effectively, and remotely.

Now that you have some background, let’s get geeky for a minute. Most of the smaller nonprofits we work with have an average of 80 gigabytes of data in shared folders. These shared folders are typically hosted on a server in their office along side email and shared calendars (a typical Exchange environment).

We have been advocating for nonprofits to move to Office 365 for email and shared calendars, but have been somewhat hesitant about moving their shared files to SharePoint. SharePoint has been too expensive for most organizations to use as a primary shared file solution.

Email, on the other hand, has been inexpensive. Up until now, for a couple of dollars a month per mailbox, a small nonprofit never had to worry about their email again. That was a pretty powerful value proposition (made even more powerful now that Office 365 is free for nonprofits).

Up until this point, SharePoint storage was prohibitively expensive. At $2.50 a month most of our nonprofits would need to pay $200 per month to replace their file server.

That just changed. Microsoft dropped the price on SharePoint storage to $.20 per gigabyte. To say that is significant would be an understatement. Now that 80 gb shared folder costs $16 a month to manage on SharePoint. Just like email, it is a better platform than most nonprofits would ever be able to afford with a server onsite.

This value proposition is disruptive. It changes everything for the better. It means that small nonprofits should not invest in servers for email and shared folders. Servers cost thousands of dollars to purchase, install, and maintain. For most nonprofits, their server is also the basis for a single-point-of-failure model.

Because Microsoft offers a basic license of Office 365 for free to nonprofits, and because storage upgrades are available for pennies a month, the value proposition is too powerful to ignore.

For a few dollars a month a nonprofit can host their email and shared files in Microsoft data centers and take the worry and cost of maintenance and crashes off the table. We run our nonprofit on Office 365 and I sleep better at night knowing our server will not crash, we are backed up, and we have access from anywhere at any time from any device.

Before upgrading your server or Exchange software, take a look at Microsoft Office 365. If you need help migrating, we’re here for you with either our self-guided instruction packet or our full migration services.

Now, get back to saving the world.

We can help migrate your organization to Office 365. http://techimpact.org/our-services/cloud-services

What if you could access your files from anywhere in the world and never have to worry about your file server crashing and losing all of your critical documents?

At Tech Impact, that’s our ultimate goal: put your server and all of its functionality up into the cloud where you never need to worry about crashes, maintenance costs, or not being able to access a document when you’re away from the office.

One of the ways we have been accomplishing this goal is by moving file servers into SharePoint and hosting them on Office 365.

Here are a few of the benefits:

Better Document Management and Collaboration: Folders in traditional file servers can get messy and disorganized very fast. Multiple users work on a document and click “save as”, creating multiple copies as they make changes, afraid of altering the master version. That “final version” ends up becoming just one in a long string of final versions as you make last minute changes and incorporate input from others. SharePoint helps solve this through a powerful feature called “versioning.” Versioning allows you to store multiple copies of a file but only displays the most recent version in the folder. Not sure if you like the changes you just made to that grant proposal? No problem, save it anyways and you can always look at the document’s version history and go back in time to a previous version. No need to “save as” and create a new file.

Another great benefit of moving from your file server to SharePoint is “comments” and file notes. SharePoint enables users to make comments when they make changes to a document so other members on a team can see comments on previous versions of a document. SharePoint allows multiple users to edit a document at once or a user can check out a document to prevent anyone else from making changes while they have it checked out. At any point, you can compare one version of a document to a past version and SharePoint will show you what changes were made to that document, who made them, and what comments the author made about the document when they were done working on it. This helps eliminate cluttered folders on your file server, and enables better collaboration within your organization.

With multiple copies of your files being redundantly stored in secure data centers around the world, the chances of data loss due to server crash is virtually zero.”

Many of the nonprofits we work with want to find ways to make their data more secure while avoiding expensive backup costs. SharePoint achieves this.

SharePoint storage is reliable: With multiple copies of your files being redundantly stored in secure data centers around the world, the chances of data loss due to server crash is virtually zero.

You can’t afford to back up your data on multiple servers around the world, but Microsoft can by spreading the cost across millions of clients.

SharePoint storage is cheap: Dirt cheap. An organization gets 10 gb of storage for free. Every gigabyte on top of that is only .20 per month. Not $.20 per user, that’s just $.20 for every gigabyte of files, images, and video your organization puts in the cloud every month. So for $20 a month you can put your 100 gigabyte server into the cloud. That’s huge! And it will be more reliable, more secure, and it will never need maintenance.

SharePoint has a wide range of capabilities, allowing it to be tailored to suit a wide variety of needs. From internal blogs, to a hub for project management, to company websites, there is little you cannot do with SharePoint. But perhaps the quickest, easiest, and most affordable thing your nonprofit can do with SharePoint is move your file server offsite and into a place where it is more secure, reliable, and affordable. Saving you time, money, and helping your organization collaborate better along the way.

We can help migrate your shared files to SharePoint. http://techimpact.org/our-services/cloud-services/npoffice/

Good question. SharePoint is, more or less, a massive evolution in online file sharing. I don’t know about your organization, but Tech Impact has traditionally kept a folder for each of our clients which, if we were lucky, looked like this:

What a mess! You can see someone (me) made an attempt to organize files by folder. That failed and we have a number of documents just in the root. Each of those documents has multiple versions.

Plus, some of these files (specifically the “MCC MPLS Status” spreadsheet) are actually just a list of tasks that really shouldn’t be in excel. Besides this folder, there was a public calendar used to coordinate with the client and a dozen contacts in outlook. Not a best practice!

Now, let’s look at similar data inside of SharePoint:

What’s different? Well, we still have a “folder,” but here it’s called a “site.” That site is accessed via a web browser instead of a mapped drive, so you can get to it anywhere you are. Also, you’ll notice that we don’t just have a big bucket for everything any more. Instead, along the left hand side there are links to access the different types of content this “site” can hold. In this case, you can put Documents, Contacts, Calendars, and Tasks in this single site. Instead of saving things in spreadsheets or bouncing between Outlook and your public drive, everything is in once place.

It’s pretty, but what does it mean for me? Well, two things. For one, you can actually keep your public folder organized. Every site has its own permissions and sites can be kept within sites. For instance, we have a “Consulting” site with a sub-site for every client. You can prevent your users from creating new sites or let them create sites only if they get multiple users to agree. Plus, SharePoint automatically versions documents so you don’t need to keep _v2, _v3, _v3.5, _final, _final2. These are only a few of the many benefits of SharePoint.

Second, and perhaps most important, you don’t need a file server anymore. Microsoft dramatically lowered their pricing for SharePoint storage to $0.20/gigabyte/month (that decimal is in the right place). That means that our average client, with 80GB of shared storage, will be paying $16 for file storage if they are on Office 365.

For $16/month, many organizations can get rid of their file server. Yes, there are some exceptions, but many organizations can’t finally get rid the server sitting under sprinklers in the back closet. Plus, you’ll never need to worry about backup or disaster recovery.

Where does Tech Impact come in?

Unfortunately, it isn’t quite as easy as taking a sledgehammer to your current server. You’ll need to migrate your email to Office 365. Then you’ll need to tailor SharePoint for your organization and move all your files. Then you’ll need to train all your users. Finally you might need some help keeping things going. Tech Impact is here to help.

Interested or have questions? Head over to TechSoup and look at your options for support. From self-service to full implementations, TechSoup and Tech Impact are here for you. http://www.techsoup.org/tech-impact

Or visit us directly at: http://techimpact.org/our-services/cloud-services/

You need a phone number? 1-888-798-1350. Unfortunately we cannot receive texts on that line.

There’s always e-mail too. We’re easy to find. It’s just our first name with @techimpact.org at the end.

Morse code? ... . .-. .. --- ..- ... .-.. -.-- ..--..

Anthony Pisapia built his first computer when he was eight years old. Today he is the Director of Development and Programs at Tech Impact and manages our training program for at-risk young adults, ITWorks. When he is not asking everyone you know for donations, he is playing classical guitar or jamming out to The Killers.

Linda Widdop is Tech Impact’s Director of Technology Services and our Chief Ornithologist. Pictured with our resident dog, and her best friend, Roxy, Linda works with nonprofits all over the globe to improve their technology. She catalogs birds during her free time and is currently having a “Big Year”. She is a bird nerd.

Sam Chenkin is the Product Manager at Tech Impact. Sam makes good use of his Master’s Degree in Information Systems by building our next generation of cloud solutions. A world traveler and current Brooklyn resident, it is always fun to play “Where in the World is Sam?”. P.S. - He can work from anywhere.

Patrick Callihan is the Executive Director of Tech Impact and has a technology career that spans over 25 years (he’s old). When he is not figuring out the next big thing for nonprofit computing, you can find him camping at a music festival with 3,000 of his closest friends.