On August 29 Johanny Torrico did a webinar on Office 365 for Nonprofits. You can watch the webinar recording (FREE, requires registration) and download the slides or review them below. Some questions she discussed during the webinar are below. If you have additional questions, feel free to post a comment below.
1. What is Office 365?
Office 365 is Microsoft’s cloud collaboration tool that bundles email applications like Exchange for email with Office applications, like Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
Office 365 includes four main components:
+ Exchange Online
This is very popular among nonprofits because it allows staff to continue using Outlook for email and calendar. It includes 25GB of mailbox size per user, and online archiving.
+ SharePoint Online
This is used for collaboration, filesharing and web publishing. Some of the things you can do with SharePoint online include:
– Create a Team collaboration site or intranet
– Create document libraries with specific permissions
– Share calendars and contacts
– Share notifications and updates
– Create blogs
+ Lync Online
This is used for instant messaging, and has audio and video capabilities.
+ Office Webapps
This includes Office applications like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, and Visio.
2. What types of organizations are eligible for the free Office 365 plan?
According to the Microsoft’s website, “To qualify for Office 365 for Nonprofits, you must hold recognized charitable status in your country. You will be required to sign a contract and attest that you are an eligible nonprofit. Microsoft reserves the right to verify eligibility at any time and suspend the service for ineligible organizations.”
3. Which Office 365 plans are available to nonprofits?
Nonprofits with less than 3000 seats can qualify for the free Enterprise E1 plan. The E3 plan is available for $4.50 per user per month. The E3 plan allows users to download Office Suite to 5 different devices, and provides an additional 100GB for online mailbox archiving. Learn more about the plans and what’s included.
4. Why should we consider migrating to Office 365?
Here are a few reasons to consider migrating to Office 365.
Save money: Nonprofits can save a lot of money and headaches by not having to maintain a server in-house.
Easy for staff to use: Your staff can continue using the software that they are familiar with.
Remote access: Your staff can access their email and documents on any device anywhere.
5. How can Community IT help my organization migrate to Office 365?
We work with nonprofits to help them apply for the nonprofit license. After they get approved by Microsoft for the program, we plan and implement the migration. Migration costs will vary from organization to organization depending on the complexity of their current setup. After the migration, we can also help to train your staff on using Office 365. Contact us by email connect[at]communityit.com or phone 202.234.1600 to get a proposal for doing the Office 365 migration for your organization.
6. Are there any ongoing maintenance costs after we migrate to Office 365?
If your organization is on the E1 plan, there are not any ongoing maintenance fees. Organizations with the E3 plan will have to pay the $4.50 per user per month fee.
7. How do we know our data will always be available in the cloud through Microsoft? What kind of redundancy can we expect?
Microsoft has data centers worldwide. In addition, you can check the Office 365 Trust Center site for additional information. Take a look at the service continuity section for the redundancy strategy.
More questions about the cloud?
Community IT has explored both SharePoint and OneDrive on our blog in the posts on OneDrive vs SharePoint , SharePoint as File Server, and OneDrive vs Dropbox.
You may also be interested in free Webinar resources we have presented on Sharepoint, OneDrive, and Dropbox. See our catalog of past webinars here.
Here’s a TechSoup video that shows how Office 365 works.