Welcome everyone to Office Productivity in the Cloud. Thank you so much for joining us today for TechSoup's webinar. Before we get started, I'd like to make sure everyone's comfortable using ReadyTalk, the webinar platform we're on today. You can chat to us at any time using the box at the lower left side of your screen to let us know if you need any help, if you have questions for our presenters, or if you just want to say hi and let us know from where you're joining. We'll be fielding questions there throughout the webinar, so feel free to ask them as they come to you. We will keep all lines muted so that we can get a clear recording for you to refer to and watch again at your convenience. Most of you will be hearing the audio play through your computer speakers. So if you're hearing an echo, you may be logged in more than once and will need to close any additional instances of ReadyTalk. If at any time you lose your Internet connection, please reconnect using the confirmation or reminder emails that you would have received this morning. That email also had attached to it the final slide deck on the right side of that email. You can download the slides if you'd like to follow along with us. You'll also receive them in a follow-up email after this webinar is completed. As I mentioned, most of you are hearing the audio through your computer speakers, but if at any point that audio stream doesn't work well for you, or if you need to call in by phone or Skype, you are welcome to do that with the code that Susan chatted out into the chat window recently. Feel free to use it at any time. And if you need to reach out to ReadyTalk for any additional support, you can do so at this 800 number on screen. As I mentioned, we do record these webinars and we'll make them available at techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. You'll also be able to find our upcoming events listed there, so feel free to check out what's coming up on the agenda and register for any that you might find of interest. You'll also see our webinars posted on our YouTube channel at Techsoup Video. Within a few days, you'll receive an email from me that includes the full recording of this presentation in case you miss anything, or would like to re-watch any parts as well as any links that we discuss. If you'd like to tweet, you can do so at Techsoup or using the hashtag TSwebinars. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm the webinar program manager here at Techsoup, and I'm happy to be your host for today's event. We are joined by two experts in our community today, Jordan McCarthy and David Castellano, and I'll tell you a little bit about them in just a second here. Jordan is a data analyst and storyteller at Tech Impact where he uses information technologies and helping make those resources available to help support social progress for nonprofits. He has 10 years of experience in systems and network administration, technical writing, and education, as well as technology policy analysis. He's volunteered in a number of schools and nonprofit organizations, and through his work with Tech Impact helps nonprofits on a day-to-day basis make their best technology decisions. He's also helped to work advanced digital literacy and inclusion and continues to do so in his spare time. So we're glad to have him joining us. He'll be giving us an overview of office productivity in the cloud and helping kind of give us some resources so we can assess what types of things we may be looking for when we're out to select an office productivity suite of our own. Then we'll hear from David Castellano, who is a lead solution architect for Amazon Web Services on their nonprofit team. He's an AWS certified solution architect, systems operations administrator, and developer. Prior to his role as a solution architect, David held one of the most demanding positions at Amazon Web Services with their cloud support team doing 24-7 on-call troubleshooting to help address any challenges that came up. So he has a lot of technical background and skills, but he's also a strategic problem solver focused on helping nonprofits meet their needs with Amazon Web Services. You'll see on the back end Susan Hope Bard who will be on hand to help field and flag those questions that might come in. She'll be here to assist and respond to you at any time during the webinar, as will I. Looking at our objectives for today's webinar, we hope that you'll come away from this event having a better understanding of what office productivity in the cloud is, what it means, how to access it. We hope that we'll alleviate some of your concerns about a potential move to the cloud for your organization's office productivity, and we'll ask you what some of those concerns and barriers are for you to move forward with that if that's what you choose to do. We hope that you'll walk away having an idea of at least three choices of cloud-hosted office productivity suites that are out there on the market. We're not going to go through all of the options out there. We're not going to do any side-by-side comparisons of all of the tools out there because there are many, but we want to at least make you aware of some of the options available to your organization. And then we'll also hope that you'll leave with some benefits and features in mind of the Amazon Web Services, Work Mail, Work Docs, and Work Spaces option. And you'll hear more about that program from David, and I'll highlight the program and where to find out more about it on the TechSoup website. And we'll also hopefully have time to get many of your questions answered. Before we dive into getting those objectives covered, I want to just do a quick overview of TechSoup for those of you who may not already be familiar with us. We are everywhere on this map that's blue, helping to build a dynamic bridge that enables social do-gooders around the world to access the technology, resources, and information they need to design and implement solutions for a more equitable planet. Go ahead and chat in to let us know where you are joining us from on the map. I saw somebody earlier say that they were joining from Texas, but go ahead and let us know where you are coming to us from today. We have Pennsylvania, Chicago, lots of folks in New York, Massachusetts, Portland, California, Maine, Ohio, all over the place. We have somebody saying Canada. And if you are joining us from outside the United States, I would recommend visiting our TechSoup.global site where you can choose your country from the drop-down on this list and learn about donation programs in your area. Today's webinar, especially around the Amazon Web Services program that we will discuss, are focused on the U.S.-based audience. So some programs around the world may be able to access that as well, but I just want to couch that if you are joining us from outside the U.S. to be aware that you need to look at TechSoup.global to find your regional donor partner. And this is just looking at our impact where we have helped facilitate the donations of $5.4 billion in technology grants and resources and products from donor partners like Microsoft, Amazon, and many, many others. So glad to be part of that. Now onto the topic at hand for today. We would like to get an understanding of you, our audience up front, what you are currently using, if any. So go ahead and check off any that might apply to your organizational use, which cloud productivity tools are you currently using at your organization, if any. And we also have an option on there. Maybe you are not using any of these at work, but you are using some in your personal life. For example, I use Google Calendar a lot in my personal life, but I don't use it at work. So if that applies to you, go ahead and check that one. If you are not sure, that's okay too. We've included a lot of options on here as part of a way to also help let you know that some of these options are available out there because maybe you haven't heard of many of these. So go ahead and take just another few seconds to let everybody weigh in on the variety of options on this. And maybe there's something I didn't include that you are using. And if so, feel free to chat in that information in our chat window and we can share it back out if there's a tool that you love out there or a suite that you are using. And I'm going to go ahead and share the results. And it looks like we have almost 50% of our population is using Google Apps and almost 40% is using Office 365. So that's great that many of you are already using different cloud productivity services. A couple of people mentioned in the chat drop box as well. And QuickBooks Online, somebody mentioned SoundCloud. So lots of other cloud-based tools out there. These are just a handful that do offer some cloud productivity, Office productivity in particular. So with that, I'd like to go ahead and have our first presenter, Jordan McCarthy, join us on the line to talk about what that is. What does Office productivity in the cloud mean? Because there are so many things in the cloud from your Yahoo! email to Facebook. All of those are cloud applications as well. But what does it mean to actually use Office productivity in the cloud? Thanks for joining us today, Jordan. Welcome to the program. Thank you very much for the introduction. Really happy to be here. Hello, everybody. I'm really glad to have a chance to talk to you today. So basically, the reason I'm here is to just give an overview of what exactly the cloud is. It's a very strange term. And I actually did a little bit of research into the history and it's not entirely clear where it came from. Although there was actually back in the 1950s, this very, very pie-in-the-sky idea of an intergalactic computer network which I think eventually became what we now know as the cloud. So it kind of came down a little bit from its very, very lofty aspirations initially. So rather than talking about outer space, we're now just talking about the clouds. It's more accessible. It's something that we can wrap our heads around a little bit more. The part of the reason why the term is so, well, nebulous and foggy is that the cloud is a bunch of things all at once. And there's, you can actually put pretty much anything in the cloud with regard to computing technology. And the cloud really is a term that is intended to mean you don't have to worry about what's going on behind the scenes if you have stuff here. All of the day-to-day concerns, worries, maintenance, software upgrades, backups, all of that is taken care of for you. So it's just not something you have to have on your radar because that is someone else's responsibility, which obviously frees up more of your time and energy to focus on whatever work it is that you need to get done. So just a little bit of a preamble.  I am a member of the Tech Impact team. The Tech Impact is a fellow nonprofit. We actually exist to serve other nonprofits across the community. And make sure that all nonprofits have the tools that they need to really get their work done as painlessly and efficiently as possible and that they're able to leverage the most relevant, useful information technologies that might be becoming available to the nonprofit community. Again, as quickly and painlessly as possible. And just to give you an indication of, or give you an idea of what that means in practical terms, we do a whole bunch of different things. We run a workforce development program for at-risk young people in several different communities, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Las Vegas. And we provide a whole range of IT services to nonprofits which we've been doing for well over a decade now. We provide a whole range of services, everything from cloud migrations, so often Office 365 assessments and implementations, to cloud-based file backup and recovery, to cloud-based voiceover IP phone system implementations, and then data management services focused on helping nonprofits collect, organize, and analyze their data, again, you know, in as easy and cost-efficient a way as possible. And again, this, as you might imagine, often makes use of cloud technologies. In case you're curious exactly who you're talking to, this is me. I am the Impact Data Analyst and Storyteller. And that, as Becky was saying in that really kind of introduction, that really means I just help nonprofits figure out what data they have, what data they want to be collecting, or should be collecting, and then what to do with their data to really help move their organization's missions forward. And day in and day out, as I do this work, I rely very, very, very strongly on cloud technologies. And generally speaking is often the case that cloud technologies for data management make the most sense in this day and age. They're really robust, and they're really actually quite affordable now, particularly for nonprofits. And we'll talk about why that is the case right now. So why is cloud computing something that you should be interested in, and why is it something that you can trust? I mean, this whole notion of everything being up in this fuzzy cloud, it sounds kind of weird, right? The term by itself does not make a lot of sense, particularly not in a very sort of hard-edged field like information technology. So I think it's very reasonable to have questions about what is this cloud thing anyway. And why should you feel comfortable investing all of your organization's data and IT services in a cloud-based solution? Well, part of the answer is the cloud is everywhere in this day and age. Again, remember what I said at the beginning, the cloud is really just a broad term meaning any software product running on a system that you don't really have to worry about. And so any web-based utility that you use regularly, Gmail, Salesforce, Facebook, various other productivity suites, various Amazon Web Services, all of those are cloud applications of various kinds. And the thing that ties all of them together, of course, is the market. All you really see is the part of the system that you care about, the part that you're interacting with, the part of it that you use to get your work done, or to communicate with other people. And everything else is abstracted away. It's removed from your vision and again, from your sort of mental load, if you will. It's not something that you really have to think about one way or the other, which means you're free to spend more of your time and energy thinking about other more important things. But I don't really have to question what the cloud is. And this impact is the cloud. The cloud is all of the software and hardware that supports all of these online services and makes it so that you don't have to worry about how they are maintained or how they're kept secure and so on and so forth. So this is a very, very boring looking building. It happens to be a data center in Dublin. Data centers generally look like this. They're huge warehouse type structures. Those things are usually generators because what these data centers do for you is they have multiple layers of redundancy backup and fail-saves to make sure that as much as possible, they never go down. And when they do, they go down as gracefully as possible and can come back up online as quickly as possible. And so these things have vast amounts of protections in place, both in terms of physical security and in terms of redundancy and various kinds of utilities. I mean, often these things actually buy their power from multiple different power providers and they have multiple power lines coming into the building, again, just to make sure they never go down. And then they, again, also have these suites of generators that can keep the data centers going for often days at a time, if need be. So these things are very, very well built. And again, they're built for the sole purpose of making sure that your data remains accessible to you at all times and that if anything ever goes wrong, that your access is regained as quickly as possible. Here's what one of these things looks like inside. Again, it's a little bit, it's a combination of boring and a little bit intimidating. Part of the point of this particular picture here is you can see there's this immense number of blinking flashing lights and racks upon, what these are are racks upon racks of servers. And the reason why this is an important point is that these servers are heavily, heavily redundant so that if for some reason that sometimes happens, something goes wrong in one of these computers, because that's what servers are, they're just computers. And if it happens to be the computer on which your data is stored, that you will not probably even notice if something goes wrong because there are actually three or four of these machines all running at the same time, all of which are actually helping to support your work. And if one of them has a problem and has to go offline for maintenance, any one of the other remaining three will be ready to take over immediately with no downtime. That is what these data is going to be able to do. And that is really the entire point behind the cloud, again, to make sure that everything is kept running to the maximum extent possible and that downtime is minimized. So, I hope that helps explain it. Before we move on to this next section, I would love to get more of our feedback from our audience because we're going to talk a little bit about what the barriers are and some of the limitations or potential drawbacks of the cloud and then as well some benefits of office productivity in the cloud. And so we really wanted to get your input on what to you are the greatest barriers to moving your organization's office productivity to the cloud. And you can select any and if there's stuff that I haven't included in this, feel free to chat it in because I'm sure there are other considerations I haven't included. But while people are weighing in on this, I just would share this anecdote that I worked for a small nonprofit where we had a server closet. And it was really just a closet that had a lot of our other stuff in it too, brooms and buckets and things like that. And we had our server conveniently parked directly below a sprinkler which we had not ever really considered.  And one time they did it badly enough that the sprinklers went off in our building and our whole server was destroyed, which was everything that we had. And we did have little backup disks that we would change out and take them in somebody's car and they would go home with them once every couple of weeks we traded them out. But we lost a couple of weeks of data and had to restore everything from those backup disks because our server was the only thing we had really other than those little backup disks. And so considering the security and the stability of having the redundancy of a huge server farm holding my data, I wish I'd known then, of course, retrospect, right? I wish I'd known then that that would have been a better option than having our server parked in our closet with the sprinkler overhead. Something you would have thought somebody would have highlighted at some point when putting it together, but it never came up. So I'm going to go ahead and skip to the results right now so we can see what the biggest barriers people are saying are keeping them from really moving into the cloud. And it looks like picking the right tool or suite, and I put right in parentheses because people say, well, which is the right tool or which is the best tool, but it's so dependent on what your organization's specific needs and demands are from where people need to access them, what level of IT support and migration support you may have, and costs and things like that all make a difference in that. Then it looks like staff training and adoption, 55% almost. I guess that jumped to the lead just now. That is a big one, and lack of knowledge. So it's our biggest one, so it looks like a lot of you are dealing with many of these barriers. I see people saying poor Internet connectivity, which I have in there, kind of low down lack of stable Internet connectivity. And I know that's an issue especially if you're in an area where maybe you only have limited access or not business grade broadband or DSL, that can be a real issue. We have some essential software is not provided on the cloud, and they have to be on a local server. Fear of migration issues is also mentioned on the back end. So a lot of good concerns being raised here. We know that these are real, and so we don't want to minimize them, but we also know that some of these, once you kind of get over the tipping point on some, you can yield a lot of benefits from moving into the cloud as well. And we've been doing this process here at TechSoup for a couple of years now migrating different parts of our systems because we're pretty big, so it takes a long time for us to do it. But we're yielding a lot of benefits at this point from finally moving into the cloud. And so I can say from personal experience that it can be painful, but it can also be very worthwhile. So I'm going to have Jordan go back into his presentation to talk about some of the potential drawbacks and then talk about the benefits a little bit more. Okay. Thank you so much for that, and I saw some really, I think, very reasonable answers to that question, which I'm going to try to go over here. And I do want to acknowledge that there are some potential drawbacks of going with a cloud-based IT solution. But there are certainly very legitimate concerns. Ongoing cost, very legitimate. I mean, part of what you feel great about cloud-based services is that they're maintained for you, which means you have to pay someone on an ongoing basis to maintain them for you. So, you know, that's definitely worth being aware of. You do get somewhat reduced control. I saw a note in the chat about the frustration to the SharePoint, and we do a lot of SharePoint work, so I very much know where you're coming from. The cloud services, often by their nature, will restrict what you can do in terms of configuration and tweaking things to exactly your organization's preferences. Because these things run on systems that are shared by often hundreds of organizations at the same time, they have to enact control to make sure that no one can demand too many resources from the system. And that does sometimes result in less flexibility for you. Another really important thing about cloud IT is that it is based on internet connectivity. Cloud-based services are in data centers that can only be accessed via a network connection. And so the more you move into the cloud, the more important your internal network and internet infrastructure becomes in determining how much success you will have with your cloud-based solutions. If your organization's connection to the internet is slow and buggy and sometimes goes out altogether, that may impact your productivity quite a bit if all of your basic productivity services are in the cloud. And then finally, there are reasons for allergenic concerns about security and data integrity given that if you go with a cloud-based solution, you are in effect handing over your data into the care of another organization, a company usually like Microsoft or Amazon. And obviously there are very detailed contracts in place explaining what their responsibility is for safeguarding that data. But nevertheless, you could definitely see why one might be a little bit unnerved about the prospect of just handing over all of your data in this way. So I want to propose, though, that in fact all of these potential downsides, they're real, but they also have very, very strong potential upsides that go with them. Ongoing costs, as we discussed, yes, you will have to be a little bit every month for subscriptions to cloud-based services. However, that pretty much always will be more than compensated for by the amount of money that you're saving on your own hardware and the software that you would ordinarily have to buy off the shelf and have someone install on people with local machines. You will not have to do any of that if you go with a cloud-based solution because again, all of that is by design offloaded onto the cloud itself. Also, many cloud-based systems are now very affordable for nonprofits due to generous nonprofit discounts by many of the major vendors. So they become even more affordable. And in some cases that means you can get access to enterprise-class services as little as a couple of dollars per user per month, which is quite good. And again, I want to remind everyone, you are actually getting quite a lot for whatever it is that you are paying in the way of these ongoing costs. You're getting continuous support usually with cloud-based services. You get not only the hardware and the software and everything that makes everything work behind the scenes, but you're also getting a large degree of access to the organization's support staff. There may be some restrictions of course, but by and large, you're paying not only for technical resources but also for some degree of human-facing support as well. In terms of reduced control, yes, you may not be able to configure things exactly the way you want. But the flip side of that is that it's also much harder to break things. Where previously you might have had to have a dedicated server administrator making sure that everything was working right and dealing with what happens when someone accidentally moves an entire folder somewhere they shouldn't or accidentally deletes everything. With a cloud-based solution, there are lots of safeguards and lots of protections to make sure that mistakes are minimized. Because mistakes, in the case of cloud-based solutions, if they were allowed to be made at the same level of frequency that they're made in regular offices, would really cost the cloud provider a lot of time. So they've figured out pretty optimal balances that help to make sure that the really damaging mistakes are very difficult to make if not in some cases impossible. And again, you also, as a result of these ongoing relationships with these vendors, you have someone you can call for support if something does go wrong. The dependency on reliable internet connectivity is a very real thing. But to be perfectly honest, in this day and age, we probably all need that anyway. So if yours are glimping along with a subpart internet connection, going with a cloud-based solution, yes, might not seem like the greatest idea, but it might also help you justify updating your internet connection, which is again, probably something that would really help you work in a lot of other ways anyway. So this concern is still valid. But the point stands, honestly, at this point in internet connectivity is basically a fundamental utility for most organizations. And so you shouldn't see a bad internet connection as preventing you from going with cloud services. You should see something that you can fix as you make that migration. And finally, security and data integrity. This one actually is sort of interesting because it seems like a very, very reasonable concern. But in fact, if you look at the nature of cloud services, they have vastly better security and data integrity than pretty much anything that any but the biggest organization could have internally. Because again, you get an entire team of people who are watching your data, not specifically your data, but the systems on which your work is being done for malicious activity, for security issues. These data centers are incredibly well protected. And they have very firm policies about who can get access to the data centers. I mean, they have the equivalent of security clearances for all of their employees. There's a lot of safeguards on your data. Again, generally speaking, far exceed whatever you would be able to put in place if you were running a server in your back closet, particularly in the way of network monitoring. In these data centers, there's a team of people monitoring the security of the building in digital terms, like watching for intrusions under their network 24-7. And unless you have an IT staff somehow that you are paying for 24-7 network monitoring in your office, which I really doubt, again, you're far better off from a security perspective having that level of monitoring, which is really, really, again, bravely expensive in any other form than associated with a cloud-based vendor. Okay, not to drown you, but there are a few other benefits of cloud services as well. There's nothing to own, no hardware to keep updated, no warranties to call in when things break, no inventory to manage. Implementation costs are very low because everything is already in place. The software has already been built. The software and hardware necessary to add more users is already there because new users are being added all the time. As a result, getting started with cloud services is incredibly quick. You really just have to sign the contract and then you have access. Again, when you need to add new users in these services, they're already there waiting for you to just turn them on. The availability is incredibly easy. Generally, they're very convenient. Typically speaking, we're using less powerful desktop and laptop machines to access cloud-based services because, again, most of the actual work is being done on the data center side of things rather than on your PC. Backup and recovery and disaster planning is done for you effectively. In some cases you may have to pay a little bit to have something restored from backups, but the backups are always there. They're run religiously, multiple times a day, which is a frequency that, again, really can't be supported in any other context than the cloud. The cloud has this massive economy of scale going forward, which, again, no one but the largest organizations can possibly replicate. Down time, again, is minimized due to the massive redundancy of the cloud. Updates happen often automatically, and if they're not totally automatic, it's very, very easy. You can often just click a button, and this entire new software package will be immediately updated for you. And again, security is actually a huge benefit. I mean, you cannot get really anywhere close to the level of security that cloud data centers offer as a small nonprofit. Okay, one quick question that I want to address explicitly because this is, I think, a great instance for a lot of people. How can cloud IT be affordable? Well, it's because of the economy of scale. The vendors who maintain cloud-based solutions have done this work at such great scale for so many organizations for so long that adding all of the data of your nonprofit is truly easy for them. And again, they often serve really big corporations as well as smaller nonprofits. And so the margin of resources that it costs them to support your staff is small enough, and they recognize that it's small enough, that they can provide greatly discounted pricing for nonprofits often. And it's to their advantage.  You know, the more people will be saying, hey, have you tried using, you know, the Google App Stack or Office 365 or Amazon Web Services. And again, it's all about the scale. They've done this for so many times that it really does not cost them much to add your collection of staff. Okay, just to get very concrete before I hand it off, what does a productivity cloud solution look like? So we talked about broadly what the cloud is. What does the cloud look like in terms of productivity? It can be a bunch of different things, but usually cloud solutions will involve some combination, productivity cloud solutions will involve some combination of these components. Email, various office applications, you know, Word, spreadsheets, presentation software, place to store files and share files. Full communications suite, which supports audio, video, and IM into messaging. Sometimes this is getting sort of more into the edges or the less mainstream packages. Some productivity suites will have built-in constituent management databases or CRMs as they're abbreviated. And some will offer built-in data analysis engines as well to help you make sense of how many people are using your productivity suite within your organization over time, or to just perform analysis on data that you're not going to have in the spreadsheet utility, that kind of thing. But again, those last two are a little bit rare. The core of productivity cloud solutions usually are the first four. So I hope I've helped you to make the case for why this sort of thing is important. And the cloud really does stand to benefit your nonprofit tremendously. For smaller organizations, it may stand to greatly reduce your costs because you're not paying for nearly as much equipment. You can pay for only the amount of, you know, licenses that you need at any given time.  Your budget becomes more predictable because, again, you're not having to shell out a huge amount of money to over-provision something.  And you may be able to reduce the number of hours that you're paying for outsourced IT or your part-time IT person because, you know, more of the work that they were previously doing is not being done for you by the cloud. Same thing applies for mid-sized organizations. For large organizations, you get even more benefits because you get huge scalability.  You get up-to-the-mid updates for software and new cutting-edge tools that are coming down the pipeline. It makes it a lot easier to administer a very complex set of tools you might be using. And it just lets you move a lot faster. So the last two slides I just wanted to show you were an example of a part of the IT cloud solutions. One is Microsoft Office 365. And again, these are just the four big issue areas that we talked about earlier. And this chart shows you what you get in Office 365 in each domain. So when it's hosted email, there's a web-based version of Microsoft Office. There's a couple of different ways to handle file storage and collaboration, SharePoint and OneDrive.  And then, of course, many of you look like we're familiar with Google Apps for nonprofits. You get much the same thing, a little bit different take on it sometimes, but, you know, hosted email again using Gmail, suite of Office applications via the Google Docs platform, file storage and collaboration in Google Drive, and communications, again, pretty much voice, audio, everything is handled by Google Hangouts. And you get a little bonus as well, which actually should be in the file storage and collaboration piece, maybe. Google Sites is probably roughly equivalent to SharePoint in many ways. Bottom line, both of these solutions, they have different, you know, characteristics, but they both give you a core of functionality that can really, you know, again, remove a lot of different moving pieces from your point. So you no longer have to think about maintaining them because they're all there. All of your users have access to them. You just need to turn them on. And that really is the power of the cloud. So with that, I'll hand it back to Becky. Thank you very much. Becky, thank you so much, Jordan. And, you know, this quadrant that he has on screen here with Google Apps for Nonprofit, or the one he showed on Office 365, I think is a good template that any of you could use if you're going out there and evaluating tools that you can be looking at, okay, what is the email that this Office Productivity Suite makes available? And what's the storage space? And what are the features? Does it allow me to have mailboxes and shared calendars? Does it allow me to have, you know, what's the file storage capacity? And what do I have to use for that? Is it Google Drive? Or do I need to install SharePoint or some other type of application? So I would recommend using this if you're considering any other tool as well just to kind of get some questions to compare along. And then we're going to go ahead and have David show us Amazon Web Services. He'll cover a lot of these features. It won't be in a little quadrant single slide like this, but he's going to show us a bit about Amazon Web Services Office Productivity options that are available to you. In particular, we're going to focus on work mail, work docs, and work spaces during his presentation. And we are working on answering questions that are coming in on the backend so I appreciate people asking them. And we will have time to field many of those live on the line after David's presentation. So thank you so much for joining us, David. Tell us a little bit about the Amazon Web Services Office Productivity offer that's available and show us a little bit about what work mail, work docs, and work spaces has to offer. Thanks. Absolutely. I want to thank TechSoup for giving the opportunity to speak to all of your individuals and organizations. And I want to thank you guys for taking time out of your schedule to join us. I want to lead off with letting everybody know that Amazon Web Services is serving more than 22,000 nonprofit organizations in the last 12 months have used AWS to help drive up their ROI as well as reduce their total cost of ownership. So what we're going to discuss here rather quickly is some of our enterprise application suites. One of them is work mail. And before we really dive into the work suite that we offer, I want to tell you a very quick story. The story that actually happened last night. So I was sitting at home eating dinner with my girlfriend. And our dog grabbed the laptop cord that was plugged into her work computer and ripped the computer off the table. The computer was turned on. It hit the ground. That spinning hard drive disk, all of the data was lost. Now because that data resided on that physical device and there was no backup to the cloud and she wasn't using some sort of virtual desktop, she was unable to finish her work and unable to recover her work. And then about what we figured out was about nine hours of work was lost as well as who knows how much money because she's in business development for a software sales company. So she had customer information that was lost, customer meetings that were missed, customer reachouts that were missed as well as quotes that never got completed to the time that they were supposed to be delivered. Now if her organization was leveraging enterprise applications that lived and ran on the AWS cloud, she would have been able to access her work mail, her documentation, or even a virtual desktop running in the cloud and get right back to work and not have any sort of lost this time. So let's dig into work mail. Amazon Workmail is a secure managed business email and calendar application that can run, that runs in the AWS cloud and the benefits are it follows. You're going to eliminate upfront investments to license and provision on-premise email servers. Anybody in this webinar has had to manage an exchange server and manage the licensing behind an exchange server and a Cal, they will know exactly what I'm referring to. Amazon Workmail automatically handles all of the patches, all of the backups and all of the upgrades. As needs grows and more users are added to your organization, you can scale that out with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. One of the big concerns that a lot of organizations have is security. When it comes to security, and I want to thank Jordan also for taking some of the pressure off of my shoulder on discussing cloud security because that usually is a number one conversation that I find myself having with customers. But because this is what we do and security is our number one concern at Amazon Web Services, we can offer enterprise-grade security through our work mail application. So you don't have to worry about, can I encrypt my data? Is it easy to encrypt my data? Can I control my data? I only want my data to live at the US East or I only want my data to live in the Europe region. You want to enable secure mobile access to your employees. You have that capability and you're also going to gain the comfort in knowing that you have protection from malware, spam, and virus and it's easily reconfigurable. So one of the biggest questions on work mail, is it compatible with Outlook? Yes, it is. If your employees think of somebody in sales or think of anybody that's maybe even working at a receptionist's front desk, they see Outlook. That's where their email is. They don't know what exchange is. They don't know what work mail is. They might not know even what Google mail is. All they know is Outlook. So when you make the migration from an exchange server to Amazon work mail, the last thing you want to have to worry about is presenting a new UI user interface for your employees. So what we did is we designed Amazon work mail to be compatible with Outlook. And as you can see from the slide share, that it doesn't present itself any differently than it would if it was running on an exchange. So back to that story at dinner last night, anywhere access, that I think is the biggest driving factor when it comes to making a decision to move to the cloud. What the cloud provides you the power of is to be able to access, control it, modify it from anywhere around the world that you have connectivity. So you are going to be able to access it from Outlook on your PC or Mac, from a browser, or even from your phone just like you would if it was a normal exchange server. I also want to take this time. When it comes to any questions that you guys have, due to the time limitations in the slides that we are going to get through, what I would like to do is gather those questions and the ones that are unanswered. I will shoot an email to npooffitowers at amazon.com or C-A-S-T-E-L-H-A at amazon.com. I will absolutely get back to you on any questions regarding Amazon web services and technology capabilities. So work mail does integrate with Active Directory. That way you can control users' existing credentials as well as use your group policy objects and any other familiar tools. Low cost, pay as you go. No user a long-term commitment. It is very cost effective. It is $4 per user per month for a 50 gigabyte mailbox. When it is purchased with WorkDocs, you are going to get $6 per user per month as well as the benefit of WorkDocs, which is what we are getting ready to lead into after workspaces. You can get started with a 30-day free trial for up to 25 users. So what is workspaces? Amazon workspaces are managed desktops in the cloud. Why is that important? What do we get from a managed workspace in the cloud? Well, you are going to be able to launch the number of workspaces needed if a new employee happens to start tomorrow or you need to add on a new sales individual or you are having an event for fundraising at a conference for your nonprofit organization and you need to quickly get four individuals on the network. You can launch four workspaces through a couple of simple clicks through the management console. All of the heavy lifting of configuring that workstation, managing the updates to any OSs is going to be handled all by AWS.  You are already managing existing laptops in your current environment. You can still continue to use popular tools such as System Center or any other sort of application that you use to push out updates or packages to your Windows 7 or Windows 8 laptops. One of the powerful tools behind workspaces is the ability to build a golden image. That golden image you can use to replicate to new machines. If you have to think of it like this, if you have a financial analyst, you have maybe a project manager or somebody in charge of fundraising, and whenever one of those new employees starts to fill that role instead of having to manually configure into an application, you can have that workspace up and running in 15 and 20 minutes with the pre-existing applications you want for that individual installed. So another huge advantage, and this is my personal favorite when it comes to workspaces, is keeping data secure and available. So let's say you are doing fundraising, and you are using Amazon workspaces through a PC, a Mac, a Kindle, an iPad, or even an Android tablet. Somebody comes by, you are not looking, and grabs that machine. If you are not using a virtual desktop, that individual has stolen the hard drive that is housing that data that you don't want anybody to have. You might have credit card information. You may have PHI, Personal Health Identifying Information. You might have somebody's address or even phone number. But with Amazon workspaces, no data is stored on the end user's device. The only data that is transferred over the Internet is the Pixel. So it is using PCOIP, and the user volumes are backed by Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is a simple storage service, and you are going to get that availability and durability that Amazon S3 has proven time and time and time again. So we also have a solution called Amazon Workspace Application Manager. In the event that you wanted to look at possibly using a new piece of software to manage your images or manage your workspaces deployment, you can take leverage of Amazon Workspace Application Manager as we call it Amazon WAM. It's fast, flexible, it's secure, and you can deploy and manage all of your organization's desktop applications through it. You can package custom applications as well. You can upload applications where you own the license, or you can even just go straight to the Amazon Marketplace, subscribe to that piece of software, and acquire that license directly. So we see a lot of people using Workspace Application Manager for it. It's for virus control. Also it's really neat for Visual Studio if there's any developers during this webinar. You can actually launch your Visual Studio, subscribe to it, and pay for that license through the Workspace Application Manager. That way we have a new developer that joins your team. As soon as his workspace is launched, in 20 minutes he's got a workstation running on workspaces that has his Visual Studio already installed. So you're going to get a few different options when it comes to picking your workspaces. You've got Value and Value Plus. Value Plus is going to add your Office subscription. It's going to add Adobe as well as it's going to add some Office 365 tools as well. You're getting, you can choose from one CPU to two gig of memories all the way up to two CPU to seven and a half gigs of memory. The pricing is below as follows. Later on in this presentation we're going to touch on a fantastic opportunity with Amazon Web Services and TechSoup. So we can talk about how you can get some opportunity to get some credit. So the biggest selling point outside of security and availability of workspaces is the support for multiple devices. We go back to my girlfriend's laptop that ultimately met its demise at the hand of a six month old plot-hound. If that was a workspace that she was connecting to through either her own device that she owned, an iPad that she owned, or even a company supplied low-end laptop she would have been able to jump on my computer, one of our desktop computers, an iPad, or even an Android tablet connect right back to that workspace and continue where she left off. So just like our work now, workspaces integrates with your corporate directory. It can leverage Active Directory if that's the directory service that you're using. You can use your AD credentials to log into the Amazon workspace to authenticate to the Amazon workspace as well as to control policies with your familiar tools you're already using like new policy objects and whatnot based upon either users or based upon organization units that that workstation might join. What's really neat about workspaces is the capability to monitor all of your running infrastructure and running machine through users from a single pane of glass leveraging CloudWatch. CloudWatch is a service that we have that aggregates metrics from our cloud services like C2, Amazon S3 which is a simple storage service, RDS like a relational database service, or even your workspaces. That way your system administrators can see are our workstations healthy? Are they being utilized? How much network is going through? Susan and Finance reported that her laptop has been running slow when she's trying to do financial reports. Let me see what her CPU utilization is. Oh, look at that. During this time of day she's hitting 100% CPU utilization. Susan's workspace is only on a 4 CPU workstation. Let's try bumping Susan up to 7.5 CPU and see if that results her issues. Workspaces are available globally. On this topic I want to touch on some of the concerns that were addressed in the chat due to Internet connectivity. Amazon workspaces like some VDIs require very, very, very little throughput. You don't need to have a 1 gig pipe or even a 1 meg pipe. You really only need to have around 100 kilobytes per second to be able to handle a workspace connection. We demonstrated this at a recent conference by connecting to a workspace that was housed in Singapore from California over 4G cell phone signal, and then from that workspace in Singapore connected back to a workspace in U.S. East and launched NASA Launched Satellite into space on YouTube and it ran fine. The benefit that that's going to give you as well is that if you're working in the cloud, if you're front-end web servers, your application servers, your file servers are on the AWS cloud, when you access your Amazon workspace that is running in that virtual private cloud. So the connectivity between your actual workspace where you're doing the work to update a server, make changes to the configuration, that communication channel is already inside that AWS region. So you're not even using your organization's internet to upload files from a workspace to a server or to download files from a server. WorkDocs is a secure fully managed enterprise storage and sharing service. And I'm going to try to blast through this slide as quickly as I can. I know we're getting low on time and I'm sure some people might have some questions if you want to get to and I know there's a message from TechSoup that they want to get out as well. So the idea of Amazon WorkDocs and the benefits is to easy access documents from anywhere across any device. That's the whole idea of today's conversation regarding AWS and enterprise applications suite. Access anything from anywhere, anytime across any device. So what's really neat about WorkDocs is it does allow you to share and comment directly on documents. You don't need to send attachments. You can see feedback. You can request deadlines. You can control document versions. You can set sharing rules and manage document access centrally. You can store files securely on the AWS cloud in the specific region that you'd like. You can even use your corporate directly as well as using the NFA. WorkDocs runs on the cloud. So you can access WorkDocs by going to a URL. There's also an agent that can be installed on your local machine to sync files from your local machine to WorkDocs. WorkDocs was designed to kind of address the concern with a large organization that has been around for a long time that offers a document suite that a few of you have mentioned having issues with today. The idea was to kind of use the best part of that piece of software, which is the document sharing, the document management, and just make it simple for end users to use and make it simple for administration. And not have to worry about configuring SQL servers and configuring the front-end application and doing custom development to get that single pane of glass that we all love and enjoy. So we touched on this already, the access and sync from any device. You've got the web application, iOS sewn and tablet apps, Android sewn and tablet apps, Amazon Fire app, Windows and macOS desktop sync apps. So just like all of our other services, your data is encrypted and transit and at rest because encryption is a priority to us. That's how you secure your data. You can choose the AWS region that you want your data to reside on. That way you can adhere to sovereign laws that your country may have. You can implement policies and roles for site access and sharing behavior that way that you can have science can have its own, you know, instead of location, the files that they can look at and then IT can have their own as well. And then you can have an administrator over all of it to try to help make sure that content is stored properly and it's secured properly as well. And just like workspaces, you can use your multi-factor authentication device from Jamalto or a soft application on your phone through your MSI. Here's the work doc pricing. It's $5 per user per month for 200 gigabytes. And that price we mentioned when bundled with Work Mail drops to $2 per workspace per user per month. And you can get a free trial for up to 50 users for 30 days. An additional storage available at regular S3 prices, S3s are simple storage service. Again, if you guys have questions on any of these services that I've kind of mentioned that we didn't have slides for or any questions in general, please feel free to shoot them to MPO Office Hours at Amazon.com. Just like our other services, these work docs are available globally. And why do you want to go with Amazon Enterprise applications? Well, the topic of today has been security. It's been cost-effective. It's been availability and accessibility. It's in scalability and ease to deploy and management, all relating to a total cost of ownership being dropped down. And in 2015, a study IDC found that a five-year TCO of developing, deploying, and managing critical applications on AWS delivered a 64.3% savings and a 560% ROI when compared with deploying the same resources on-premise or in a host environment. So that's the power of the cloud. And that's what Amazon Web Services and other cloud providers can bring to you. I want to thank you all for your time. I want to call up these two slides in case you want any more information or documentation on the services that were covered. The last two slides of the Amazon presentation has these slides. And I will hand it over to our friends at TechSoup to talk about this often program that we have with TechSoup where you can get some credits to use work mail, work docs, and work spaces. Thank you so much, David. I really appreciate it. And I realize that we are at time. So I will really quickly just mention that you can go to this link here, techsoup.org slash amazon-web-services. You can also get to it if you go to the TechSoup homepage, click on Get Products and Services. You can browse by Donor or Partner and just click on Amazon Web Services there. You will find access to the credits for nonprofits. This is also open to public libraries throughout the United States. Eligible nonprofits and public libraries can access this. Any of these organizations can get one grant for $2,000 for the first year of Amazon Web Services credits. If you want to renew for subsequent years organizations with budgets of $1 million or less may request the renewals. You will see that there are two products on this page. So I just wanted to call that out really quickly. We are at time, so I don't think we really have time to get to questions. We have been answering a lot of them in the back end. I did want to just ask one clarifying question around work docs that we got and just asking what kinds of file extensions or formats do those come out in. So can you export that or share it as a Doc or DocX? Or how does it work if you are trying to use it across other platforms and other installed desktop office productivity suites that people may be using? So Amazon WorkDocs is very similar to other document collaborations. We will think of things like Dropbox and the one by that large organization that makes operating systems for servers. You can store virtually any type of file on Amazon WorkDocs. And you can preview and comment on all Microsoft Office files. So if you have documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, web pages, images, and text files stored on WorkDocs, if you wanted to have active preview or comment on those, you can have that as well. In that slide deck on the More Resources page, there is a link to the FAQ, frequently asked questions around WorkDocs. And a lot of the questions on how to store files, can happen and how the thinking work are answered there. And again, the plug MPO Office Hours for the third time. Any questions you have, shoot them over to MPOOfficeHours at Amazon.com. And every month we open a one hour long open door policy where anybody can join our webinar and ask us questions. And I will try to have that schedule sent over to TechSoup so they can make you all aware of it. Great. And we'll include that email address in the follow-up as well as all those links that are mentioned in that slide resource slide. Thank you guys so much. We know we didn't have time to get to a lot of the questions verbally today, but we did help facilitate answering a lot of them on the back end. And I hope that if nothing else we've helped let your appetite to go look out there, see what your needs are, and really lay out how much storage you might need, and what kind of features you might need so that you can look and evaluate the different cloud productivity tools that are in the marketplace. And look at the different donation programs and discounts and credits that are available to your organization so you can determine what the best fit would be for your organization's needs. We hope that you would chat in one thing that you learned in today's webinar that you'll take back to your organization to either implement or help you evaluate the tools on the marketplace. We also would encourage you to share this information with other colleagues in your network who may benefit from it. And we would also ask it to complete the post-event survey that pops up once we've completed. Lastly, I'd like to invite you to join us for upcoming webinars. You see we have a variety on this calendar from helping to train your staff on technology and get a tour of many of the TechSoup resources including the launch of our very first full-fledged Learning Management System curricula on this topic. You'll see more about that next week. If you are on many of our email newsletter lists, you'll hear more about it. We hope that you'd come, especially since many of you mentioned that training your staff on technology is one of your biggest barriers to adopting Cloud Office productivity. Then we'll have a couple of webinars, one for libraries on social media numbers. We'll do two on GrantStation, one on the actual tool of GrantStation and then another one that's on really getting your Grant's calendar set for the next year to 18 months. We'll have a tour for TechSoup for libraries. So if you're a library, we would like to invite you to join that if you're newer to TechSoup. And then we'll have a webinar featuring youth coding clubs. So we'll be doing that with Girls Who Code. So if you're interested in setting up a coding club for youth in your area, feel free to join us. Thank you so much to both Jordan and David for your presentations today. And thank you to Susan on the back end. Thanks also to webinar sponsor ReadyTalk who has provided the use of their platform so we can present these events on a weekly basis for you. Feel free to give us your feedback. We really do appreciate it and read through all of it in that post-event survey that pops up once we close out. Thank you all for joining us today and have a great afternoon. Bye-bye.


The school used the award ceremony to inspire potential within all of its students, not only academically, but wherever their productive passions lead. For principle of the Duga Combined School, Tessa-Charles Coltrane, that means nurturing confident global citizens by giving them the tools necessary for success beyond the confines of Duga Combined and beyond the community of Choselle and indeed the island of St. Lucia. Mrs. Coltrane says the students awarded have made their school and parents proud and it's only fitting to celebrate their achievements. Today we come together to not only ignite young minds, but to celebrate young minds and most importantly to inspire young minds to impact globally in spite of challenges, in spite of skepticism, in spite of being from a small school, in spite of being from a small island. We possess powerful and limitless young minds. Education Minister Hon. Sean Edward congratulated students and staff for the school's exemplary performance at all levels of the school curriculum and the national assessment. Minister Edward says government wants all St. Lucia children to have an equal opportunity to excel and as such, encourage the teachers of the school to continue to strive for the best in spite of the known challenges. The teachers' contribution can never, never adequately be compensated by what you get at the end of a month by way of a salary. But the real gratitude and satisfaction comes when the children whom you would have taught at the primary level, the infant level, when you see them excel, you see them graduate out of the school system and you see them landing jobs and taking positions in society that make them outstanding citizens as a teacher you go home and there's a satisfaction that you derive from that that you ought never to try and put a dollar value on. Parliamentary representative for Chazelle Soutibus, Hon. Bradley Felix, told Yuga Combined Students that they can succeed at their future endeavors once they work hard at it, but he also warned them of not being easily distracted. Because we live in an environment now where there's so many distractions, so many distractions children, but I can tell you to achieve anything in this life, you must remain focused on your goals. Adelia Henry, a former student of the Yuga Combined, was selected as guest speaker for the ceremony to help inspire students with her amazing story, attaining all wands at CXCC SEC and later at Cape. Never give up, though there might be obstacles and setbacks, it is through these challenges that you will grow and learn. Remember that every great inventor, scientist and leader face some level of difficulty. What set them apart was how they overcame them. Therefore, my young friends, remember that you have the power to make a difference. I want to encourage you to strive to be the best version of yourself. Adelia Henry, who has a passion for art, is currently a social studies teacher at the Sufra Combined School. From the communications unit of the Department of Education, Innovation and Vocational Training, I am Chris Satney reporting.


The researchers have developed a new material called Copian NC at CNT, which is composed of cop nanoparticles embedded in carbon nanotubes and nitrogen-doped carbon materials. The material has been shown to be highly effective at both hydrogen evolution oxygen evolution reactions, making it suitable for use in water electrolysis. Furthermore, this material has been found to be more efficient than other materials tested, with an over-potential of 153 mV in 0.5 mH2SO4 and 159 mV in 1.0 mKOH, and an over-potential of 270 mV in 1.0 mKOH when used as anodes or cathodes in an oxygen evolution reaction. This article was authored by Lulu Chai, Jui Hu, Xian Wang, and others.