Yeah. So within Lumber, you know, you've got hundreds of items that are called commodity lumber. They all move differently. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I'm Beth Popnickola of Your Host, and today we are revisiting lumber prices because we know we haven't gotten enough of what is happening with that world. So we're excited to bring on a couple of the team members from Sherwood Lumber. In the studio with me, I have Steve Lopener. He's the VP of Commodities and Risk Management. I also have Josh Goodman. He's the SVP of Forest Products, Sales, and Supply Chain for Sherwood Lumber. Guys, thanks so much for your time, and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. So before we dive in to the volatility of the lumber pricing market, why don't you guys take just a few seconds and introduce yourselves and introduce Sherwood Lumber for our listeners. Well, thanks again for having us, Beth. So just a high level about Sherwood Lumber. We are a family owned business, third generation coming into our 70 years in business. I am in third generation family member. We have about 20 distribution centers around the country. Our largest facility is in Palmer, Massachusetts, which is around 70 acres, and that is solely owned by Sherwood Lumber. We have about 40 lumber panel traders. Our three main office locations, Portland, Oregon, Melville, New York, and Tampa, Florida, and then we have remote offices around the country. This 90% of our business is focused on commodity sticks and lumber and panels. A big focus that we've been growing over the past couple of years has been the specialty business, and that's mainly in the northeast, and that is solely focused on exterior building products. So anything you see outside of your house from siding to decking to railing, we're in it. So that's a little bit about Sherwood Lumber. About me, I just quickly said I'm third generation family member. I've been in, I've been here at Sherwood for now, roughly about 13 years. And once I came into the business after graduating Syracuse University with a finance and accounting degree, I really started from the ground up, unloading rail cars, loading trucks, then moved into the office with our CFO, doing the accounting skills that I really practiced in school. And then did logistics work, worked on a lot of marketing and IT, implemented a whole new computer system. And so that was the whole back end of the business. And since 2017, I focused on the front end, so on the buying and selling. And that's where I sit right now, managing all the buyers and the inventory around the country alongside sales and working hand in hand with Mr. Steve Lobner. It's great segue Steve what about you why don't you tell us a little about yourself. Okay, I've been in the industry, about 20 years. My background prior to that it's a little bit unique for the, for this industry I was an options floor trader stock options that traded in San Francisco, the Pacific Stock Exchange and then later on at the Chicago Board Options Exchange in Chicago. So my background is in financial derivatives, which has been sort of a great segue into into my current role here which is managing, you know risk management forward pricing, which is a, you know, something sure with numbers going for. I'm in Portland, Oregon. We have a sales office here with 10 traders. So I run that. Josh mentioned on just commodity lumber panels, two by four, two by six is, we don't really get too involved in the specialty side of things out here. You know, so our day to day is basically talking to the sawmills across North America selling and talking customers buying and selling for for inventory, out of our inventory, doing direct trading and managing the features.  And that's something that comes up quite a lot in our conversations with manufacturers and dealers is the fact that a lot of the products maybe even the majority of the products in the building space are technically commodities. And Steve and I were chatting before the podcast and just talking about some of the unique ways that sure word lumber goes to market and some of your unique business models. I'd love to know how you're differentiating in a commodities market. That's not just a race to the bottom. Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, Josh, I can probably take this one but I know that our owner Andy, he always says that we try to take the commodity out of the commodity, you know. It's not a race to the bottom if you're solely competing on price, you know, ultimately you're not going to, you know, you're not going to be in business that long. Josh, you want to you want to kind of kick that off in terms of what we do from a distribution standpoint. Yeah, like Steve mentioned, you know, we try to take the commodity out of the commodity and we're trying to provide the, you know, the ultimate best service for our clients. Yeah, so what we're doing is bringing in bulk material and we're facilitating from the logistics standpoint from the credit standpoint to servicing the customer either directly to their yards directly to specific job sites to just making it as easy as possible from a mixed truckload, you know, specification versus in large quantities and really delivering exactly what they need when they need it and provide if it's credit. You know, that's what we do. I would add that provides sort of a myriad of different services that our customers can use so it's anywhere from from the mixed truck small quantity distribution customer that might be a smaller, you know, independent guy in a big city that has tight space to we're also doing with the largest, you know, dealers in the country that have you know 100 acre, you know, yards where they can store 300 cars. So they can so customers can come to us for the small mixed loads, they can come to us for their bulk shipment needs and also where we really I think differentiate ourselves as in the risk management that features long term pricing space, where we're essentially providing customized risk management solutions for customers all around the country to help them mitigate their market risk through all these crazy, you know, ups and downs that we've experienced certainly last couple years. So it makes a ton of sense. When you think about, you know, where your product fits, and then what are the pain points kind of on either one of those ends and the way that you're differentiating yourself is solving, not just for hey we have like need product have product, but what's leading up to that product point making sure that they're getting the right product and then getting it all the way through to the job site I think that's, I mean that's a huge differentiator for sure and solves a lot of the frustrations and kind of complications that we know exist within our, within our industry so I love that and see you, you started to mention, you know, about some of your risk management and future so I'm going to loop us back around to our original conversation is we were tying up 2022 lumber prices we're starting to get back close to pre pandemic prices where we're at least getting within the realm of normalcy. So I started to see a small uptick in January and February, I think a small considering trend as we go into March. I'd love to hear from your perspective. What you think is contributing to that in where you all are anticipating lumber prices going this year. I know that's a bit that's a big ask right because there's still, there's eight months left. So we need to scrap the whole episode because we just all missed it that's I have no problem doing that. It's been a while then you know the old adages like if you don't like the weather just wait a week and it'll be different so I think you could really say the same thing about lumber pricing. The past, you know, years just been just wild so we came off the extreme highs. To your point we sold off to some sort of pre pandemic normal quote normal levels. We had a large rally about three to four weeks ago, followed by an epic collapse now we're starting to climb out of that but I think when you when you kind of step back from all that I think what we're doing is, we're trying to figure out a new kind of long term sustainable range for lumber and our feeling is that that range is probably higher than the, you know, pre pandemic normal input costs, log supply in Canada there's a lot of things that have changed and evolve over the past few years so we think lumber should be higher than than what it used to be. We certainly don't expect to return to the crazy days of you know two years ago and when a car lumber was a quarter million dollars for car two by four see we don't think that's going to happen, but. So I think we're in the early stages of that process of fleshing out like what new what reality is and what and the sustainable level is, which most likely, if I had to guess is probably going to be, you know, 50% plus over kind of the old historic ranges, which is sort of give or take depending on the item. So you're expecting we're going to even out kind of about where we are give or take. Just now today we're starting we're starting to rally again over the past few days after extra you know, pretty epic sell off. So I think you know we probably can be higher than we are right now. Yeah, but I wouldn't say, like, we're not going to be double, you know, futures right now are in the low fours. I would, I would expect a realistic range for futures maybe 400 to 600. If I had to, you know, if I had to just make a guess, and that certainly be volatility around that but that's kind of our feeling for kind of long term sustainable where the mills are able to make a little money. The customers are happy, you know, a good middle ground it makes sense. There'll be a lot of ups and downs and in between all that though. One other point to add is, you know, on this extreme volatility over the past, you know, it's been past couple years but I think right now as we've seen housing starts come off over the past, you know, six to nine months, and it's stabilizing here. Right now we're in the process of right sizing the supply side. And that's just only a matter of time to right size what we've heard and seen over the past 3060 9020 days between permanent shutdowns curtailments reduce shifts. So how that all affects and you know what is brought into the marketplace to the current, you know, right sizing the supply to the demand and, you know, that's, that's where we're at right now. We recently saw like some q4 earnings announcements from some of the large Canadian mills, and they were, you know, these guys were losing quite a bit of money. This is based on this is based on the q4 pricing which was higher than where we are right now.  Yeah, and I think that's I mean that's what we're hearing from categories across the board right for some it was deceptively low, maybe even lower than it should have been so we're just seeing everything kind of come up across the board. Nobody loves that just building a house costs more builders don't love it homeowners don't love it. But it's, it doesn't seem to be like there's a significant reduction, other than places where it was significantly inflated like lumber was in, you know, 2020 2021. I mean that makes a ton of sense. As you're talking to your customers about lumber futures and the lumber futures market and risk management. What are some leading indicators you're monitoring from your side that you're, you know, either pushing to them or raising flags for them in those conversations. Each customer based on the business segment that they're in has its own they have their own unique like risk profile. So I think those conversations really are sort of tailored to, to the, you know, is it a sawmill, you know, the where their risk is to the downside is it a multifamily developer where their risk is to the upside so what we try to do is, you know, first and foremost, just get an analysis of where they sit in the space and what their risks truly are and from that we help them craft a risk management solution to mitigate what their risks are. And that could be futures it could be fixed pricing future physical delivery it could be financial swaps is a lot of different things we do but they're all really custom tailored to the profile that folks were talking to and so I guess the indicators we would look at would be based on, based on what's going on. Of course, you know, we're now we're in the futures market very heavily timing things and, and a lot of technical sort of data we can look at to help us in terms of when to implement trades. But big picture, it's really, it's about helping customers initiate the proper long term plan to, you know, to smooth out their earnings volatility. As you're looking at, you know, the back end and the data that you need to have in order to be able to create these risk management profiles or risk management statuses for your customers. Is there a topic or a category or something that you're seeing or that you find yourself elevating in conversations that maybe isn't quite on the radar for everyone the way that you would think that it should be. I would say, you know, just kind of based on my background the financial markets that I would say risk management and futures in general, in the lumber industry is dramatically underutilized. I'm always just sort of shocked and blown away by the amount of risk that a lot of entities are willing to take when there's the perfect product that is sits that's available to help mitigate that so I, you know, I just think it's a space that everyone in lumber talks about futures they watch futures but there's, I would say the actual percentage of market participants that are heavily involved in a sort of risk management is very, very low. And, and so I guess my overall comment would just be that and that it's underutilized and that it's not and I would say that the industry could probably benefit from a little more sophistication in terms of utilizing some of these tools that are available. Josh, do you have any, any thoughts, I miss anything. No, I think you hit it now on, I think, you know, what you discussed earlier was, you know, the range, you know, of, let's just say 400 to 600 and when you're talking to various different customers is understanding, you know, where the risk is at where it is and if we're at the bottom end, we would, you know, suggest obviously to cover up as much as you possibly can and at the higher end of the range is, you know, what, you know, the comfort for each customer is different of how much risk they want to take. But, you know, that's definitely something to look at and then another tool that we use that is probably not well used in the industry is just looking at specific items, as far as what's undervalued and what's overvalued to the current market of the data that we have for the past. I don't know what is it Steve, 30 years. Yeah, so within lumber, you know, you have hundreds of items that are called commodity lumber they all move differently. And so, you know, like what Josh is, you know, mentioning is sometimes some of these items might be dramatically, they might be very cheap relative to historical relative to everything else and that might be item we would advise our customers to hey, buy six months worth of this stuff there might be something else that's, you know, extremely high relative to its normal relationship and these things tend to come back in line over time so that's analysis that that's pretty instrumental in not only guiding our customers but certainly in guiding our inventory purchase decisions and how we run our own business as well. I love that I think that's a great point also is just the variation and the specifics within even just lumber futures and lumber pricing in itself, and understanding where's their risk where's their over value that's a really great highlight Josh I appreciate that I want to go back Steve to your comment of really just your the amount of like your surprise that utilizing something like this risk management service isn't more common in the industry is there a particular obstacle that you think stands in the way maybe it's just but if it's not if it's not awareness, you know what's the conversation that you find you have to have or the the aha moment you have to create. I think there's a few things. You know a lot of companies have done it the way they've done it for a very long time, and they've had a lot of ups and down volatility along the way but in the end of the day they've made money so it's like why would I, you know, why would I change if what I'm I think it's like, okay, I mean if you want to make, you know lose 60% of one year and you know. So I don't know but but that's one obstacle the other I think is just the, you know, specifically with the futures market I think it scares people I think the financial. You know the ups and downs and the cash flow and margin implications that they come along with that that are inherent with futures is something that a lot of people do shy away from, because those swings can be pretty significant. People tend to look at, you know, one of the things that we're good at it sure what is, we have a very large futures position but we also have a very large cash position and we look together how that marriage together for your total P&L versus a lot of people to view them separately like they're two separate things it's like no you put these things together so a lot of people have a hard time making that mental jump. But I will say that the folks that the folks that do recognize the value, you know, to be gained from risk management that partner with us. These are people that are with us day after day week after week, you know, year after year.   You know, so, so it's very powerful once people kind of buy into it and we help them navigate how to do it. Before I let you go I've got one question we're asking a lot of our guests as we're at the beginning of the year, other than lumber futures and lumber pricing. What's one prediction you have for the building material sector in 2023. What are you expecting to see. I'm not saying it all along with my customers. I think it's pretty obvious. It's coming into 2023. It was doom and gloom recession depression. It is well better than expected business. Things are shipping out quicker than, you know, expected. So I think just a better than expected than what, you know, we thought coming into this year. I would say the same thing. I mean I think the multifamily space is extremely busy, super robust. I mean we're record shipments and record not near record backlog of orders so that's that part is strong single family. It's challenged but there's also, you know the supply, Josh mentioned supply lumber supply earlier well there's also like housing supply it's not that high. And this stuff is going to work itself out quicker than people think and so I think people could be surprised it could be better than expected. People don't want to get to down the dumpster. My opinion. That's so it's so interesting that's both of your responses so when we were at the builder show at the end of January. We often we always get asked, you know, what are people saying about the economy or what do you think is going to happen and without fail every single situation I had or have had over the last four months has been exactly this, where whoever I'm talking to that whether it's a manufacturer dealer their responses basically like, I know that I'm supposed to be worried and I know that things are supposed to be bad. And maybe they're bad for everybody else, but for us we seem to be doing really well. And it's not all eggs in that basket and we're all a bit more cautious these days just naturally coming out of everything that's gone on and all of the volatility and change and the expected change that we've gone through the last three years I don't think anybody's saying it in a presumptuous or prideful like we've hacked it kind of way, but just in the like, is it okay that I'm okay because like we're okay. So I mean I just love hearing that because I think that's been the the consistent cadence is like cautious optimism, but with reason to be optimistic. Yeah, I think cautious optimistic is exactly where we stands but you know it's like Steve always mentioned it business isn't going to come as easy as it did the past two years it's going to be harder to conduct but there's plenty of business out there. 100%. Is there anything that you all have had to pivot or find yourself doing as a result as you know 2023 business isn't going to be as easy to come by as it was the last two years any specific strategies you've put into place to continue to see demand walk through the door. I think just leaning on our overall value proposition that we sort of alluded to earlier in the cast. Just really, you know we have to provide value to our customers, you know, otherwise there's no reason for us to be here so with between the just in time deliveries and just all the different business models that we run. We just have to I mean that's where we're going to find our success. It's not like shooting fish in a barrel anymore I mean the markets we're back to normal we're going to have to work for it. But I think you know I think there's a lot out there and I think you know that navigate that well are going to do just fine. Frankly, not shooting fish in the barrel but also not smoking mirrors I love that we're just going to deliver value. Yeah, I mean what else is there. Well, thank you both so much for your time. If any of our listeners want to get in touch or ask more questions after the episode what be a good way for them to get in contact with you. Our email addresses. Josh at Sherwood lumber.com and s slowbner at Sherwood lumber.com. Yeah, great. We'll make sure to link those in the show notes thank you both again for your time this has been awesome for our listeners. If you want more great content like this head to venvio.com slash podcast to subscribe until next time. I'm back.


past the hour. Hello and welcome to the second installment of our monthly virtual office hour series. My name is Bill Nguyen and I am the director of customer success here at TechSoup. Joining me today on our panel are Marilyn DeMorris, our account manager on our solutions team. Shruti Ramaswamy, our VP of strategy. Vanessa Jimenez, who's our customer success manager and she will be helping me moderate. Today's meeting making sense of your Microsoft cloud licenses part two. Kevin Mohall is our technical success manager who will be presenting today's today's demo. A few housekeeping items before we start. Please use the chat function to type in your questions and comments. We will collect the questions and answer them during the Q&A portion of this second. In fact, you can start using the chat feature now by saying hello, which some of you have already done and right where you're attending this conversation from. I'm personally dialing in from the San Francisco Bay Area. For easier access for closed captioning, please click on the ellipsis and then turn on live captioning. And please note that this session is being recorded. The recording and slides will be available shortly for everyone who is registered for this event. Before we start the demo, we would like to know what your experience level is with 365. This poll is optional, so don't feel like you have to answer. It just helps us understand our audience better. And when you're done, you can close out the pop-up window when you're done, or if you don't feel like answering, you can also close out the window. Okay, and that's the quick poll we have. Feel free to answer or not. Yep, and use the polling feature there. I'm going to go ahead and answer with a basic experience. I see one person with advanced and for the most part, we are basic. And then a little bit of none. Okay, this is very helpful. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Kevin Mohall, who will be leading this conversation and doing demos. Kevin. Thanks, Phil. A pleasant good morning, afternoon, or evening to those joining us today. Again, my name is Kevin Mohall. I'm a technical customer success manager here at TechSoup. And today's virtual office hour session, we'll be discussing the following topics. Creating users, assigning licenses and roles in your 365Evan home portal. Next, we're going to take a brief look at tenant user roles and the concept of role-based access control. We'll then touch on downloading office desktop applications before moving on how to add a custom domain. Then finally, and for the majority of the session, we'll be opening the floor to any questions you may have. I'm going to go ahead and switch over here to my demo account. Wait with me one second. To access the admin homepage, you'll need to log in at the following URL, admin.microsoft.com. Once logged in, you'll arrive at the homepage that you see here. To add a user, you'll scroll over to the left side dashboard where it reads users, click the down arrow, select active users, and from the screen that you're redirected to, simply click add a user. This is going to walk you through the wizard for adding a user. We'll start with first name. I'm going to go ahead and add myself to this demo account. Please note all the information that's contained in this account that you're seeing is fictitious. It's a demonstration account. It's only meant for providing information. As you can see here, after I've added my first name and last name, Microsoft went ahead and populated that in a display name. You can of course change this. It does not need to match here, but for simplicity's sake, I'm going to go ahead and keep it as is. For the username, this is something that you might be familiar with. This is actually something called a user principal name. You know this is an alias. I recommend using the first initial of the first name and then the last name as standard policy. I'm going to go ahead and use my first and last name on this. We're not going to pay attention to the domain here for the moment being. We'll come back to that. You'll see here there's a couple of checkmark boxes here that read, automatically creating a password, require this user to change their password, and then to send password and email upon completion. The one item I would like to pay attention to here is the sending password and email upon completion. Now you'll see here that the domain that's listed is a dot on Microsoft domain level. Now say that you were a church group of 10 people and one of your staff does not have a standard domain, custom domain listing, and you're not keen on using it on Microsoft to communicate this information. Say they have a Gmail or a Yahoo account, you can actually go ahead and change this to that email client. In this case, in this example, I'll just use Yahoo and then I'll go ahead and send that here. Afterwards, you'll want to click Next, and then we're going to go into Product Licenses. By default, the location as it was the licenses were requested in the United States will be set to the United States. The licenses that you do request in our provision will populate here under the licenses. In this particular example, I'm going to go ahead and then just select Office 365 E3 in my demo account. Note you can also create a user without a product license. When I clicked and highlighted the Office 365 E3 account, you may have noticed that the apps keyword here updated to the number 27 in parenthesis. By clicking on this, what this allows you to do is to granularly control what applications the user has access to. By default, it's going to highlight everything. This is a decision, of course, you can make. I just wanted you to be aware that you have the ability to say, for example, deprovision access to something like Microsoft Bookings. Say that you have another calendar tool that you use and you don't want your colleagues to be using Bookings, you can certainly deselect that. When they go into access their license, this application feature will be disabled and they'll receive a notification that their admin has disabled access to it. I'm going to go ahead and click Next to go forward and this gets us into optional settings. Now, first here, the profile information. I'll go over this just very briefly. It may be or may not be something that you want to consider. What this here does is it offers an expanded list of what, from those who have experience with Active Directory, represents group policy objects. Don't be worried or alarmed if you don't fill this out. In many cases, it's not necessary, but if you do decide to begin managing by groups using 365 groups, you may want to include some information in there. Again, this is completely not necessary for most standard users, but I wanted you to be aware that that exists. Now, getting here into roles. By default, a new user that's created will be created with a standard user role. From the drop-down menu, you can see that that's highlighted and then it gets into the admin roles. And that's what we're going to move to next. I'm going to head and click Next again, review the information that's listed in here, license, the user account, the password will be auto-generated, and then click Finish Adding. And then I'm going to go ahead and close this out. All right. So the first step is creating and assigning licenses to users. The next step is assigning roles and rights to users. There are four main roles and rights that we recommend, which Kevin will go over now. Thanks, Phil. So let's scroll down here to find the new account and the demo tenant that I created for myself. You can see here I am. This is my username and the license that we had just assigned to that user. So I'm going to go ahead and click on my display name, and it's going to pull up a menu on the right side here. I'm going to scroll down to roles. So you can see here it lists no administrator access. That was a default user role that was assigned to it. But say we want to change it to one of those roles that Phil had just mentioned. I'm going to go ahead and click Manage Roles. I'm going to click Admin Center Access, and then I'm going to scroll down to the appropriate role. The four roles that we wanted to review are the Global Administrator, the User Administrator, Help Desk Administrator, and the Service Support Administrator. Without going too far down the rabbit hole, administrative roles work on a hierarchy. Think of the Global Administrator as a super user. You might be wondering what can a Global Administrator do. The cool thing about this inside 365 and with a lot of things you'll discover when you start exploring the Admin Center is Microsoft actually does a really great job of explaining what certain roles and functions do. In this particular case, I'm going to scroll over to the Information Circle, and it gives me a brief but fairly descriptive bit of information. The Global Administrator has access to all management features and to most data in all Admin Centers. When you're first starting out, you don't need to go really far down the rabbit hole. You just need to understand that a Global Admin, again, is essentially a super user. The individuals that create your account when they first set up your 365 tenancy for validation are by default Global Administrators. Let's scroll on down to User Administrator. Clicking the Information, we can see that a User Administrator can reset passwords, create and manage users and groups, including filters, manage service requests, and monitor service health. The next level up in the hierarchy is this Service Support Administrator, which creates, you can create service requests for Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 services, and monitor service health. The last is the Help Desk Administrator. The Help Desk Administrator can reset passwords and re-authentication sessions for all non-admins, a small number of admin roles, manage service requests, and monitor service health.  The main takeaway here that I want you to understand is that no matter how big or small your organization is, it's best practice to have a secondary administrator on hand for two reasons. The first, in the off chance that your Global Admin gets locked out, and the second is, goes back to the old effage, many hands make light work. By delegating someone as a secondary administrator, you can make your life navigating around and using your 365 tenant that much easier. Now, with that, I'm going to go ahead and jump back in here. And the last part that we're going to discuss here, I'm sorry, let me double back here. The next part that we're going to discuss here is understanding roles in 365. Let me jump back into my tenant account. I'm sorry, we just, give me one second here, apologies. We just discussed that. Let me jump back in. And the next part that we were going to cover is downloading and installing Office. Yeah. Great. So the login URL for installing Office to your device, you can access that at office.com. You'll log in using your username and password that has been created and assigned for you. Here, you'll land, this is the landing page from which it will work. Kevin, I'm sorry, you're not sharing right now. Apologies. There we go. Can you see that now? Okay, perfect. So you're going to log in at office.com with your username and password. On the landing page, you'll scroll over to install Office. You'll click on the drop down menu and you'll select Office 365 apps. Really quickly here, you'll see a tab for other install options. This will not be a common scenario. The reasoning or logic for installing going to other install options would be one of two things. The first would be if you needed to download a different architecture or language pack, say for example that your user was a Spanish native Spanish speaker, you could select your installation pack to be downloaded in Spanish. And if you had a secondary license such as Power BI Pro that is not downloaded through the standard installation. So I'm going to go ahead and click the Office 365 apps tab. And as you can see here, I'm getting a prompt to save the executable file. For those of you that are familiar with the old fashion way of installing Office, the old days of the CD-ROM, the platform that's used is what's called click to run. The great thing about the 365 local installation is it uses the same technology. You'll save the file, you'll run the file, you'll follow the instructions here. As part of completing the installation, what you're going to need to do is actually log back in using your username and password 365 username and password. And by logging in, that is going to authenticate your active subscription ID and allow for the installation to complete. Go ahead and close this out. And then we wanted to jump over to adding a custom domain. Yeah, sorry about that. Now that you've created users, assign admin roles and rights and installed Office, step four is adding a custom domain to your tenant. All right. So adding a custom domain, first I want to preface this that what we're going to be showing is just a portion of what's called DNS records. In this particular instance, adding a custom domain will be focusing on what's called a TXT record. So I'm going to go ahead and back at my admin homepage. I'm going to click show all settings, domains. From here, you can see that my default domain is an Microsoft domain, which many of you will have. I'm going to click add domain. And I'm going to follow the setup wizard here. Again, one of the great features about 365 is that you'll experience as you go through the admin center is all of the learning resources that are presented to you as a part of going through the process. In here, Microsoft introduces you to a quick video on how to add a domain. I would certainly recommend reviewing that additionally before going forward in the steps through the wizard. So I'm going to jump back in here. We're going to type in the domain that I am leasing from my registrar. A domain registrar some of you may be familiar with is an example of is GoDaddy. There are also other domain registrars such as Hover, one-on-one, and HostGator. I do have my Hover account to briefly show you where the record will ultimately be placed. But just note that when you add the domain and the TXT records, you will have a different experience based on who your domain registrar is. So in this particular example, I'm going to type in a fictitious domain and I'm going to click use this domain. Now you'll notice here that it's walking me through the next step of the process and adding a TXT record to the domain's DNS records. This is what we want to have highlighted. We're going to click continue. Now when you put in your domain name, provided it's not an example like the one that I'm using in an actual real domain, Microsoft may detect who your DNS host is and place that here. In this particular case, it listed other because it did not recognize the domain host by default. It's not a big deal if it doesn't recognize yours even if you're using a well-known domain registrar. The main focus here is on the TXT records that are listed down here. You'll see TXT name, TXT value, and TTL or time to live. These records right here will need to be added to your DNS records on your registrar's admin page. In this particular instance, I have my personal hover account in, so I'm not going to go all the way through for the sake of this demonstration, but after logging in in this particular case, I'm going to my account and into my control panel. It's there that I will, you find my custom domain. I will select in this particular case of hover to edit the DNS, and then I will go back into the admin center here. I will highlight on the copy record, and I will copy and paste each of these values back into my registrar's homepage. Once I've done that, I'll click verify. Depending on your registrar, it will, you may experience a difference in time that it takes to properly connect and verify your domain. It can be within minutes, it may be within hours. After it's been verified, you'll see a check mark similar to the one that we saw for the OnMicrosoft.com domain, and then you will finish out and close the wizard. Kevin, it looks like we have a bunch of questions, so let's get back to the deck and so we can move forward with the Q&A session. Sounds good. Give me one second here to pull that up. And don't forget, folks, we are collecting all your questions, and we will address them at the Q&A, which is going to start in about one minute. Okay, there you go. Okay, we are providing the resources page in the slide deck. It will be shared with you after this call, along with the recording from this session. But here are a few resources we have. The first part is a getting started guide. It's a step-by-step guide with screenshots, with exactly what Kevin went through, the four steps in getting started with Office 365. The second one is the Digital Transformation Forum. This is a forum where you can come in, you can ask questions, you can answer questions, you can have conversations. We have guides, we have how-to videos, everything you may need, and I highly recommend you join and participate. And by the way, it's actually hosted by this team here, so you'll get direct answers from our team. The third thing is Digital Skills Center training courses. This is where you can get all the courses that you may need for Microsoft 365. We have one comprehensive course called Bootcamp, which basically covers all the apps that N365 has. And then the last thing I want to share here is that for the next virtual office hour, which is going to be October 22, we're going to start touching on security. As we progress, security will be big issues, so we want to address that there. And it will be the fundamentals of Office 365 security. Vanessa here is actually sharing the links in the chat as well. But like I said, all these resources will be available to you shortly after this session. So without further ado, Kevin, let's go to the Q&A session along with Kevin and myself. We have Shruti and we have Marilyn to help answer your questions. Okay, so I'm just going to go down the list in chronological order as they were asked. Okay. Wendy, you have a question I think is already answered by Shruti, but the next one is by Wynn. Wynn, nice to see you again and welcome back. But she asks, I have someone from outside our organization who needs to upload files to me. I understand there is a concept of guest user, but I don't know how to set that up or instruct the user how one might use that to be able to upload to me a bunch of files. Kevin, you want to take that one? Yeah, you can add a guest user to the account. Looks like I can jump back in here really quick. I can even demo that. You see down here from the menu, let me get back out of this really quickly. From the drop down menu here, I simply click on guest user and then you can add a guest user right here by clicking on the tab here. This looks like it's redirecting to Azure Active Directory and then you can simply create a new user here through the prompt. You can also invite a new guest user to collaborate with your organization by clicking on the tab here. You can also invite guest users in bulk. Here you'll just follow through the prompts. The only item that is needed, which is Ashrit, is the email address. I would still recommend filling out all of these field lines and then of course you can put in a personal message. From here, if you're using group management, which I referenced earlier, you can add them to a particular group that may change some considerations as far as what the individual guest has access to. You may or may not want to use that depending on the level of security you need to meet. Their role by default is user. Depending on the nature of your relationship again with the individual will dictate what you want them to have access to and the abilities and functions that they have. It will work certainly differently from a partner that's a partner food pantry versus a MSP and a managed service provider and the roles that they would need. You can go through the rest of the prompt here, determine any of the settings or usage locations that you want to update, job info. Again, these items, you don't need to go that granular. If it's just simply about having an individual having guest access into teams, this is where this is controlled. Once that's all filled out, then you simply click invite. Yeah, Kevin, stay here for a moment, please. There's another question by, yeah if you could just go back Kevin to the chair. There's another question by Mary and she asked, can a guest user only be shared certain files from the main SharePoint folder and not see the other files? Yeah, so when you're setting up sharing and SharePoint, there's expanded option menus that might take me a little bit more time than I have to show. I think for the sake of that, just know that yes, when you are setting and inviting the guest and then controlling the guest access, you'll be able to configure that actually within SharePoint and within your SharePoint administrator. Okay. So this is the SharePoint admin site, which again, when you go to the main page, you click show all, it'll expand down to the administrative centers here. This is where you'll control on a fine or more granular access levels of controls that you have. I'm actually very glad that you brought that question up. So to me that SharePoint and OneDrive are kind of function within the same. They're different components, but SharePoint hierarchically is not a word probably, but is nested within OneDrive. So just know that when you set permissions for SharePoint, going through the SharePoint admin center, for example, that SharePoint has the hierarchy. So whatever permission sharing that you set in SharePoint, OneDrive will either match that or it will have a permission level less than that. You can never have a greater permission level in OneDrive than you do in SharePoint. Okay, great. Thanks Kevin. So Matt Wolf asked, do you have experience using Microsoft 365 without using Exchange? We're having a lot of issues with mail notification delivery in Teams and OneDrive and parentheses. We use Google workplace for email. As far as that, I would need to know if, for example, if you've set up like SMTP, if you have mail forwarding from workspace, if you have a relay set up, that's definitely a follow up question, Phil. I think that I'd need to have a little bit more understanding of how the mail message exchange is configured. Yeah, I think it's a little more complicated than that, Matt. So we'll reach out to you directly after this to get more information so we can answer this properly. The next question is by Evan Perkins. There are a number of apps in Microsoft 365 that I'm not familiar with. Where can I learn about all these options? If it was covering part one, I do apologize. So Evan, we're actually hearing a lot about this. It's not just about getting to know and using the apps, but how do we use it? Because there are a couple of different use cases. So what we'll do is we'll make note of this as a topic that we're going to cover in the future. And we're talking about SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, and the other apps that are out there that come along with 365. So thank you for that. We'll make note of that and we'll collect the topic ideas and which we'll ask at the end as well. So great point. Oh yeah, go ahead, Kevin. I was just going to say if you could just show quickly where to go on the Office just to see the apps that you actually have, that'd be great. Yeah, perfect. That was actually what I was going to go. This would be a great way to just explore it. So again, going back to the Office.com landing page where we had gone through the Office install demo. If you scroll down, you'll see an icon that reads All Apps. If you click on that, this gives you the ability to view the Office 365 All Apps. Tips and tricks is probably a good place to start for Microsoft Materials for learning more about the applications. But you can even see here that they give a breakdown to a certain degree of what the application is. One of my personal favorites I would have to say is probably to do in Forms. Microsoft Forms is a great way for creating polls and quizzes. But if you do go through here, you'll be able to see a full list of all the applications that are available in your license. Again, this is an E3 license. So if you do reference this for the future, you may see something a little bit different depending on the subscription type. Yeah, and there's a lot so it could be overwhelming. Thanks, Kevin. The next question from Inna is, so the secondary administrator has global admins, has global admins set on or is it another role? So the individual who registers for your account is by associated with the Approval for Charity Billing is by default a global admin unless you are bringing this over from a commercial account. When you create a secondary user, they are just treated as a user. So again, going back to the demonstration earlier, when we've created that user, we'll want to highlight the, we'll want to highlight here. Once we've created that role, we'll want to, we'll want to give you one second here, we'll want to highlight admin center access and then select it. It's not until you've checked the admin center access box and then checked the associated box that they're elevated to that level permissions. That's what our back is. Our back is role based access control. Think of it as the same hierarchy as maybe even a family that you have parents and then you have children. So in the case of someone who is going to again be acting in that administrative capacity in some way as a backup global admin or someone that maybe handles help desk support, that's a great one to troubleshoot. If you have an issue that's coming up within your tenant rather than have everybody in the office chasing after support for it, you could always designate a single person as say a help desk administrator and that will afford them the ability to generate tickets. Again, also as your CSP, I would definitely encourage you also to reach out to us to enable us or allow us to even potentially create an advanced ticket on your behalf. But of course, if you want to self serve the tickets, you can as well. And one more thing, Kevin, is the information icon right there. If you mouse over it, it will give you a definition of each of the admin roles. Yep. Okay, thank you. John Romano asks, what if any services can TechSoup offer towards setting up and administering M365? Shuri, I think that's a good question for you. Sure. Hi. We actually offer an, oops, sorry, there's just going to answer another question and I got a YouTube video pop up. We offer an Office 365 installation and startup service. So we're happy to help with that. And we also offer a cloud starter kit. So for organizations who want us to actually help them in setting up the account and actually provisioning the licenses and accounts, we can do that for you as well. So I'll put up a link in here to an intake form and you just set that up and we'll contact you for a meeting and we can get that moving forward. Okay. The next question is Deb's organization. What about installing MS project? I mean, kind of use this same process for MS project. Yeah. So MS project is a standalone skew. So that's a great question. So going back to the office page, scroll up here and install. That's where you would go to other install options. In this particular case, you're not going to see it reflected in here. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on under the office apps and devices view apps and devices. Your project plan subscription skew that offers the installation will populate here. You can see Skype is here. I would never, I don't recommend that Microsoft is phased out Skype. But for those that have power project, Visio, a version of Visio that includes a downloadable desktop application and Power BI Pro, you'll see those populate in here because they're not technically nested within this core subscription. You'll see here that Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access, Publisher, etc. are listed here in that office install. Project will be its own separate installation. Okay. Thanks, Kevin. The next question is from Kathleen Burley. Kathleen, nice to have you back. And Marilyn, I think you could take this one. Is there a difference between adding O365 on the computer versus the cloud? Yes, there is. There's different licensing plans. Some of them will come with desktop applications. Some of them will be office online only. For example, some of them like business premium licenses, Office 365 E3. So they will come with both of them. So you can actually install them onto your computer and use them online. So the difference will be if you use it online, you can access it just by going to office.com, just by having internet anywhere. And then the desktop applications, you can actually install the apps onto your computer and access them that way. Okay. Thank you, Marilyn. Okay. So WAGs, Librarian asks, what's the reason for adding a domain? That's where it does get complicated in the process, Kevin. So I think we're going to have a couple more of these questions here regarding domain. Yeah. So the TXT record, so there's a couple different types of DNS records. I'm just going to name them just for the sake of running it through my head. But you have TXT records, which essentially verify ownership of a domain. You have MX records, which are message exchange records. Those are responsible for email. You have Kenacle name, which also function in a similar capacity or CNAME. Then you have SVP and A or AA records. I'm not going to go into details with that. The value of TXT records is in a nutshell. If you had, say, I was K-Mall Hall at techsoup.onmicrosoft.com, I don't want to log into my 365 account using that. I want to log into my account using my TechSoup address, my K-Mall Hall at TechSoup. By verifying ownership of the domain, I will be able to update the account. Let's go back into the demo I created here. So when your TXT records are verified, when your TXT records are verified by Microsoft, what you'll have the ability to do is you'll have the ability to modify the domain at which it's named. In this particular case, say that I had wagslibrary.org. Once it's verified, you will see that populate in the drop-down menu and I can change the primary username or UPN from K-Mall Hall at this long domain handle here to K-Mall Hall at wagslibrary.org. It will also allow you to set, I don't want to get too down the rabbit hole, but it'll also set that domain as your authoritative domain for the tenant. But the main takeaway here is that that's the reason you would add a TXT record is so that you can change the login, because if you have a custom domain, the idea of constantly typing in whatever it is at.onmicrosoft.com is kind of taxing. Okay, staying on the domain topic, Kevin Warner, as is there any additional impact on an existing domain when it is added to Microsoft 365, e.g. if the domain hosts a publicly visible website? Okay, so if it's TXT, it's just performing verification. You won't, we do not recommend touching any other domain record type unless you plan on, for example, with the MX record, plan on using Exchange Online or Exchange as part of your 365 entitlement as a mail host. So for all intents and purposes, introducing a TXT record is really just to change the user principal name or the alias that you log in with. Implications will start happening once you start changing things, like directions, like directing to name servers, like our CNAME, MX records, A records, AA records, those are hooks for when you have, for example, you brought up a website. If you have a link in a website that redirects to an email address, like an auto format, an email client to push out, that's where you would need to configure A or AA records. But just to change just the user names, TXT is the way to go. When you start using more, you start running into potential services and complications. If you do want to go forward with that, definitely reach out to us. We work with a couple of managed service partners that will be able to help if you do want to bring your mail client over into exchange. Okay. The next question is from Michael H. The quote add domain unquote section briefly showed that the records could be removed from the DNS record. Don't understand that. The DNS record, again, it's going back to authoritative and like default domains. DNS can be removed from your 365 tenant. The idea is that when you are using DNS records that point to Microsoft, that your registrar is communicating that information. For example, when you're configuring SPF, I don't want to get too technical here, but that's for spam protection. When you're configuring that, the address is autodiscover.outlook.com. That's the way that the communication works is your DNS host communicates with Microsoft servers as far as when it makes requests through those protocols. For example, mail has its own protocol. Again, I don't really want to get too technical, but yes, you can control DNS records at both levels, but the end of the day, your registrar should be the place through which DNS records are managed and controlled rather than within your 365 tenant. Okay. Great. Can Robin ask, can a username be outside our domain? You're talking about like as if, for example, if somebody had a Gmail or Outlook account. Yeah, that would go back to as far as a guest user, but configuring a domain to that, no, like as far as a standard name, because you don't own Gmail, like you domain, you don't own Yahoo. So there's no way that you'd have the ability to validate those TXT records. They're owned by Google or, I unfortunately actually don't know who owns Yahoo. Now I'm like maybe AOL Time Warner or somebody, but yeah, you don't have authority to verify that. So no, if you do want to have an account that operates that way, it would need to operate within like a guest capacity, but then you're talking about limitation. So I would stick with the on Microsoft domain for the time being, if you wanted full user access and privileges to the account. Yeah. And keep in mind, this is all dummy data, but if you could see some of the user names, Kevin used the first initial, last name convention, and some people did the opposite words, first name and last initial. So that's typically the case for username with on Microsoft.com domain. Okay. The next one is Chris from Chris. This may be beyond the scope of this presentation, but I'm curious where I can review and edit the policies that are pushed down to employees PCs when they log into our 365 environment. Yeah. That's Azure. I don't know if we have time to go down that roll. Azure Active Directory, you can control conditional access policies. It's actually a great question and I'd be more than happy to follow up on that one. Yeah. We'll follow up. Chris, we'll follow up with you directly on that one. It's a little more complicated. And this is from Millard. Does TechSoup support offer training for Adobe Creative Cloud? I can take that and I will just respond back to you, Millard, with some resources that you can use there, some courses and some webinars that we've done. Yeah. I know they have a ton of resources from that as well, but we would address that to you directly as well. Okay. So Jason asks, what's the difference between M365 Business Standard and O365 E3? Can actually provide a full outlay from their GitHub, but Business Standard, it's really going to come down to applications and then to security items like rights management service. For example, email encryption is a feature that's part of rights management service that's in E3. It's not available on Business Standard. Though you could technically, if you have Business Standard, you could upgrade Azure Information Protection to enable part of that. But it really comes down to applications and then to features, particularly security for E3. It's a license that's built specifically to address things like HIPAA and ISO, compliances, etc. Okay. And we will follow with the differences between these two licenses, which is a very, very common question, by the way, Jason. Okay. Julie Sims asks, I want to use Mile IQ, which is a phone app. How do I set that up? That's a great question. I can answer that one. Yeah. So Mile IQ actually comes within your Office 365 or Microsoft 365 solutions. Mile IQ, for those that might not know, is an application that you can use to log your mileage and it can help you in terms of if you're getting tax reimbursements and things for it. Once you download the application of Mile IQ from either your iOS or Android or your Apple phone or the PlayStores, the way that you log in is using your Microsoft credentials, so it will automatically kind of go towards your account. So that's how you do it for Mile IQ. Okay. Thanks, Rudy. Okay. Steve Humphrey asks, every time I try adding a custom domain, I get errors. Where can I go to get live help? Personally, I would recommend starting with your DNS or your registrar to confirm where the issue is resting at, because if you've copied the records correctly into, like I demonstrated my hover account into your control panel, if the records match and there's an issue with, it's called propagation, and you've double-checked that, it's something that you may want to discuss with whoever the host is. It could be an issue, but regarding like the TTL I was talking about, the time to live, you may need to change the priority level on that. From like the standards, like 3600, it could be zero, it could be 3600. Again, this speaks back to some of the differences that you'll experience across registrars. They don't necessarily all work the same, so I would reach out to them first. If they're not much help, you could certainly come back to us and we could discuss possible solutions at that point. Okay. Thanks, Ed. Marilyn, I think you can address this next one from Al Harlow. Is installing Office required or can I run it from the cloud? It's not required. If you have a license that comes with desktop applications and you haven't installed them, you can use the cloud option. So at office.com, you should be able to see the icons for any of the apps that you want, like Word, Powerpoint, and you can access them through that. Yeah, Kevin, since you have it up, can you go to office.com really quick? I see it on your browser. And you can see all the apps that are available. So you don't have to use the web app as well. But some of the other the desktop apps are actually very helpful. And I think, for me, it's a little more helpful. Okay. Yeah, I would just add to that for Phil.  You might want to use the desktop version. Yeah. So there's not complete parity between the desktop versus the web. And so if I really want to dig down and start running formulas and stuff, I actually use the desktop. Okay. Good point. Okay. Millard, if we hate Google workplace and we want to use Microsoft, is that included here? What is the Microsoft email manager called? Exchange. So I could certainly understand that Google Workspace is a great solution for certain organizations. Definitely. If you're a Microsoft house, using mail will run through Exchange Online. The service is hosted on Microsoft servers. There is the ability to kind of do a little bit of a lift and shift over from Workspace to 365. And again, of course, if that's something you're interested in, you could reach out to us directly to be more than happy to walk you through part of that process. Yeah. So at this point, we have about four minutes left to go. I'm going to go through as many questions as I can. But I do want to hear from you folks out there on some of the topics that you want to touch on in the future. So if you want, go ahead and add that to the chat. And so we know what the hottest topics are, what you want to talk about, because these open office hours, these virtual office hours, it's all about addressing your needs and what's on your mind. So Vanessa, if you could post that question and then please respond. Okay. And I'll keep on going down the list at this point. So Tanya asks, I would like also to learn more about all the apps. Oh, okay. So we'll duly note it. Very good timing. Mary P asks, just nonprofit licenses that were originally available in Volume License Center now have to have an on microsoft.com login. Is there a guide to the process of setting up the whole setup for an organization? I think if we could put that Getting Started link in from the page that you had, that actually includes it all. So that could be a good resource. Yeah. That Getting Started guide is really, really nice. It's step by step. It has visuals and it should answer a lot of your questions there. Admin Vivian's door asks, where's the link to reach out for support on the MS office 365? And we'll include that link as well. Okay. Shonda Mohammed asks, will everyone on our staff who is using this platform be required to install the authenticator on their phone? Will everyone on our staff? Oh, sorry. That's the same question. Yeah. Will everyone of the staff be required to install the authenticator on the phone? Okay. Did you want me to take this film? Is that all right? So the default modern authentication technique that Microsoft moves or pushes forward is authenticator. That said, there are other secondary ways of authenticating and even disabling Microsoft authenticator. My recommendation would not be not to do that. If you can keep that as the standard way through which you access onto your accounts, it's recommended. Having a basic authentication, meaning username and password, just doesn't cut it anymore. I can send you information on how you can make some potential changes to that methodology, but it will depend in part on your license to the extent at which you can add additional functionalities like SMS, phone call, which really don't recommend. I don't recommend that anymore, but I would try to stick with authenticator. It's just the safest way to ensure the integrity of your tenant. Right. Sorry, I just wanted to add to Kevin's answer. You can also go to mysignins.microsoft.com and over there you can see how many methods of authentication you have. So if you have a license that can be multi-pacture authentication, you should be able to see text, email, and the authenticator app. So from there, you should be able to delete a method or add another one. Okay. Thanks, Marilyn. We have time for one more and it's from Anna. So the secondary administrator has global admin set on, or is it another role? And Ronald responded, the answer is yes. You always want to have that backup to the main admin role, like Kevin suggested as well, but kudos to Ronald for jumping in and answering the questions, because this is what it's all about. It's about helping each other, it's about community, and it's about support. So Ronald, thank you for that, and I completely concur. That concludes this session. There are outstanding questions that we will address. We do have them all listed and we will address directly. Please, I invite you to our next session, which is about security. We will also collect all your feedback here on some future topics. And thank you so much for attending. We will send out recording.  And with that, our conclusion, thank you to our panelists. Thank you for attending, taking time out of your day to visit us. We really appreciate it. So I see some claps. So I'm going to clap back to the audience. Thank you so much and see you in one month, October 22nd. And just to let people know, we'll send out an email with the links afterwards to the deck, as well as the recording, because I know there's some questions about that. Thank you, Shuri.