Office 365 for Nonprofits

Discussions around the setup, operation, replacement, and disposal of clerk computers, not to include using MLS
elesel
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Office 365 for Nonprofits

#1

Post by elesel »

I just saw that Microsoft offers Office 365 for free to nonprofits. Has anyone looked into this either on a local unit level or churchwide?
bfromm
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Re: Office 365 for Nonprofits

#2

Post by bfromm »

The Church is aware of this and has been in conversations with Microsoft for quite a while now about what it means and whether or not they will use it for ecclesiastical leaders. Nothing has been decided yet, but when a decision is made, word will go out.
StricklandCI
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Re: Office 365 for Nonprofits

#3

Post by StricklandCI »

This sting is dated for 2010, is there an update to the question? i.e. is Office 365 available for use on clerk office computers?
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Mikerowaved
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Re: Office 365 for Nonprofits

#4

Post by Mikerowaved »

I think you might have looked at the wrong date, because the answer above was only given a couple of months ago.
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slmsz20
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Re: Office 365 for Nonprofits

#5

Post by slmsz20 »

Putting my support in for this, especially after having to spend $600-700 for Office Licenses for Unit computers at the request of the Stake President. If units are spending the money anyway, we may as well either leverage buying power or try to get the 365. Most leaders I've worked with use Office at work/home and do not want to deal with Openoffice/libreoffice, personally I like the free ones and use them, but I'm not going to push them on people that won't use them.
russellhltn
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Re: Office 365 for Nonprofits

#6

Post by russellhltn »

Just as a note for those following the thread: in the current policy, the church discourages buying office specifically because of the cost.
Have you searched the Help Center? Try doing a Google search and adding "site:churchofjesuschrist.org/help" to the search criteria.

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aclawson
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Re: Office 365 for Nonprofits

#7

Post by aclawson »

"To be eligible for nonprofit pricing, we must verify that you own a domain that is registered to a charitable institution. If you click Yes, you will be directed to the trial version. You can verify domain ownership later on." This could make it difficult for a stake to obtain a free subscription.
bcchristensen
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Re: Office 365 for Nonprofits

#8

Post by bcchristensen »

russellhltn wrote:Just as a note for those following the thread: in the current policy, the church discourages buying office specifically because of the cost.
I understand this is the guideline provided by the Church. However, I'm a stake executive secretary and whenever we receive electronic documents from Church HQ or any of the Brethren, they're MS Office documents, and in several instances we've had trouble working with the documents in OpenOffice/LibreOffice, either because the formatting gets all messed up, or in some instances MS Office features have been used that aren't compatible with the free office suites. So our Stake President (who is VERY disciplined in following direction from the Church) decided we simply need MS Office and authorized me to purchase it.
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aebrown
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Re: Office 365 for Nonprofits

#9

Post by aebrown »

bcchristensen wrote:
russellhltn wrote:Just as a note for those following the thread: in the current policy, the church discourages buying office specifically because of the cost.
I understand this is the guideline provided by the Church.
...
So our Stake President (who is VERY disciplined in following direction from the Church) decided we simply need MS Office and authorized me to purchase it.
The exact wording is "Microsoft Office: Due to high costs, the Church does not recommend purchasing this software with budget funds." By no means is it prohibited, and the wording is not even as strong as "discourages"; it simply is not recommended.

As for the cost, you can follow the instructions in this post and get MS Office for well under $100, so if the stake president does choose to purchase this software, it doesn't have to impact the budget significantly.
xenserve
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Re: Office 365 for Nonprofits

#10

Post by xenserve »

I'm very interested in leveraging Office365 for Stake use... not only does it allow such capabilities as OneDrive for Business (which will be fantastic for collaboration between units and the presidency (not financial data tho, that is against policy)) it also allows for the capability of Lync which is significantly superior to PVC and Skype (unless you buy a skype subscription to allow multiple users). My stake, geographically, is the second largest stake in the world, and we rely heavily on connectivity to include our remote locations.

The problem I ran into is that a Stake isn't a registered charity/non-profit, while individual local units typically are. If we were able to leverage a subdomain to lds.org for example (canada.lds.org) for this, there is significant benefit in turning the different stake and ward/branch leadership callings into an Office365 account and moving away from external third party private email addresses and less secure cloud storage options. Plus, it comes with Office online, so you don't need to purchase Office. the biggest benefit by using Office365 is when someone in one of those leadership positions change. By using the Office 365 subscription based on position, when someone is released, they hand over the account information and they won't need to spend months/years responding to emails sent to their personal/work email addresses they used while in the calling, plus the newly called individual will have the email history at their fingertips. I've been putting a lot of thought into this and have a organizational plan for our stake which I think makes a lot of sense and would love to discuss it further and in more detail with someone in Salt Lake as it could be easily extended to other stakes.

I am a Microsoft employee, not sure what weight I can bring to the discussions, but would love to become involved if possible.
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