I'm Becky Wiegand. I am an editor here at
TechSoup. I will be your facilitator for today. And we have Ginny Mies who is a content
curator at TechSoup who will be joining us as our key presenter today. And we will have
assistance in the chat with Kevin and Cameron. So feel free to ask us your questions as we
get started with our discussion about Windows 8. Let's take a quick look at our
introduction of what Windows 8 is. We will look through some of the features
and considerations that nonprofits
and libraries should think about before upgrading.
And helping to decide whether they want to or not, we will do a demo of some Windows 8
features, look at the new look and feel that you may have seen and
commercials for the new Surface. And we will look at some differences
between Windows 8 and Windows 7, how to find some of your frequent functions,
and how to get donations and upgrades through TechSoup. So before we get started into that, a little bit
about TechSoup, we are part of TechSoup g
lobal. We are working toward a day when every
nonprofit, library and social benefit organization has the technology, knowledge, and resources
they need to operate at their full potential. We are a nonprofit organization and we serve
nonprofits both in the United States and worldwide. Today we will be talking about the donation
program for organizations in the United States. With that we can go ahead and
get started with Windows 8. So I would love to bring Ginny on the line with
us to talk a litt
le bit about some of the features and what's new with
Windows 8. So welcome Ginny. Ginny: Thanks Becky. So I've been
using Windows 8 for the past few months and I just wanted to walk through some of the new
features and benefits of upgrading to Windows 8. Now you have probably seen on TV the
new commercial for the Surface tablet and just for Windows 8 in general.
It does have a very new look. And sometimes change can be a little bit
daunting but that's what were here for. It actually brings some
really great useful
features to your nonprofit or library, and overall performance to
your entire operating system. So let's walk through some of the
benefits there are for office use. Like I said there is a faster performance. Windows
8 has a very, very small footprint comparatively so to Windows 7. And we actually tested this
out. We installed Windows 8 on an older machine which is actually the machine I will be using
today to demo Windows 8, and it works really well. So you don't need to upg
rade any of your
machines. You don't need a touch screen. It will work on your older IT
equipment which is a great cost-benefit and a great benefit for using Green technology.
You don't have to throw out your old computers. Another big benefit is that it comes
preinstalled with Windows Defender Security. So let me explain this. You might be
familiar with Microsoft Security Essentials. This is Microsoft's free software
for security software for Windows 7. Windows Defender is pretty much the same
as
Microsoft Security Essentials just with a new name. It includes your basic malware detection. It
includes spyware detection. It comes preinstalled. You don't have to do anything
with it and it will start running. And if you have like a preferred security
software already installed on your computer, you can turn Windows Defender off and it will not
interfere if you have like Norton Security running. So that's a really great benefit because it is
free and you don't have to do any work for it. A
nother benefit is the enhanced
built-in hardware failure protection and we can put you through
to some resources about that. You might have heard of SkyDrive cloud storage.
That is integrated throughout Windows 8. This is Microsoft's cloud storage service, and
you will be able to save your documents, photos, whatever, to the SkyDrive cloud service
and then access it from your Windows 8 PC, your Windows 8 tablet, your Windows 8 phone,
whatever you are using Windows 8 on, very useful. Windows 8 ha
s new features for multi-language
use, so it is very easy to switch between different languages. And that is really
easy to share information between your colleagues to your donors. You can send pictures really
easily. And it's got some great new features for searching which I will show you later
in a demo. You can also set a default mode for public access computers, great
for libraries. And as we said before you can use your existing equipment.
You don't need a touch screen. You can use Windows
8 with
the mouse and the keyboard. That has kind of been a concern I've heard
from the nonprofit and library communities. You can use Windows 8 easily
with both a keyboard and a mouse. Becky: Thank you so much Ginny. That's a
quick highlight of some of the features. And we will get to demoing some of that
a little bit later in the presentation. But we also want to be aware and make you aware
of some of the considerations to think about before you make the switch to upgrade. So if
you are curren
tly running Windows XP or Windows 7 or Vista, here are some things to think about.
We also have a lot of resources that we will share at the end of the presentation that
walk you through some of the questions about should you upgrade, and how to do so.
So know that this is not a comprehensive list but here are a few things to consider.
And I will hand it back to Ginny. Ginny: So one thing you might be concerned
with especially if you are upgrading from XP; is your existing software
going to work
with Windows 8? Microsoft has a really great resource
on their site, a Compatibility Center where you can search your software
and see if it will work with Windows 8. So we definitely recommend using that
before considering making upgrade. If you use a lot of software that is not supported
by Windows 8 you might need to rethink upgrading. Number two, this new look is going to require
a learning curve for your staff and users. As we will show you later in the
demo, Windows 8 has a new start scre
en. It takes a little bit of getting used to,
so it will require some additional training. Number three, low resolution monitors
and/or graphics cards will reduce some of the enhancements in Windows 8.
There are certain features that you can do that won't work with low resolution monitors. So
if that is the equipment that you currently have you might need to consider upgrading it or
just not upgrading to Windows 8 right away. Becky: Great. They are really helpful things to
think about especially
if your key critical programs, if your financial software that you need to
balance your books every year is not compatible yet with Windows 8 then that is definitely
something to really think about before you make the
upgrade across your office. So with that we will go ahead and get started with
a live demo. We'll show you a few things in this. We are not going to have time to cover everything,
so we just want to take a little bit of time to walk you through. And Ginny is
going to be nice enoug
h to show us how she has her Windows 8 set up and
show us some of the differences and hopefully answer a lot
of your questions along way. And after that we will talk a little bit about
our donation programs and share some or resources. So with that Ginny, you can
go ahead and share your screen and we will get started
with the live demo. Ginny: So I have just pulled up the
fabulous start screen in Windows 8. This is sort of like the
marquis feature of Windows 8, one of the biggest changes
between
Windows 8 and Windows 7. So you might be familiar with Windows 7
or any of the older versions of Windows where they have the start
button in the lower left-hand. This is the start button — it's basically
everything that you would find in your start button blown up into an entire screen. So what you are
seeing here are live tiles which are specially made, Windows 8 apps that will show information
on these live tiles from the app. So you can see right here in this corner, this
is my people app an
d it's pulling in the photos of all of my contacts on my e-mail address
in Gmail. So it keeps updating with that. And then you can see down here there is
a news tile that is updating with news about the current election. And you can program some of these titles
to update with relevant information. So let's say you have stocks that you want
follow, so the stock ticker will update with that relevant information. So I am just going to do a quick
little work around the start screen. If you want to g
et to your desktop there
are a couple of different ways to do that. You can click on this desktop tile. And
let's see, I have my Word document open. So here's your standard desktop that you
might be familiar with from Windows 7. But to get back to your start screen, you can
just drag your mouse to the lower left-hand corner and you will see a little thumbnail of
the start screen. And you can click that and that will open up your start screen again.
You can also do that with the keyboard shortcut
. It makes things a little bit easier. You
can just hit the Windows key and then "D" to get to your desktop. And
I'll go back to my start screen. And then if you pull your mouse
over to the left-hand corner, you are going to bring up all of the apps that
you have open. So I opened up a bunch of apps just to demo this. So let's see, I have my travel
app open, my games and my news, and whatever. So this is a really easy way to switch
between your different applications. Let's go open something els
e up.
So we'll pull up the news app. So I can easily switch between my different
applications. By pulling this up I can go to Bing. And then on your right side, you pull your mouse
over and you are going to see these little icons. Now these icons are called your charms. And these
are really, really important buttons to learn because it makes it really easy to do certain
things in all your different applications. So you'll see the search icon
here. And we will get back to search because its a big
part of Windows
8. You have your share icon. You have your start button,
devices, and settings. So let's go to settings because one of the
things that we have heard a lot from our users is that Windows 8 makes it really hard to find
certain things that you are used to finding in Windows 7, and one of those
things is the control panel. You are used to getting the
control panel from the start button. But instead, you are going to have to access it in
a different way, but thankfully, it is really
easy. So I just want to settings from the
charm button. And you go down here, and here is your change PC settings. This is
everything that you would find in your control panel so you can personalize. You can
add different users. You can share. You can change your share settings.
You can add devices, privacy, etc. So this is a really good thing to know.
You can also get to your PC settings by just doing a simple search.
Let's say I want to find my mail app. So I am just going to search
"mail." An
d here it is. So you don't necessarily have to click
on that magnifying glass to get to search, you can just start typing. You can also search within other apps.
So let's say I wanted to find something about the election yesterday. So I can start typing
election. It is not in my apps, but I can go to Bing, click there, and it will start
searching for relevant results in Bing. Becky: Thanks Ginny. So yeah, that
start screen does look very different than what I am used using on Windows 7 or
on XP,
but I do see a lot of familiar icons, so Microsoft Office's Word, and PowerPoint
, and Excel. Those icons are all there. Do they work the same way as icons on my
regular desktop? And how did they get there? Ginny: Sure, so you will see some links to your
standard Microsoft Office 2010 applications. And when we installed these, these
shortcuts appeared automatically, and they function exactly the same way you
would expect them to on a Windows 7 desktop or on a Windows XP desktop. I can jump stra
ight
to the program just by clicking on the tile. And you will see a document
that I set up in advance. And I just wanted to show a pretty neat
feature. So when you go up to save the document, I'm going to hit save as. And you will see
under my favorites, SkyDrive is an option. Again, that is Microsoft's cloud storage service
for files. So I can select that and I can hit save. Oh, I already save that there, but I
will just replace that existing file. And then that is in my SkyDrive account. And
I
can access this document from any Windows 8 device, or from the SkyDrive web account. So that is
just a really handy feature for saving your files to the cloud. And if you want
to access them later from home or if you are working
from a different device. Becky: That's great and I would imagine
it comes in handy for shared documents where you have an annual report that
you want a board member to review. You want to save the draft to SkyDrive
and allow somebody else to review with. That kind of
cloud feature I would imagine
be really helpful for something like that. Ginny: Yeah. And it makes sharing
photos really easy as well. And I wanted to share some
of the other sharing features in Windows 8 going back to those charms.
So I went back to the start screen, and I am just going to open up my Bing news right
here. And let's see, we'll go back to the main page. And I've got some articles about nonprofits up
here. So I am just going to open this one up. And if you have a Twitter account a
nd
you Tweet from that Twitter account and you like to share news on it,
Windows 8 makes it really easy. So bringing up these charms again you will
see this share icon. And if I click that I have the option to Tweet it using MetroTwit.
I can also e-mail it using my e-mail account. And I can share with my
contacts in the people hub. So this is a really, really quick and easy
feature to share information among your colleagues or share information with your Twitter
followers. If I had Facebook on h
ere I could also share it on Facebook. It just
makes information sharing so much easier. And I really think that is a
huge benefit especially for people who are doing their own social
media work in their organization. Becky: That sounds great. So
are you installing apps yourself? Like can you install all kinds
of other apps from someplace, because you mentioned if
you have Facebook installed. Where would you go about getting those? Ginny: So Microsoft has it's very
own store for apps for Windows
8 apps. And that is this green tile right here, the
Windows Store. I'm going to click on that. And I just installed some apps so it is showing
me that right now. Let's go back to the main page. Becky: So while you are doing
that I see travel, and kayaks. So it looks like you can search all
kinds of apps from within the store. And if you travel a lot for your job or you have
field organizers or you have conferences to attend, you can install all kinds of things
that would help those folks too. G
inny: Definitely. And one of the apps that I just
wanted to show really quickly is the Skype app. It's a brand-new version of Skype just for
Windows 8. And it looks like that wasn't loading, but yeah, there are apps that are
productivity apps. There are apps for travel. There are apps for RSS feeds. We actually
compiled a whole list of our favorite apps for Windows 8, and we can point you
to that resource after this webinar. Becky: Great. Thank you Ginny. And that list
of apps that Ginny actuall
y put together, that blog post is specifically geared toward apps
that would be useful for nonprofits and libraries, or foundations, people working
in an office environment, and the needs that they have that are different
from maybe your personal needs at home. Some other things that I would love for
us to look at, you mentioned in the charms there is device installation or one that
is called device. It would be great to see since we don't have the same type of
control panel is what many of us a
re used to with the start menu, how easy is it to hook
something up and just have it installed? Like is there a printer section or something
that just detects devices like phones or iPads? Ginny: Sure. So that is
actually a really easy feature. So let's go back to these charms.
And I am going to go up into settings. There is a separate devices charm, but to add a
new device — let's just do a quick walk through. So I am going to go to change PC settings
and I already have the devices page open. S
o I am going to plug in a new device. And that will just take
a second while we do that. So you can see that something has
appeared at the top. It is unknown. Windows 8 is working to recognize it. Below
you can see we already have a Dell USB keyboard. We have OneNote. We have the optical mouse.
And slowly it is recognizing that device. But I am not installing anything. I
am not having to install new drives. I am not looking through knowledge-based
articles on how to install this new device. Wind
ows 8 is recognizing it on its own.
There we go. It is a blackberry That. Becky: Great. That's really easy. I wish
everything could hook itself up like that for myself in my own life. There are ways to do those other
things too, if you have to search and install files or put a disc in to
run something, right? Ginny: There are other ways, but for
most of the devices that you will be using I think that you won't have to do that. I mean,
I think that the way, Windows 8 is designed it is designed to
recognize a whole variety of
devices. And if it is like a blue tooth enabled device it will pick it up. You shouldn't
have any problems. But if you do, there are a lot of Microsoft support articles out
there that can tell you how to hook up that device. Becky: Great. Thank you. So we have covered
a handful of things with the look and feel in this demo. There is a lot more that people
can see. So what I want to do, unless Ginny, you have other things that you
want to show before we switch off an
d talk about the donation
program, we can do that. Otherwise we will start talking
about where people can get Windows 8. Ginny: I just wanted to show really quickly
just how to change around your start screen, because I think one concern is that these
titles are static and you can't adjust them. But it is really easy and I'm
going to show that very quickly. Let's say you want to move your Bing tile over,
you just click on to it, hold down your mouse button and drag it. And you can see that the t
iles all
sort of adjust themselves to make room for this. And you can sort your tiles by application. You
can sort them by projects that you were working on. You can pretty much arranged them any way you
would like. And if you want to delete a tile, let's say you don't really want to have a sports
ticker up on your page while you are working, you can right click on that and you will
see these options below; unpin from start, uninstall, smaller, turn live tile off. Let's just
unpin it from the st
art, and it is gone. It simple. We didn't delete it. It is still there. You can
add it back. To get to all of your applications you can just right click
anywhere on the start screen and hit this "all apps," and
they are all right there for you. Becky: Wow, that's really cool. And it is
very similar to the kind of functionality I think we are all getting used to
using more and more with Smart phones that are touch screen based. Like you said
earlier, people can use this without a touch screen and
with their existing equipment, so that
is great for folks who are in an office. But it is also probably good to be
looking at this type of technology since it is going to be the next
wave — or the current wave, but it is coming for all of us
even for offices pretty soon. So thank you so much for giving us that live
demo. I really appreciate the walk-through. And it's been educational for me as
well since I don't use Windows 8 yet. So with that, I am going to go
ahead and take the desktop back a
nd we are going to pop
back into some of our slides and just talk a little bit about our donation
program. Windows 8 is available through TechSoup for a donation to eligible nonprofits,
public libraries and foundations. You can check the donation program
eligibility by looking at this link here which will be sent out in
the follow-up information. You can see what your organization
is eligible to receive and request. We have four different versions of Windows
8 available. There is Windows 8 Profe
ssional or Enterprise in both
32 and 64 bit versions. So you can click on those links
afterwards to check out the actual product. If you are running Home Editions
or versions of operating systems that you don't have legal rights
to have installed on your machine and you are trying to figure out
how the heck to make them legal, and how to get them into the
Professional or Office grade version, you would want to check out our Get
Genuine program through Microsoft. That is a one-time only program
t
o get your equipment upgraded to the right most recent program. You can also upgrade with Software Assurance.
If you have received donated software through TechSoup from Microsoft in the past two
years, you may be eligible to upgrade for free with Software Assurance. And most of
our donated programs with Microsoft come with Software Assurance and they provide
a variety of benefits including the upgrades, but also things like e-learning
and trainings for your staff many of which are geared toward
nonprofits.
So definitely check out those benefits to see if you are eligible
to upgrade totally free. Also you can go to this page on our site which
is our Windows 8 for Nonprofits, Foundations, and Libraries page where you can see the
product information for both Windows 8 and also Windows 7 if you are not quite
sure you are ready to make the leap to 8 and you are still running Vista or
XP. Also below this you can't see, but below we have a lot of resources including
some of the articles abou
t how to upgrade and should you upgrade, a lot of blog posts
including the test run that we did here installing it on a seven-year-old
computer, details about keyboard shortcuts, the Microsoft Compatibility Center where
you can see if your programs are compatible with Windows 8 yet or not. It will help you
make the decision about whether or not Windows 8 is right for your organization. So with that I will just go ahead
and jump us to some resources. Some of these I have already mentioned
and the
se will also be shared later. So take a moment to look these over, and
we have a few more on the screen as well. We have just launched the Windows
8 Apps for Social Good Contest where organizations and developers and
individual coders and hackers can create apps that are intended for social good for the
Windows 8 platform, mobile or desktop platform, and compete to win up to $15,000 in prizes
to make those apps more widely available. So go ahead and look
some of these things over. And with that
I would like to thank
our presenter. Thank you so much Ginnie for giving us this great walk-through. And I would also like to thank ReadyTalk for
giving us this product to use to host our webinars. And with that, thank you so much and I hope
you will join us again for a future webinar. Thanks a lot Ginnie. And we will be glad to answer
your questions in the formum. Please join us there.
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