Office 365 for Non-profits – the Fall 2013 update

Hi everyone, your favorite Mavideans are back with a new update to the Office 365 for Non-Profits process and a lower price-point.

It figures that right after we made the last update and got 15 customers set up and running and had just ironed out all the kinds in the system, Microsoft changed the process yet again.

On September 10th, 2013, Microsoft implemented a new website where you can create a trial and process everything you need to sign up for a non-profit account yourself.  Take a look at the main portal for Non-Profits.  If you want to skip some of the marketing fluff and just straight to signing yourself up, look at the various plans that available to non-profits (only 2 of 4 open right now, but they are the same 2 we have always had), and then click on the Free Trial button.

The good news?  E1 is still free and the price for E3 is now only $4.50 per month.   E1 includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online.  E3 is all of that, plus Office Web-Apps and the full version of Office 2013 for up to 5 devices of that user.  So if you break it down to hourly, that works out to about 3.5 cents per user per hour for email, calendar, contacts, file sharing and collaboration, instant messaging and audio/video conferencing, and the full version of Office 2013.  That’s a steal for 3.5 cents per hour.  (Never thought about it that way did you?)

The bad news is that Mavidea cannot help you through the process anymore.  You have to sign up for the trial yourself and submit all your documentation yourself.  It’s pretty easy to do from what we’ve been told (we’re not a non-profit so we haven’t see the entire process).  Follow the link above and it will walk you through getting set up.

So now you may be wondering “Where does this leave  Mavidea in the process?”

The answer is easy – we’re in almost the same spot.  With all the clients we have helped, Mavidea has become really good at migrating organizations to Office 365.  We’ve moved users with old Exchange 2003, users with Google Docs email, users with POP3 or IMAP – if you have it we’ve helped move it to Office 365.  Our processes are robust and thorough.

The migration expertise can be put to use in your organization.  Some of the nonprofits we have helped do not have a tech staff.  We can help from start to finish.  The last 200 seat nonprofit we helped had 2 internal IT staff, but they didn’t have expertise in Office 365 migrations, so we did it for them.  It was quicker and faster all the way around.  You can get a price quote for Mavidea performing your Office 365 migration here.

Office 365 migrations are a tricky thing.  Just to give you an idea of how Mavidea charges, I’ll tell you up front the average Office 365 non-profit migration works out to be about $45 per user.  There are things that make the price go up and down.  We have put together a rough list of things and affect our migration fees.

Increases Migration Costs:

  • Transferring old / archived email no longer on the server / in the mailbox.
  • Old versions of Office installed on computers (Office 2003 or Office 2007)
  • Old Exchange servers (Exchange 2000, 2003, or 2007)
  • Unknown DNS records information (email contacts or passwords)
  • Users with huge mailbox sizes (over 5 GB)
  • Transferring public folders

Decreases Migration Costs:

  • Only migrating email in current mailboxes
  • Office 2010 or 2013 already installed
  • Using POP3 / IMAP for email
  • DNS contact person current and knows passwords
  • Normal sized mailboxes (5GB or under)

We would love to help your firm get migrated over to Office 365.  If you want a price quote for your organization, please complete our Office 365 for Nonprofits migration form.

Jamie