Earlier this week our friends at Microsoft Community Affairs hosted a webinar to show nonprofit organizations What’s New in Office 2010.  Product Manager Markus Weickenmeier and TechSoup Staff Writer Elliot Harmon walked the participants through the compelling new features in Office 2010.

Through our Scheduled Support customers, we are seeing a lot of interest in Office 2010 with many having upgraded already or making plans to do so.  Before diving into the presentation and demo, a quick Live Meeting poll was conducted to see what version of Office the participants were using.  The results showed that almost 20% (out of 253 responses) have already upgraded to 2010 with 44% and 27% on 2007 (or 2008 for Mac) and 2003 (2004) respectively.  It’s interesting to see a more aggressive adoption of 2010, compared to the slower migration to 2007.  I suspect that this is being influenced by the upgrade of older Windows XP computers to newer desktops running Windows 7.

Getting back to the webinar, below are some the new features and capabilities that stood out for me:

• Online Collaboration: Office 2010 allows for online document collaboration regardless of location – across branch offices, from home, while travelling, with volunteers or board members.  This is supported in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, although the implementation varies by application.  For Word and PowerPoint, co-authoring is provided through the desktop application.  Spreadsheet collaboration is accomplished using the free Excel Web App.  OneNote supports multi-user access in both the desktop and web applications.

• Social Connector: With the Outlook Social Connector, you can synchronize Outlook contacts with social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Windows Live, and SharePoint.  When one of your Outlook contacts updates their profile on one of these sites, this information will be available in your address book.  Beyond the social aspects, the Connector allows you to quickly view your history of email, meetings, and attachments with any contact, which can help with that needle in the haystack search for a piece of information that you desperately need to locate right now.  Some of the features are still in Beta, but the Facebook Connector is currently available and supports earlier versions of Outlook (2003/2007) as well.

• Photo/Video Editing: With the new built-in features, you can easily clean-up a picture or trim a video directly within Word and PowerPoint.  While not as robust as stand-alone photo or video editing software, this in-house capability greatly simplifies the process of doing minor touch-up to increase its effectiveness in a report or presentation.

• Presentation Broadcasts: PowerPoint Broadcast Slide Show allows you to easily share a presentation to a remote audience.  From the comfort of your desktop, you can broadcast a slide show that participants can quickly connect using their web browser or smartphone.  Using the video export feature, you can convert your presentation into a video suitable to be burned to DVD or shared online.

Thanks to Microsoft and TechSoup for putting this webinar together.  If you were not able to join the live event or would like to view it again, Microsoft has posted the presentation materials online at http://bit.ly/ngowebinar.  In addition, TechSoup has posted a blog about the webinar, including resources to learn more, at http://bit.ly/officewebinar.

Have a great weekend!

Picking up the thread from Alison’s post on unplugging, I am moved to share a few observations about what it’s been like to plug back in after a significant hiatus from the office and from interaction with technology.

Defining “unplugged”

The first part of July I took three weeks of vacation and went on a road trip with my family. We drove 2,000 miles and covered parts of the OR and CA coast, the Redwoods, Sonoma wine country, Palo Alto and San Francisco. I share this not to bore you with the entire itinerary, but to give you a sense of the scale of the trip and of how unplugged I was. I didn’t check work email after the first few days, there were long gaps in cell phone coverage, and I went 2.5 solid weeks without looking at a computer monitor except for educational displays at park system exhibits, and Facebook on my phone — which is a recreational break for me from my dependency on email at my desk.

The experience of being unplugged

I had some withdrawal pangs at first, but I eventually settled in quite nicely to the long view of magnificent scenery and the joys of real time conversation. Mostly I enjoyed focusing on one thing at a time, making me a case study for the brain research that tells us multitasking is impossible for our neural circuitry, and we end up shortchanging the whole list of things we’re trying to do at the same time. Like trying to talk with my partner on the phone while sneakily typing - it never works, I always get caught, and I have to rewrite anyhow. Why not just take a moment to talk? 

Plugging back in

Now I’m back at work, digging out my inbox and re-engaging with projects I put down for 3 weeks. A few observations stand out from my reentry:

The economy is taking a toll. Headlines in three weeks worth of the Puget Sound Business Journal include the closures of  Taproot’s Puget Sound area office and of Unitus, and “Foundation grants to stay down, survey says”. It’s one thing to live with the “new normal” day to day, but coming back and seeing the accumulated evidence is sobering.

NPower does great work for nonprofits. Reading the kudos and thank you notes that came in from customers while I was gone were a reminder of our expertise and of the quality relationships we build with our community partners. It made me proud.

Exciting times are ahead. NPower Seattle is on the brink of some exciting changes to our services and our service area. Technology changes fast, but there is staying power to that 12-year-old idea that a nonprofit providing technology solutions to the nonprofit sector could change the game. I am happy to be a part of making that happen, one focused moment at a time.

Though this announcement is not directly technology related, we offer it as a service to our nonprofit partners. (Credit to The Nonprofit Center in Tacoma for a snappy recap of the issue.)

The IRS has released the list of those nonprofit groups that face losing their exempt status because they failed to file their returns for three consecutive years. Organizations who have failed to file for the last three years and were supposed to back in May (which includes groups whose fiscal year ends on December 31) have until October 15 to file, so if you are on this list be sure to get in compliance. 

Some facts about the Washington nonprofits on the list:

There are 8,128 nonprofits in the state that are at risk of losing their exempt status

• 1652  of those organizations are in Seattle
• 427 are in Tacoma
• 198 are in Olympia
• 398 are in Spokane

Update: (7/21/10) As of today, the TechSoup/Microsoft webinar on Office 2010 is FULL!  A recording of the webinar will be posted online after the event.  You can access it, along with other Microsoft Community Affairs webinars, at http://bit.ly/ngowebinar.

Join Microsoft Community Affairs on Tuesday, July 27th for a sneak peek of what’s new in Office 2010:

Event Title: Microsoft Office 2010: What’s the latest & why we like it

Event Time: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM PDT

Event Description: The latest version of Microsoft Office was released to the world last month. Should you upgrade? Should you care?  In this FREE webinar, co-hosted by TechSoup and Microsoft, nonprofits and public libraries can see what’s new with Office and why there may be some compelling reasons to make the switch.

Elliot Harmon from TechSoup, author of What Your Organization Should Know About Office 2010, will be joined by a Microsoft Office expert to highlight some of the new features like Web Apps for improved online collaboration, the Social Connector tool to bridge your Outlook to social media tools, as well as improvements to built-in image and video-editing features throughout the suite. In addition, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of upgrading at your organization, compatibility with older versions of the Office suite, and how you can go about upgrading your donation through TechSoup or Microsoft Software Assurance.

Register now!

Have you wondered whether you should be writing “email” or “e-mail”? Should be “Web site” or “website”?

To help with questions like these, Yahoo has recently published “The Yahoo! Style Guide: Writing, Editing, and Creating content in the Digital World”, and hopes will be the definitive style and grammar guide for online writing. (To answer the questions above, they weigh in with “email” and “website”.)

The Yahoo Style Guide stands to serve as a convenient reference for grammatical questions and writing style for the web. While the free, online version is said to only contain excerpts from the printed book, it still contains enough content and advice to serve as a stand-alone reference for many users. Those interested in reading the full version can purchase print copies from several online book sellers. Here are a few of the rules included in the online guide to give you an idea:

• Don’t include the http:// before a website address or the slash (/) at the end when writing. For instance, when writing out a web address, use npowerseattle.org or www.npowerseattle.org instead of writing out http://www.npowerseattle.org/ . The “www” part of internet addresses is optional.
  
• File names should remain in all lower case letters (setup.exe), but extension and file types should be in all caps (JPEG, GIF).
• Use their word list to look up how to spell out or use tech-related words. In addition to preferring “email” and “website”, they also prefer “3D” over “3-D”, and they say that we are not supposed to use “Google” as a verb. (Use phrases like “search for” instead.)

More than just new spelling and grammar rules, the guide has a lot of great tips for writing content for the web. Visit their “Writing for the Web” section for a lot of good articles on topics like identifying your audience, search engine optimization, writing for mobile readers, gender-neutral language, and site accessibility.

Take a look through the Yahoo! Style Guide and let us know what you think in the comments. Are you an “e-mail” person? Do you have other style guides that you prefer for online writing?

Finally, it feels like summer. My family is looking forward to a relaxing weekend. The kids are headed to Mimi and Gramps’ house, while Scott and I enjoy a date weekend. As we planned this weekend, we thought we’d head out of town so we wouldn’t be tempted by our weekly chores. We love spending time together, but in a life that is consumed by family and work the pull to try and stay ahead is pretty strong.

This morning, as I was checking my personal email I came across a blog post asking “Can You Unplug?” (No judgment on what I read, please.) I’m afraid my answer is often—No.
To honor date weekend, I’m inspired to turn off my email, twitter feed and facebook status checking and enjoy some old fashioned downtime—I’m sure that I’ll be more refreshed and ready to tackle the world. Maybe you’ll join me in unplugging for the weekend? I bet the work will still be there on Monday.
-Alison

P.S. Wondering why we (the collective we) can’t put down our smart phones? It’s a psychological condition (not sure if that makes me feel better or worse) called variable reinforcement scheduling —read more about it here, Vacation Unplugging.

For two days last week, the leadership team at NPower dug in deep to build our team and expand our leadership skills. We were fortunate to be facilitated by the always on point Amanda Madorno of Roam Consulting. It was a terrific couple of days capped off with good food (we love the Meydenbauer Center), great conversation and of course a team of people who are dedicated to making NPower a success.

To prepare ourselves for our time together, we read The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni—a fable about a technology team. (For real, it wasn’t about us, though each of us saw characteristics of ourselves). We conducted a self assessment on the performance of our team. Turns out “we’re not that concerned with titles and status” but we’ve got some work to do “pointing out team members unproductive behaviors”. We spent time developing our team norms (be a Tigger, not an Eyore was one of my favorites), conducting an archaeological dig of our culture and learning ways to productively deal with conflict (We all agreed that conflict is hard, but is good and we are committed to saying all that needs to be said in our team meetings)

From the moment we walked in the room, it was clear to me that our team was committed to the mission of NPower. We’ve definitely got our work cut out of ourselves as we create and innovate new ways to provide optimal technology to our community, but I’m really pleased this is my team.

-Alison

PS-I had good intentions to take lots of pictures, but alas the only pics are of one of our team challenges. See if you can figure out the challenge.