1. Budgeting: Cloud computing changes your IT from a Capital Expense (Capex) to an Operational Expense (Opex). Picture it as the difference between a) building a power plant when you need electricity (buying a server) and b) buying electricity from your local electric company when you need it (cloud model).  The cloud can help you save money but you need to be prepared for this shift from large one-time costs to smaller monthly costs.  Your budget needs to be aligned with the reality of paying for the computing you need monthly.
2. Organizational Analysis: The cloud is very flexible and can scale up or down based on your needs, but it requires that you be an active participant in communicating those needs to your cloud provider.  If your environment is running too slow, you need to let your cloud provider know.  You may need more bandwidth or have your server beefed up.  If you need to add more users, or if one set of users needs a different set of functionality than another, you need to communicate that to your cloud provider.  The cloud can be tailored to your nonprofits needs.  Doing so will save you money.  But your analysis of the day-to-day needs of your nonprofit is what determines the extent to which your environment gets tailored.
3. Change Management: Change.  It sounds easy, but you need to be able to work with your employees and coworkers to make sure that everyone transitions smoothly to the cloud. They will have to adopt slightly different working habits (very slightly). Make sure that people are not left behind in a state of confusion.  A good service provider will help ease this transition.
4. Disaster Preparedness: The cloud is “always on” even if your office is not.  Prepare your organization for this new reality.  Your staff will be able to get back to work, even if they can’t get to the office.  A good disaster preparedness plan, well communicated, will help articulate this.
5. Vendor Selection: Who will have access to your essential data? How will your service provider backup your data? What will happen if you something goes wrong? What happens if your cloud provider goes out of business?  These are all essential questions to ask your provider to make sure that you are as secure as you can be in the cloud.

With Hostess shutting down, people seem to be panicking about where to get their Twinkies. Eater gives you a map of 18 places where you can get your deep-fried Twinkies before they become a thing of the past.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving. We bet you probably have some leftovers. Serious Eats gives you a bunch of creative ideas of how to use those leftovers!

Check this out- solar powered race cars in Chile.

Ben & Jerry’s hits it out of the park with engagement- their new local campaigns incorporate Instagram photos taken by customers.

These gorgeous tarts mimic Pantone colors in a display of design know-how and foodie sensibilities.

How great is this promotional idea for magazines and Windows 8? The covers look super sleek!

Warning: this is destructive to your work habits. The useless web takes you to useless and addictive websites. Ismycomputeron.com really cracked me up.

In a galaxy far, far away- there’s a planet 13 times more massive than Jupiter. That’s huge. Learn more about it!

We often speak with clients who are looking to switch to the cloud because their Exchange Server is unreliable or difficult to maintain. Those aren’t the only reasons to switch. As one client recently discovered, Exchange Servers can reach capacity. And when they do, they crash… big time.

The more users you add, and the more communication it has to handle, the more overworked your Exchange Server will become.  Slowly, over time, your server’s hard drive fills up.  Maybe you’ll catch it when it’s at 80%.  You’ll get a warning; you’ll think you have time.  Once you start to reach capacity, vital emails bounce.  Then bang, out of nowhere (or maybe because you forgot to install a bigger hard drive) your server will crash.  Now you, or your tech person, will begin the arduous task of moving your Exchange Server to a new hard drive.

It’s an expensive mistake.  Lost hours of work productivity and expert IT help add up.

Office 365 can help you avoid the Exchange Server time bomb. There’s room enough for everyone up there! The cloud scales to your needs. Let’s say you start out not needing too much from your Office 365.  That’s fine.  The nonprofit pricing for Office 365 is extremely reasonable.  But as your organization, and its functions, grow so does your need for email. Add more users, add more folders, and add more email addresses.  It’s all no problem.  The cloud can grow with you.

The baseline storage in Office 365 can store years’ worth of e-mail.  I know.  I currently have about 4 years’ worth.  But if you need to, you can always upgrade for a couple of dollars per month.   It’s the best deal going in nonprofit IT, and it ensures you don’t fall victim to the Exchange Server time bomb.

To get you in the Thanksgiving spirit, here are our two favorite Thanksgiving themed infographics.

Want to do Thanksgiving on a budget? This infographic shows you how! Also, can you guess which traditional part of the meal is getting cheaper every year?

 Let’s talk turkey travel. What was served at the first Thanksgiving? What exactly are the numbers for turkeys consumed, miles traveled and so on? This infographic has the answers!

Do you remember learning to write in cursive in school? Well, your kids might not! Kansas is thinking of removing it from schools’ curriculum, and 46 other states have adopted the new curriculum which does not require the skill.

How cool is this? Microsoft has invented a way to translate your voice into another language. This is the demo video- you’ve got to watch it. Imagine a future where all you have to do to speak Chinese is just load up a device with this program and say what is on your mind!

These augmented reality campaigns are out of this world! Trying on shoes without really having them there, interacting with polar bears and penguins at the mall…missed seeing them in your local neighborhood? Check out the YouTube videos.

We are huge fans of TED talks here in the npCloud office. So we couldn’t help but get excited when heard that TEDtalks had reached one billion views! Here’s their way of celebrating.

This is video is INSANE. No seriously- three days and 2,600 balloons later, this guy turns a room into a balloon recreation of Bag End from The Hobbit. Balloon art- it’s so much more than balloon animals.

Windows 95 changed computing forever.  Specifically Windows 95 paired with Office 95.  Together, they were a set of powerful tools with a completely new interface.  The command line of DOS 6.0 was replaced with a point and click on your mouse.  It was pretty, and it made computing accessible for a whole generation of folks who never wanted to learn about command lines or code.  I call them spoiled.

What’s funny is that a new software package has arrived that is just as groundbreaking.  Yet, it gets little fanfare.  Office 365 does for cloud computing what Windows 95 did 20 years ago.  It gives you access to a powerful set of tools and makes computing accessible in ways never before possible.  You used to have to build a server to do this stuff.  You used to need a computer that weighed 40 pounds (at home and at work).  You used to have to remember to take the documents you needed home with you at the end of the night.  You used to have to make sure the tape drive loaded properly.  You used to have to know how to resuscitate a crashed server.

Office 365 changes all of that.  And it is available to nonprofits at a fraction of the cost that it is to the rest of the world.  Let us show you what Office 365 can do for your nonprofit.  Soon you’ll be as excited as this guy.

We’ve all played with Legos, but some people take their Lego creations above and beyond. Mashable has 12 pictures of amazing Lego creations.

This is not only inspirational, but it’s also very impressive. Solar-powered internet schools in South Africa.

We are really into space, if you haven’t been able to tell from the trend running throughout the past few Happy Friday posts. Mashable compiles the 8 scariest things in space- I hadn’t even heard of some of these!

Response media doesn’t exactly have the best reputation, but this article in the Nonprofit Quarterly helps nonprofits with Google Adwords understand how they can produce the most relevant responsive content. It’s not as complicated as you might think!

Awwww! A panda baby kisses her mother. It does not get any cuter than this. And remember from an earlier Happy Friday post- looking at cute animals at work is good for you!

This is really cool- NASA will now text you whenever the ISS (International Space Station) is visible from over 4,600 locations around the world. Weather permitting, you can see it with your own eyes!

1)    One of the most important factors is broadband access. That broadband connection at home that you pay $20 a month for is about a hundred times quicker than connections costing $2000 a month just a decade ago.  Imagine broadband as a water hose that keeps getting bigger.  Eventually, the hose and the reservoir become indiscernible.

2)    Computing prices have dropped.  Servers at data centers are literally disposable.  We’re talking about equipment that would have cost $10,000 a decade ago.  It’s now cheaper to throw that equipment out than fix it.  Data centers around the globe are loading up with these cheap, disposable machines.

3)    Virtualization is changing computing.  Back in the old days, you used to run all of your programs on one server (one box).  Now multiple servers can run on one physical box.  Virtualization is like a school bus. Instead of each parent driving their kid to school each day in their car with the resulting traffic jams and waste of time and fuel or having to build lots of extra lanes on the roads, we have the kids ride a big bus that can effectively carry a lot of people. We save resources like gas and space on the highways, as well as the parents’ time.

via squidoo.com/halloween-pictures

This has been a pretty sobering week for the East Coast, where we are based. We hope that you and yours have kept safe and that you have been able to have a happy Halloween despite the devastation caused by Sandy. We are here to help and wish you and yours all the best. Here are our favorite tips, tricks, infographics, articles and videos from the past week.

Here are some great examples of nonprofits putting infrographics to good use. If you have data and want to convey it in a succinct way- this is a great way to do it!

Since it is Friday, you probably have your candy haul all stored safely away. Buzzfeed has the definitive video on Halloween candy trades- you’ll want to make sure you’re getting the best deal.

A robot using a knife kind of makes me nervous, but I have to admit that this salad making robot is pretty impressive!

Another big news story from this week- a seventh Star Wars film? What? Disney has purchased Lucasfilm.

R.L. Stine tells a very scary Halloween tale in just 13 tweets.

Want to do good while having fun? Here are 13 haunted houses around the USA that raise money for charities.

Some very exciting news for those NPOs in the UK- Kickstarter has officially launched this week in the UK!

Normally data centers stories don’t get your heart racing, but it is amazing what these employees in NYC did to keep their data center up and running during Sandy.

Someone made one of the most creative pumpkins I’ve ever seen- you can actually play Tetris on it! You’ve got to see it to believe it.

Do volunteers help run your nonprofit?

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), has become one of the most popular ways of leveraging volunteers to help run nonprofits.  It saves you the cost of buying volunteers computers, and they get the comfort of using technology they are used to.

If you’re on a cloud-based solution, it’s easy and affordable to give your volunteers an email, or access to a database.  They will be able to access it from any computer. That way if your office does not have a computer to spare for a new volunteer, they can use their own for the same functions.

Do you have any employees or volunteers offsite?

If you have employees or volunteers working for your nonprofit offsite, utilizing cloud computing is essential in making your day-to-day operations run smoothly.

For example, npTalk allows your extension to go wherever you are, so that if you’re out of the office but still at work, you won’t miss all your calls.

Cloud based email like npOffice makes sure that your email is always accessible wherever you work.   Solutions like this provide great benefits for those employees that travel a lot, work out of the office, or work in remote locations.

Is your power supply unpredictable?

If you’re in an area that experiences a lot of power surges or power outages, this could be a very important factor in switching to the cloud.

Instead of worrying that your power might go out, or surge and harm your computing capabilities (or fry your server), switch to the cloud.  Data centers are very secure and mostly immune to power fluctuations.  All the ones we work with have generators that could run the center for weeks if need be.

And if you’re in a location that doesn’t have constant internet access, don’t let that hold you back.  Talk to us about some of the cloud solutions that work best for “offline” environments.

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This is by no means a complete list of the questions you should ask, and we plan to keep this list as an ongoing project.

If you have further questions on whether or not cloud computing might be right for your nonprofit, ask us in the comments below.