There are many choices for organizations when deciding on an messaging and collaboration platform and or provider. Most organizations will need to consider function and features compared to cost, and for Non-Profit (501(c3)) organizations that decision just can be a little easier due to Microsoft's philanthropy initiatives.
Starting in September 2013 Microsoft announced that they wanted to increase subscribers to their Office 365 platform by offering their Enterprise level 1 plan free to 501(c3) organizations and their Enterprise level 3 plan at about eighty percent off.
No for my organization that hosted our own Exchange and Lync servers we were struggling with to keep mailbox sizes reasonable, to keep server backup manageable and provide Instant Messaging features up to date the offering by Microsoft was great news. So we did our due diligence to make sure the offering wasn't a bait and switch, that the features we needed would be within the free package and that we were not going to need new software of extensive end users training.
Since we currently use Office 2010 and Lync 2010 there was nothing new and we would get OneDrive and SharePoint for an extranet. Everything was looked great and so we signed up and began mapping a migration strategy. The migration of Lync was super easy, Exchange had a few bumps but nothing major and a month later we now have all staff connecting to Office 365 for Exchange Online and Lync Online. The really remarkable part of it all is that there was no data loss and staff were typically only without email for a few hours during their mailbox migration.
All in all if your organization is a registered 501(c3) then Microsoft's Office 365 Enterprise 1 package is worth researching.
