Software as a service (SaaS) is an undeniably green alternative to traditional computing. It's one form of cloud computing in which people use software applications that are located on the Internet rather than on their own computers or networks. A very common example of it is web-based email. The green aspect of SaaS or cloud computing is that it shifts the computing power responsibilities to a relatively small number of Internet servers and can slow the continual demand for hardware upgrades to meet the needs of new software. Essentially, a software hosting provider can utilize a server more efficiently than you can in your office; it can also make setting up and managing your software a whole lot easier. As you rely more on the cloud, you may find that you rely less on an in-house IT person. It also usually lowers your upfront costs since you no longer have to buy and maintain the server or the software. But is it the right solution for you and your organization?

Risks

Since these services usually charge some sort of subscription fee, the lower upfront costs need to be balanced against the generally higher operating costs to determine what is right for your budget. Check out the thoughts and concerns of some of our forum users in this thread (read past the first few posts about the initial article to get to the real discussion). Their main concerns were around security, potential for data loss and availability. Major SaaS providers like Google, Amazon and Microsoft have had significant outages causing inconvenience to their users, but more importantly, one actually lost data in the process.

TechSoup Global has been rapidly expanding over the course of the past few years, with new nonprofit partners launched in 32 countries around the world (and many others on the way!)

Our partner in New Zealand participated in a party hosted by Microsoft New Zealand to celebrate their first anniversary of being part of the TechSoup Global Network. Microsoft helped support their launch and product donation program throughout organizations across New Zealand. You can read more about the event here. They created a great video that features some of the charities and social benefit organizations which have benefited from the donation program (and support) so far. Check out the clip from YouTube below the fold.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that in the U.S. in 2007, only 18% of electronic waste was collected for recycling and a full 82%, or 1.84 million tons, was disposed of, primarily in landfills.

With these types of statistics, we feel an obligation to do our part to help curb e-waste while at the same time promoting the efficient use of technology to help social benefit organizations most effectively meet their missions.

Mozilla Service Week is here! We've blogged about Mozilla Service Week a few times in the past few weeks, but if you still haven't gotten involved, it's not too late. The Mozilla Blog has a list of projects and challenges that still need volunteers. If you need help at your nonprofit but don't know where to start, try Jayne's list of short-term assignments for tech volunteers. Beth has some suggestions too.

All week, the Mozilla Service Week site will be featuring volunteer success stories. You can also follow the action on Flickr and Delicious.

Are you participating in Mozilla Service Week, either with your nonprofit or as a volunteer? If so, come tell us about it in the TechSoup forums.

Earlier this year, we hosted the first Microsoft-TechSoup Show Your Impact Story Contest and I wandted to take a moment to highlight one of the winners. Elliot blogged about another one of the winners last week. As you may have noticed, we've been writing tooklits and guides, conducting webinars, and blogging about different ways to plan and prepare for disasters and emergencies over the past couple of weeks.

This is, in part, because September is National Preparedness Month. It's also in part because it's around this time of year that the news is full of warnings about hurricanes and wildfires and we want to do our part to make sure that nonprofits and libaries have resources especially for them.

Despite the fear that talking about a major natural disaster might evoke, the resources we've been developing and sharing are really intended to help ensure that your organization can be resilient and flexible — able to adapt to any situation quickly, whether it's an emergency or an opportunity.

One such resource, is a project of the Pangea Foundation, one of the winners of that contest I mentioned earlier. They developed something called ReliefPoint, "a real-time communications hub for national disaster relief coordination and information dissemination." They initially created it in response to the October 2007 wildfires that destroyed land and homes in and around San Diego.

Initially, the region relied on all-centers in order to communicate that status of the fires to various agencies, news affiliates, and community members, but they found it to still take too long to get the information turned around. As an alternative, Pangea created (in 3 days) a hub that provided:

If you are a small to medium-sized nonprofit, why should you care about cloud computing? Because it can save you time, money and help spare the environment.

What Is Cloud Computing?

Here is how the CyberOptic Group describes it:

Essentially, cloud computing enables computer software and hardware resources to be accessed over the Internet without the need to have any detailed or specific knowledge of the infrastructure used to deliver the resources, much like a utility model. You really don't need to know what the phone company or electric company does on there end to enable calls and allow the lights to go on when you flip the switch; and, you really don't want to know as long as when you plug into it, it works.

I bet many of you are using a form of cloud computing without knowing it. Current examples are Gmail, Yahoo mail, Google Docs, Salesforce, and Microsoft Office Live Workspace. They are often called Software as a Service (SaaS). A company provides access to their software applications over the Internet and you access it through your web-browser. If you are using email hosted by a company, like one of those mentioned above, you and your staff don't have to manage an in-house email server like Exchange. You simply sign up for the accounts and all the back-end stuff is handled for you.

In April, I blogged about the NPower and Accenture survey of nonprofits and technology and encouraged people to respond. Well, thanks to everyone who participated. More than 1000 nonprofits responded and the results and analysis are in!

You can check out the full report (PDF) on NPower's site but here are some key highlights I think are interesting for others in the nptech community:

Here's a great project that Mozilla has put together in conjunction with Idealist, Social Actions, and others. For one week in September, tech experts all around the world will donate their time to organizations and individuals who need help accessing and using the Internet. It makes sense for Mozilla to take the initiative to put together a project like this; after all, it's largely volunteer efforts that have put together Mozilla products, translated them into dozens of languages, and built plugins to extend functionality in every conceivable direction. Imagine the impact that those developers, designers, and translators could achieve by focusing all of that attention on their own communities for one week.

If you head over to the Mozilla Service Week site, you can sign up as a volunteer or as an organization in need of help.

If your nonprofit or library works with supporters or community members who have difficulty hearing or are deaf, there's a cool new freebie out there to help ensure that people can communicate well by phone with you and everybody else. Please feel free to share this info with your networks, local community centers, or health care facilities.

As of January 2009, American Network has "been approved by the Federal Communications Commission to provide IP Relay, Video Relay Services (VRS) and Internet Protocol Caption Telephone Service (IPCTS)." This phone captioning service is free because it is funded by the Federal Communications Commission. 

PhoneCaption.com provides free captioning for telephone calls to help those who are hard of hearing. PhoneCaption.com supports standard phones and IP phones and sends voice dialogue via text through the Internet or your IP phone screen. The caller receives captions to read of what is being said, via the web or a Cisco 79XX IP phone screen display for example.

June marked the launch of two new international TechSoup partners: Japan and Kenya, bringing the total count of TechSoup Global Network partners to 24 (not including the original U.S. TechSoup).

TechSoup's Partner NGO in Japan is the Tokyo-based Japan NPO Center, which hosted a successful launch event at the Tokyo International Forum. Present were 48 representatives from Japanese nonprofit organizations, as well as representatives from Symantec Japan, Microsoft Japan, and Adobe Japan.

TechSoup Kenya is a collaborative effort by SANGONeT/NGO Pulse and Arid Lands Information Network (ALIN). The TechSoup Kenya donation program provides nonprofit organizations in Kenya with software for very low fees in conjunction with ICT donor partners, as well as by supporting NGOs to make the most of their ICT purchases and infrastructure.

Congratulations to all, and welcome to TechSoup Japan and TechSoup Kenya!

Check out this sweet pic of many representatives from our global partner organizations which participated in a recent Partner Summit here in San Francisco. Good people, good times.

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