As you may know, NTEN hosted a midsummer mixer with Google [1]at their campus in the South Bay. By all accounts it was lively and fun! I couldn't be there for the free food, cocktails, or the sounds of DJ Hey Man [2], but I am lucky enough to share with you the big announcement from the event (drum roll please!):

Google is now extending Google Apps Education Edition [3] to all registered nonprofits.

For those of you who are already using the free standard edition, this means that you will now have access to:

• Email migration assistance
• 24/7 support
• Integration APIs.

You can read more about the features here [4].

Why is this important?

First, Google provides powerful and usable tools already, often for free. Extending a nonprofit productivity suite allows even small organizations to take advantage of some very solid applications. Coupled with the Google Earth announcement [5], and Google Ad grants [6] long underway, this signals that Google is making an investment in the nonprofit community, increasing the options for all organizations.

Furthermore, software as a service is becoming ever more important to the sector. Soon enough, we'll be untethered from our PCs (or Macs: shout out to the NTEN Mac users out there!) and we'll be accessing information on devices we've yet to imagine (though in my imagination they look a lot like the iPhone). The increasing ability to access our work from any device, anywhere with Internet access feels liberating and will change the way we work. We should start that change now.