By: Rajneesh De, DQ Channels, CyberMedia

Rakesh Wani was a worried man some 12 months back.  The administrator of the Mumbai-based NGO Pragatee Foundation was reeling under technology challenges—problems that might have seemed irrelevant to experienced CIOs in more tech-savvy enterprises, but for this NGO with rudimentary IT infrastructure this was an excruciatingly painful situation.  Same was the situation with Mukesh Sarve, Director-IT of another bigger NGO, Family Planning Association of India. Or with Anthony Thomas of another NGO, Habitat for Humanity India Trust.

Fortunately, all three of Wani, Sarve and Thomas have found their saviors. They answer by the names of Microsoft India and more emphatically Suresh Ramani of Mumbai-based SI, TechGyan, one of Microsoft’s exclusive cloud partners in India who deals with both Azure and Office 365 practices. Ramani has been working a lot with NGOs (or Not for Profits) and deploying technology solutions for them so that they are more productive. He works closely with NASSCOM Foundation and helps Not For Profits leverage technology in a more efficient and productive manner.

Over past many years, Microsoft has been jointly working with NASSCOM Foundation with the aim to propagate use of Microsoft Products and Services amongst the Not For Profits. NASSCOM has in turn been working with TechGyan and have jointly executed many workshops around the country. As a result of doing workshops, many NGOs have taken donation of Microsoft Software. However one challenge has always been, points out Ramani, that only a small percentage of these donations have actually been implemented. Another challenge was that with the various software packages that were donated, there was no view or instructions on the actual deployment.

Ramani and TechGyan was at pains to address this anomaly and accordingly under the ConnectIT program on 26th June 2015, a full day Workshop was organized for the NGOs at Mumbai Office of Microsoft. Ramani delivered the workshop and post workshop four NGOs signed up for the pilot Implementation which centered around improving productivity and processes with cloud and mobility using Office 365 as the primary platform. These NGOs included Family Planning Association of India (FPAI), Pragatee Foundation, Habitat For Humanity and Balanand.