The Heart foundation is New Zealand's heart health charity working to stop New Zealanders dying prematurely from heart disease.

 It is committed to promoting heart health through funding vital research, promoting heart healthy lifestyles and advancing cardiac care.

The Foundation is an organisation with over 120 staff.  Recently the organisation wanted to do a complete upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, and TechSoup New Zealand was able to help. 

Says the Foundation's Information Services Manager, Jonathan Boucher: "We already had a number of full XP licences, but were able to [order donations for] the remaining licences from TechSoup to ensure all machines could be upgraded to the one new operating system right across the organisation.

Jonathan also says they also took advantage of donations on offer of server software so they could also upgrade their server software from the 2003 to the 2008 version.

"This was a necessity given that our [order] of Microsoft's Dynamic CRM required at least the later 2008 server software to run on.

"Our prime drivers here were not only to upgrade our basic software systems, but also to enable, for the first time, all our data to be consolidated onto one platform.

"Up until then data was being managed from a whole variety of fragmented sources right across the organisation in the form of various old databases, Access databases and Excel spreadsheets," he says.

"This was by no means an easy load to manage, so Dynamics CRM, operating as one central data repository is now working well for us.

"Organisations like ours tend to think that we exceed the TechSoup New Zealand donation guidelines and therefore may not qualify.  But that is not always the case. We've found out that it can help us achieve what we need to in managing our data effectively and ensuring we have up-to-date software running on all our machines.

"We've gone back several times to TechSoup for our software and have saved significant amounts of money in our information and communications budgets.