Microsoft Gives $1M to Atlanta History Center
John Manasso
November 30, 2007

Thanks to a $1 million gift from Microsoft Corp., the Atlanta History Center will be able to put more of its collections online, allowing people to more easily access its extensive genealogical database and Civil War archives.

The gift is the third to the History Center from the Seattle-based software giant since 2000. The three gifts total more than $1.4 million.

"A lot of these nonprofits have pretty archaic computing systems, to put it bluntly," said Chris Jones, who, as Greater Southeast district general manager, oversees Microsoft's 250 employees at its Alpharetta offices. "They were really running into problems. Computers down when visitors there. They weren't backing up. All of Atlanta's history is there and there was no backup. You're potentially at risk of losing data that's a good part of Atlanta's history."

Instrumental in putting the two parties together was TechBridge, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that Microsoft founded and whose mission is to provide information technology services to other nonprofits.

Microsoft's gift will provide software, training, online security and also hardware. Jones sits on the board of TechBridge, which helps 180 nonprofits locally.

"We can find grants and funding for the digitization," said Casey Steadman, the History Center's chief financial officer. "Typically, we don't find hardware and the back end. This allows us to develop and to grow our servers to do more."

Steadman said that in the next 12 to 18 months the History Center hopes to put many of its photo archives online for the public to purchase.

The software that the center will receive will come in the form of Microsoft's Office suite. Steadman said the center's employees will receive training and certification in those programs.

The use of that software, in particular the small-business program SharePoint, will come in handy so that the center's employees will be able to work together better online and share resources. That is especially important for the organization as it has two campuses, the Margaret Mitchell House in Midtown and the main center on 33 acres in Buckhead, along with several other historic homes.

"It will help us along with staff development to improve our day-to-day experience," Steadman said, "sharing files and accessibility to information and online forms. That's important to us."