Yes. Empowering.Cloud will always be free for Individual IT professionals.

It takes a lot of research, time and effort working with great experts, Microsoft and customers organisations using Microsoft Teams to keep our briefings informative and up to date. Fortunately, Empowering.Cloud is supported by six fantastic benefactors, AudioCodes, AVI-SPL, Dubber, Luware, Neat and Ribbon and a wider number of supporters. They believe in our mission and help fund the work, enabling you to access free, up-to-date, independent information.

Empowering.Cloud is co-founded by Tom Arbuthnot, a Microsoft Certified Master and MVP since 2011 and James Rodd, previously founder and CEO of Microsoft collaboration specialists Modality Systems. Tom Morgan. Microsoft MVP has created the platform (Azure based) and provides Microsoft Teams development monthly update and briefings. We are a Microsoft partner and part of the Microsoft Start-up Program. 

However, most importantly, Empowering.Cloud would not be possible without the support of a global community of experts providing insights, advice and guidance for Empowering.Cloud briefings and everyone sharing their real world experiences. Empowering.Cloud is really the combined knowledge of our community.

Creating great Microsoft Teams advice and training takes a lot of time and research. Working with experts. Microsoft and organisations using Microsoft Teams is the only way to get a complete picture and provide real-world advice. We want to empower as many people as possible, the support of our Benefactors and Supporter sponsorship allows us to invest the time needed and provide the advice and training for free in a sustainable way. 

Benefactors have each made a significant contribution to supporting Empowering.Cloud and get benefits in return, including brand awareness and Tom Arbuthnot working with them directly, for example, joining webinars and co-creating product briefings for their offerings. Any content created with Benefactors will be clearly identified as such. Benefactors and Supporters have no editorial influence on our content.

Sponsors provide a smaller but still greatly appreciated level of support for nothing in return other than supporting Empowering.Cloud and the community.

Both Benefactors and Sponsors support what we do. We could not do this without them, thank you.

Categorically No. Benefactors and Supporters understand and agree that Empowering.Cloud to be valuable and credible, the advice and training must be independent of any vendor, Microsoft or partner influence. As part of signing up as Benefactors, Tom Arbuthnot will work with Benefactors on webinars and product briefings which will be made available to Empowering.Cloud members, but this will be clearly identified as benefactor content and separate to Empowering.Cloud briefings and content.

You are always welcome to be part of Empowering.Cloud and access our briefings and advice at no cost. Our Empowering.Cloud Premium subscriptions are for organisations who want to proactively drive the training experience within their IT organisations, ask questions, share information and advice with peers in private discussion areas and directly ask questions.

We take your privacy seriously. Your personal information will not be shared with benefactors or sponsors. To deliver you a great experience Empowering.Cloud platform is built on Microsoft Azure and uses several supporting services such as Auth0 for secure authentication, Outseta for membership management and Matomo for usage analytics. For full details on how we handle your data, please see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service at the bottom of this page. If you have any questions please contact hello@empowering.cloud