Breaking News: Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 6.5 is RTW

RTW = Released to the Webitubes

Today Microsoft releases the next version of the MAP Toolkit.  MAP, in case you weren't aware, stands for Microsoft Assessment and Planning.  And a brand new version (v6.5) is now available to download.

“What does it do?”

I’m glad you asked.  The MAP Toolkit is the Swiss Army Knife of all of the Solution Accelerators, in that it allows you to perform assessment of your environment/infrastructure/architecture/network/servers/workstations/software, and then gives you recommendations (a plan) for making a change.  That change could be upgrading to the newest version of Windows or Office, or determining which servers are most likely candidates to be virtualized. 

Here is the summary paragraph from the MAP Solution Accelerator page:

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is an agentless inventory, assessment, and reporting tool that can securely assess IT environments for various platform migrations—including Windows 7, Office 2010 and 365, Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, Windows Azure, and Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track.

“Cool. So what’s new?”

How about being able to survey and report on all of the VMware resources (products, hosts and virtualized workloads) to aide you in determining when it might make sense to move virtualized resources to Hyper-V; which is a better platform for running SQL or Exchange Server on anyway.

Another new addition is something called the “Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track Onboarding Assessment Report”.  The tool will analyze what your infrastructure looks like and what the next logical steps would be if you are interested in implementing a Private Cloud as defined by the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track.

“Sounds great, Kevin. But what does it cost?”

It’s a Solution Accelerator, so it’s FREE.  It costs nothing.  $0.00.  Download it today.