Assessment and Planning Toolkit 5.0

A free planning tool, the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit, has been updated to help organizations prepare to deploy Office 2010, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Hyper-V. MAP finds computers on a network; compiles hardware, driver, and software inventories; and then determines whether the computers are ready to run the latest versions of Windows or Office. Detailed reports show what needs updating. MAP 5.0 includes a new Software Usage Tracker which demonstrates a particularly useful licensing compliance feature: the ability to count client accesses to Windows Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and SQL Server.

Toolkit Now Helps with Licenses

MAP is a Microsoft Solution Accelerator assessment and planning tool targeted at IT professionals beginning a software migration or deployment process. The tool inventories an organization’s current environment and assesses the readiness of those computers for migration to the latest versions of Windows and Office, including Office 2010, and then prepares recommendations for hardware and software updates that may be needed. MAP is an agentless tool that uses technologies already available in an IT environment, such as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), the Remote Registry Service, Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), and the Computer Browser service to perform inventory and assessments.