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Microsoft MAP Toolkit 6.5 Beta Program Now Open

Microsoft has opened its Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 6.5 Beta review program. MAP Toolkit 6.5 is an agentless inventory, assessment, and reporting tool that helps administrators understand their current IT infrastructure and determine which Microsoft products best fit their needs.

MAP Toolkit can help determine whether infrastructure is ready for Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Office 365, or Windows Server 2008 R2. It identifies computers running Windows Server operating systems or virtual technologies, as well as those lacking up-to-date security software. It can discover and report on computers running Microsoft, VMware, and Linux platforms, including Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) application stacks. It can also discover virtual machine (VM) candidates, inventory Microsoft SQL Server instances, databases, and components, and discover MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase databases. To make the process easier, MAP Toolkit includes numerous wizards to help with setup, hardware and software assessments, and report and proposal generation.

New features in the MAP Toolkit 6.5 Beta include:

  • Ability to customize Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track configurations;
  • Ability to set usage thresholds for virtualization hosts and infrastructure;
  • Enhanced user interface controls that enable users to find, filter, and select the list of machines targeted for virtualization;
  • Additional in-depth migration analysis of applications to the Windows Azure platform;
  • Software usage tracking for Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) servers;
  • Discovery and reporting of active devices running the Windows operating system;
  • Discovery and reporting of SQL Server "Denali";
  • Discovery and reporting of Oracle instances on HP-UX-based Itanium servers; and
  • General usability enhancements.

The Microsoft Assessment and Planing Toolkit is provided by the Microsoft Solution Accelerators team to help organizations plan, deploy, and manage new Microsoft technologies. It is freely available and fully supported by Microsoft. For more information or to download the toolkit, visit the Microsoft site.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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