Migration planning made easier with MAP Toolkit 5.5 Beta

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I’m a fan of this toolkit, not just because I’ve worked with the people who build it, but also seeing what is can do. It’s used internally by use when we visit sites, also partner use it for their customers.

Over the years it’s been improved and expanded both through changing technologies and also feedback from these beta program.

So once again a new beta is available and the opportunity to try and provide feedback is here. So for those of you familiar with MAP, jump to the bottom of this post to find the sign up details.

For those not familiar with MAP, what does it do?

In a nutshell, “Simplify planning for upgrade or migration to the latest Microsoft products and technologies.” It provides reports and analysis of your environment to help you make decisions about migration and upgrade. The 5.5 version helps with the following.

Assess your environment for upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows Internet Explorer 8 (or the latest version). This tool helps simplify your organization's migration to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8—and, in turn, helps you enjoy improved desktop security, reliability and manageability.The MAP 5.5 Internet Explorer Upgrade Assessment inventories you environment and reports on deployed web browsers, Microsoft ActiveX controls, plug-ins and toolbars, and then generates a migration assessment report and proposal—information to help you more easily migrate to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 (or the latest version).

Identify and analyse web application, and database readiness for migration to Windows Azure and SQL Azure. You cansimplify you move to the cloud with the MAP 5.5 automated discovery with detailed inventory reporting on database and web application readiness for Windows Azure and SQL Azure. MAP identifies web applications, IIS servers, and SQL Server databases, analyses their performance characteristics, and estimates required cloud features such as number of Windows Azure compute instances, number of SQL Azure databases, bandwidth usage, and storage.

Discover heterogeneous database instances for migration to SQL Server. Now with heterogeneous database inventory supported, MAP 5.5 helps you accelerate migration to SQL Server with network inventory reporting for MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase instances.

Enhanced server consolidation assessments for Hyper-V. Enhanced server consolidation capabilities help you save time and effort when creating virtualization assessments and proposals. Enhancements include:

  • Updated hardware libraries allowing you to select from the latest Intel and AMD processors.
  • Customized server selection for easy editing of assessment data.
  • Data collection and store every five minutes for more accurate reporting.
  • Better scalability and reliability, requiring less oversight of the data collection process.
  • Support for more machines.

If you are interested in this then read on…

Join the MAP beta review program for MAP Toolkit 5.5.  We’d like your feedback too.  Visit Microsoft Connect to download the beta materials.

Tell us what you think! Test drive our beta release, and send us your constructive feedback. Send your feedback and questions to the MAP Development Team. We value your input; this is the perfect opportunity to be heard. MAP 5.5 will be available for beta download through January, 14, 2011.

Already using Solution Accelerators? We’d like to hear about your experiences. Please send comments and suggestions to satfdbk@microsoft.com.