Free Tools: Taking stock of what’s in house with MAP 5.5
It’s January, start of a new Calendar year and typically time for regular folk to take a personal inventory of what’s been going on over the last year and plan for what lies ahead. IT departments don’t necessarily run on the same schedule, but you might find that you have cycles to check up on what’s in your shop in order to help plan for the future. I just got an internal notice that the final version of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning toolkit version 5.5 has been released for FREE (as in beer) download from here. In case you are not up to speed on what it does or what that means, here’s the official blurb.
The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit makes it easy to assess your current IT infrastructure for a variety of technology migration projects. This Solution Accelerator provides a powerful inventory, assessment, and reporting tool to simplify the migration planning process.
MAP 5.5 is an agentless, automated, multi-product planning and assessment tool for quicker and easier desktop and server migrations and upgrades. MAP provides detailed readiness assessment reports and executive proposals with extensive hardware and application information, and actionable recommendations to help organizations accelerate their IT infrastructure planning process, and gather more detail on assets that reside in their current environment. MAP also provides server utilization data for Hyper-V server virtualization planning; identifying server placements, and performing virtualization candidate assessments, including ROI analysis for server consolidation with Hyper-V
Yup – if you don’t have access to big enterprise class monitoring solutions or want to have some nicely purpose formatted reports, this free download is for you. Remember – this is a Multi-Project reporting tool. You can use the information gathered over a user determined period of time for the following reports:
- Windows Azure Platform
- Windows 7 & Internet Explorer 8
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- Hyper-V
- SQL Server 2008 R2
- PC Security
- Microsoft Office 2010
- Cost Control
- Software Licensing & Asset Management
There are some seriously good reports generated from using this tool. You should check out the MAP toolkit homepage for more details on how you can use this puppy in your environment.
Still hesitant? relax… The download contains a 40+ page training kit with sample data and reports you can use to find out just what you are looking for with your collected data.
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