Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 8.5 Now Available for Download

Microsoft has made the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 8.5 available for download. MAP Toolkit makes it easy to assess your current IT infrastructure for a variety of technology migration projects. It provides a powerful inventory, assessment, and reporting tool to simplify the migration planning process.

Details
Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is an agentless, automated, multi-product planning and assessment tool for quicker and easier desktop, server and cloud migrations. MAP provides detailed readiness assessment reports and executive proposals with extensive hardware and software information, and actionable recommendations to help organizations accelerate their IT infrastructure planning process, and gather more detail on assets that reside within 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.

MAP Toolkit is one of the tools provided by the Microsoft Solution Accelerators team. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and Security Compliance Manager provide tested guidance and automated tools to help organizations plan, securely deploy, and manage new Microsoft technologies-easier, faster, and at less cost. All are freely available, and fully-supported by Microsoft.

Key features and updates

Newly designed user interface:
The MAP Toolkit 8.5 features a newly designed user interface which provides a more intuitive user experience. Scenarios have been organized into Scenario Groups to allow quick navigation and display at-a-glance summaries on individual scenario tiles. Details for each scenario can be found in the Scenario Detail Pages along with a checklist of steps needed to maximize your results and enable one-click report generation.

Lync 2013, SharePoint 2013, and Exchange 2013 Usage Tracking Support:
Groundbreaking new releases of Lync, SharePoint, and Exchange have been brought to market this year. These products provide IT organizations and their end users greater efficiency, productivity and flexibility than ever before. With the release of the MAP Toolkit 8.5, the usage tracking scenarios within MAP have been updated to leverage new usage tracking capabilities provided within Lync, SharePoint, and Exchange resulting in less administrative effort and greater accuracy to collect and report on end user access to these servers.

Enhanced Virtual Machine discovery:
Server virtualization has become the standard method for optimizing an organization's resource utilization, availability, and agility. The MAP Toolkit 8.5 assists in the effort to virtualize with added discoverability of virtual machines for software asset location and reporting to facilitate license compliance for highly virtualized environments. Additionally, the MAP Toolkit now includes enhanced inventory reports which detail the virtual machines discovered, as well as the total number of virtual machines running on each host.

Windows Volume Licensing scenario helps to Identify license status of computers running Windows Vista SP1 and newer:
Microsoft Volume Licensing gives you flexible, cost-effective access to the Microsoft products and services that your business is built upon. The MAP Toolkit 8.5 provides the ability to detect and report on the volume license status of client computers in your enterprise so you can rest assured that you are in full compliance with your volume license agreement.

Download Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 8.5:
The following file is available for download from the Microsoft Download Center. Download the files appropriate for you.

The MAP Toolkit includes the following components:
  • Microsoft_Assessment_and_Planning_Toolkit_Setup.exe. Installation package containing the tool and SQL LocalDB.
  • readme_en.htm. Available as a separate download. Provides information to read before installing the MAP Toolkit, including installation prerequisites and known issues.
  • MAP_Sample_Documents.zip. Available as a separate download. Contains sample reports and proposals.
  • MAP_Training_Kit.zip. Available as a separate download. Contains sample database and instructions for completing various exercises.


System requirements:
Supported operating systems:
  • Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012

Hardware Requirements:
A computer with at least the following minimum configuration:
  • A dual-core 1.5 GHz processor
  • 2.0 GB of RAM
  • 1 GB of available disk space
  • Network adapter card
  • Graphics adapter that supports 1024x768 or higher resolution. At 1024x768, using a DPI setting of more than 100% is not supported. At higher resolutions, DPI settings higher than 100% are supported.

Note: Inventory, assessment, and reporting performance are based primarily on the speed of the CPU and the amount of available RAM.

The full details of Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 8.5 system requirements available here.

Reference:
The MAP toolkit blog

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