Microsoft has accompanied Windows Vista to the market with a comprehensive package of products designed to support the upgrading and migration from older versions of the Windows operating system, to the latest client available. In this context, while home users running XP had the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisorat their disposal, business customers could leverage the power of the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment. The Windows Vista Hardware Assessment solution accelerator grew to version 2.1 in 2007, and Microsoft announced its evolution past Vista at the TechEd IT Forum 2007, in Barcelona, in November 2007. Now, the company has made available the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Beta Refresh for Windows Vista & Windows Server 2008.
"MAP is an automated agent-less network-wide inventory and assessment tool that can quickly determine if your organization's desktops
and servers are ready for migration to Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. What do I mean by AGENT-LESS inventory? Simply put, it means that you do not need to launch any software agents on any of those machines you want this tool to inventory and query - so no more security concerns and user interruption! It offers quick network-wide inventory of machines and generate hardware and device compatibility reports with actionable recommendations in the form of auto-generated proposal documents - perfect documentation for your IT project planning in the new fiscal year," revealed Baldwin Ng, Senior Product Manager on the Microsoft Solutions Accelerators team.
Essentially, the Microsoft Assessment and Planning is nothing more than the expanded version of the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment 2.1. The solution accelerator in its current form is able to produce multiple assessments and reports, while performing a single inventory of an IT infrastructure, and to draw conclusions not only for desktop and server migration, but also for the virtualization options Microsoft is offering.
MAP 3.0 comes to the table with all the features of Windows Vista Hardware Assessment, including support for English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese. But, Microsoft has also added assessment capabilities for hardware migration to Windows Server 2008, as well as evaluation for Windows server virtualization (but just Virtual Server 2005 R2; Hyper-V will be added later into 2008), all wrapped with a brand new Graphical user interface.
"Through the use of a sophisticated, agent-less and network-wide inventory engine, Microsoft Assessment and Planning will be able to discover machines on your network whether they are in workgroups or managed AD environments. By way of WMI, Win32, SNMP and other protocols, we can then securely collect hardware and device attributes of each machine and auto-generate migration readiness reports in Microsoft Word and Excel for the user," Baldwin Ng, added.
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