14 DAY TRIAL // The next iteration of a Solution Accelerator offered to enterprise customers, to help them embrace the latest Microsoft technologies, has hit the first Beta development milestone. Earlier this week, the Redmond company announced the availability of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 Beta 1 bits, as well as the start of the associated Beta review program. The MAP Toolkit, which is now heading to version 5.0, can be leveraged by corporate customers in a variety of scenarios, from planning the size of their infrastructure, to accelerating IT planning. However, the main purpose of the Toolkit is to streamline the evaluation of many an IT infrastructure and products, by offering a single tool designed to centralize the assessment process.
“MAP Toolkit 5.0 is an agentless tool designed to simplify and streamline the IT infrastructure planning process across multiple scenarios through network-wide automated discovery and assessments. This Solution Accelerator performs an inventory of heterogeneous server environments and provides you with usage information for servers in the Core CAL Suite, a data center infrastructure assessment survey, and a readiness assessment for the most widely used Microsoft technologies—now including Office 2010,” an excerpt out of the email invitation the MAP toolkit team sent to Beta testers reads.
Customers that want to join the Beta program, and download the bits can do so via Microsoft Connect. According to Microsoft, testers will get a chance to try out MAP Toolkit 5.0 Beta 1 and provide feedback only through mid-April 2010. After the Beta review program will close down, the software giant will focus on wrapping up the tool, planning to offer the final version of MAP Toolkit 5.0 in July, 2010.
Because it supports scenarios involving inventory of heterogeneous server environments, the Toolkit is tailored to:
“• Heterogeneous Server Environment Inventory for Technologies including Windows Server, Linux, UNIX and VMWare; • Ability to determine usage of deployed System Center Configuration Manager, a member of the Core Client Access License Suite; • Readiness assessment for migration or upgrade to Microsoft Office 2010,” Matt McSpirit, Microsoft, Partner Technology specialist, explained.