Over the years, we’ve been bringing you the latest updates in the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit that enables you as partners to help your clients do assessments and planning for migrations within their environments. Now, the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 6.0 Beta is available for you to download through the MAP 6.0 Beta Review Program at Microsoft Connect.

In this latest version of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, you will find a ton of new features and benefits, including many cloud solutions. Here is a quick look at some of the new features available in the 6.0 version:

• Analyze your portfolio of applications for a move to the Windows Azure Platform, including helping you:
  • Catalog all of the applications in your environment
  • Estimate the needed capacity to run your applications on the Windows Azure platform
  • Evaluate applications based on migration difficulty
  • Stack rank applications in terms of migration suitability
  • Obtain a TCO-ROI analysis for the application
• Accelerate planning to private cloud with Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track Onboarding
  • Provides consolidation guidance and validated configurations with preconfigured Hyper-V Fast Track Infrastructures
  • Includes computing power, network and storage architectures
  • Provides guidance on next steps forward using Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track
• Identify migration opportunities with enhanced heterogeneous server environment inventory
  • Expanded heterogeneous server environment history to include VMware Server, vSphere, & VMware Center.
  • Inventory and reporting on the number of servers and guests deployed and managed by VMware infrastructure
  • Added capability of identifying Microsoft workloads deployed on VMware guests
• Assess your client environment for Office 365 readiness
  • Evaluates the compatibility of Office Suite software deployed in your environment with Office 365, via a hardware and software readiness assessment
  • Obtains machine level detail about why a given machine is not capable of using Office 365
  • Quickly identifies whether the Office Suite software currently being used in your environment is compatible with Office 365
• Determine readiness for migration to Windows Internet Explorer 9 & Identify web browser compatibility issues prior to Windows 7 deployment
  • Inventories your environment and reports on deployed web browsers, Microsoft ActiveX controls, and add-ons
  • Generates a migration assessment report and proposal for easier migration to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 9
• Discover Oracle database schemas for migration to SQL Server
  • Provides an estimate of the complexity of migration and suggests candidates for migration to SQL Server

Ready to get started with the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 6.0 Beta? Here are some next steps:

• Join the MAP 6.0 Beta Review Program
• Learn more about the MAP Toolkit.
• Send your questions or comments to the MAP Team.
• Follow Microsoft Solution Accelerators on Twitter: @MSSolutionAccel

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Thank you and have a wonderful day,

Eric Ligman – Follow me on TWITTER, LinkedIn, and RSS and see “What I’m thinking”
Director, Worldwide Partner Experience
Microsoft Corporation
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights