Today, over on the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit Team Blog we announced the availability of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 Beta.

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is an assessment and planning tool targeted at IT Professionals to help them begin the deployment process. The tool inventories your current environment and assesses the readiness of those computers for migration to the new technology, in this case Office 2010. MAP is an agentless tool, this means it can discover the computers in your network without installing any components on the target computers. MAP uses technologies already available in your IT environment to perform inventory and assessments. These technologies include Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), the Remote Registry Service, Active Directory Domain Services, and the Computer Browser service.

MAP was originally created in 2006 to assess hardware readiness for desktop migration via an agentless inventory architecture. Over the course of the next three years MAP has been extended to assist Microsoft customers and partners to more rapidly and accurately plan for the deployment of the latest Microsoft platform technologies including Office 2010, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, SQL Server 2008, and more.

MAP is a Microsoft Solution Accelerator that serves as the starting point to help an IT Professional begin planning for Office 2010 deployments and outlines the next steps for your deployment. If you are just getting started with MAP review all of the capabilities of MAP on the MAP website.

We are particularly excited about this announcement as this release offers a complete assessment for Office 2010 readiness. Use MAP to perform an inventory and assessment of your IT environment and create two forms of output. The first is targeted at technical decision makers; this is a summary proposal which outlines the readiness of your environment for Office 2010 and outlines the next steps to drive the deployment. The second output is targeted at the IT professional; this is an Excel workbook detailing the readiness and inventory of the Office applications in the environment. Check out the sample MAP Office 2010 outputs:

• Office 2010 Assessment Report Sample
• Office 2010 Summary Proposal Sample

The actionable recommendations and assessments presented in these outputs shorten the time it takes to plan your Office 2010 migration.

You can get the MAP 5.0 Beta from the MAP Connect site (Live ID required). Download the MAP beta and get started planning your Office 2010 deployment today. We look forward to your feedback on the assessment process and tools.

-Brian Shiers, Sr. Product Manager, Microsoft Office

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Posted By: z3r010
16 Mar 2010