Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit Version 9.x

Abstract

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is an free inventory, assessment, and reporting tool from that helps you assess your current IT infrastructure and determine the right Microsoft technologies for your IT needs.

Sample

Whether you're an IT professional, a partner or a consultant, the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit helps you understand your organization's IT infrastructures and assets. It helps you determine the right Microsoft technologies for your needs. This free Solution Accelerator (a "helper" tool) can quickly inventory small or large IT environments and provides insight into your ability to migrate to the latest versions of Microsoft products. MAP is an ideal assessment and planning tool for the following key benefits.

Key Benefits

•  No cost, free download
• Provides a fast, scalable and agentless inventory with low overhead
• Discovery of Devices and Applications
• Integrated Automated Toolkit for migration planning from desktops to servers
• Multi-Product Planning and Assessment Tool & Technology for migration and readiness assessment and proposal generation
• Readiness reports and proposals for the Windows 8.x, Windows 7 operating systems, Microsoft Office 2013 and 2010, and Windows Server 2012 R2 and 2008 R2
• Server Consolidation and Virtualization Assessment to help you identify underused resources and determine server virtualization candidates
• Capacity planning for server, desktop and virtualization projects
• SQL Server inventory and database discovery for consolidation
• Reduces time and administrative costs for managing software, servers, and CAL licensing assets
• Public and private cloud capacity and migration planning
• Software usage and performance tracking

What is MAP?

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is Version 9.1 as of this writing. The MAP Toolkit is a free Microsoft download that is an agentless (meaning there is nothing to install on the client machines) inventory, assessment, and reporting tool that can securely assess your IT environments. I like it for its simplicity to take a hardware and software inventory without any of the political or financial constraints sometime involved with a "fee-based" inventory tool; often involving a debate as to what needs to be purchased and from whom. No discussion, it doesn't cost anything.

MAP toolkit uses commonly found IT technologies, that are usually already in place, for its assessment and reporting such as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), SMS Provider, and typical networking technologies (such as IP subnets, etc.) to collect data in your environment for computer inventories, computer hardware, software, and operating systems in small or large IT environments without installing any agent software on the target computers.

The data and analysis provided by MAP streamline the planning process for software migration, help assess device driver availability, and allow you to make hardware upgrade recommendations. The MAP Toolkit also gathers performance metrics from computers you are considering for virtualization and includes a feature to model a library of potential host and storage hardware configurations. Use the MAP Toolkit to simplify the planning process for migration to Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Office 2013, Microsoft Office 365, Internet Explorer 11, Windows Azure Platform, Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft SQL Server 2012, Hyper-V, Hyper-V R2, and Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track.

After you have installed the MAP Toolkit, you can begin the data collection process. There are two wizards that are used to collect the data required for most scenarios. These are:

•  Inventory and Assessment Wizard
• Performance Metrics Wizard

The Inventory and Assessment Wizard is your starting point with MAP based on different inventory scenarios. The scenarios you use determine the technologies used to collect information from your environment. The scenarios are listed in figure 1.

It's important to note that the MAP Toolkit uses collection protocols to communicate with computers in a network in order to collect information to use in the various assessments. The communication is subject to specific administration and security settings on the target computers and is based upon many things including the operating system, firewall and anti-virus settings as well as the information that you are trying to collect. In this scenario you will gather the user accounts and passwords needed to connect and successfully inventory your environment in advance of running the toolkit.