Just a quick note to highlight some of the great work done by the Solution Accelerator team, with the delivery of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning toolkit. This free of charge, downloadable utility provides customers and partners with a quick and easy way to assess their existing IT assets and advises on their suitability for a range of potential infrastructure upgrades including:

  • Upgrade to Windows Server 2008 - reports detailing hardware suitability and main server roles
  • Server utilisation reports with advice on how to consolidate and place workloads with our server technologies (Virtual Server 2005 R2 with Hyper-V to follow)
  • Assessment of the technology environment for the implementation of Microsoft Application Virtualisation (SoftGrid)
  • Upgrade of desktop systems to Windows Vista SP1 and / or Office 2007

map The three phase process involves a hardware inventory, compatibility analysis and readiness reporting, delivering a series of business-ready proposals as well as more comprehensive reports should you wish to dig a little deeper into the underlying data.

So, to find out more, download the Microsoft Assessment and Planning toolkit today and get stared by analysing the suitability of your environment for upgrade to the latest and greatest server, desktop and virtualisation technologies. 

NB - please note that this tool will not run on an X64 instance of Windows, as I have found out to my cost :-( ...but hey, that's what x86 VMs are for, no?  [RH]