The Microsoft Solutions Accelerator team recently announced the new Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit 7.0 is now available for download.

For those of you who aren’t already familiar with MAP Toolkits, they’re agentless inventory, assessment and reporting tools that help assess an IT environment for platform migrations. MAP’s are a great tool for Volume Licensing and asset management. 

A Software Usage Tracking feature in MAP Toolkit 7.0 generates automatic reports, giving you a view of actual server usage.  This helps cut down the time and costs for managing server and client licenses (CALs) across a range of products: Windows Server, SharePoint Server, System Center Configuration Manager, Exchange Server, Forefront Endpoint Protection, Lync 2010 and SQL Server.  Our volume licensing customers generally find this to be a terrific help.

New in the latest version is an inventory scenario for tracking active users and devices in an organization – key to the Enterprise Agreement and also for maintaining Active Directory.  Lastly – the newest release includes server inventory and software usage by device and user for Lync 2010 features.  It also has capabilities to:

  • Exploring how Windows Server and System Center can manage a heterogeneous environment through VMware migration and Linux server virtualization assessments;
  • Size your desktop virtualization needs for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and session-based virtualization using Remote Desktop Services;
  • Ready your information platform for the cloud with SQL Server 2012;
  • Evaluate licensing needs with usage tracking for Lync 2010, active users and devices, SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012. 

You can also use the latest version to determine SQL Server 2012 core licensing requirements; check the MAP Team Blog here for details. 

Interested in learning more about how MAP helps with volume licensing and asset management? Plenty of resources are available here, such as how-to guides for using MAP to assess server volume licensing, case studies, and additional resources.

If you’re already using Solution Accelerators and have comments or suggestions, please send them to satfdbk@microsoft.com.  As always, we’re curious how volume licensing customers benefit from MAP, so feel free to share your thoughts below, or send us a tweet @Msft_VL.