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.

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Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft Worldwide Licensing and Pricing Group, Joe Matz, sat down recently to share Microsoft's perspective for how Volume Licensing is enabling customers and partners to become cloud ready. Recent changes to the Enterprise...

Posted by Joe Matz
Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Licensing and Pricing, Microsoft

Acquiring software licenses for multiple users and systems at once within an organization makes it easier and more affordable. In short, that’s volume licensing, and this blog is dedicated to discussing, exploring and demystifying what it’s all about so our customers can get on with business, equipped with the best tools and services to succeed.

By acquiring software licenses through Microsoft Volume Licensing (VL) programs, you not only benefit from the number of users and systems outfitted, but you can often save costs typically associated with shrink-wrapped boxes, physical media (CD-ROM or DVD), printed consumer users’ guides, shipping, and other costs. Volume licensing also provides customized purchasing options and improved software management.

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Since launching the Microsoft Volume Licensing blog in May, we have enjoyed sharing our news and highlights with our readers and are looking forward to more great things to come in 2012. It’s been a busy year for the Microsoft Volume Licensing team and we wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of our top highlights from 2011.

Ensuring licensing provides ample flexibility to embrace the cloud on your terms has been a focus for us this past year and we know it is top-of-mind for many customers and partners. Throughout the year, we’ve made
many tools and resources available to help our customers make a smooth transition incorporating the power of cloud computing...

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Mid-September Microsoft had the opportunity to sponsor the Gartner ITAM Summit in Orlando, Fla., where we announced new software asset management (SAM) services. (Check out our full recap of the event >>HERE<< )

Following the successful announcement at Gartner ITAM, we wanted to take a moment to give a deeper dive into SAM services and explore the added value these services provide.  

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