Ready for the Cloud? Find out with MAP

Now this post is not intended as a business decision type-of-post, but more from a technical standpoint J if your infrastructure is ready for the next level.
MAP (Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit) is a tool that inventories your infrastructure, generates reports based on the data, and runs it against best practices to see if it is a match.
Microsoft recently released a new version of this tool (In version 8) you can download the tool here à
http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/6/F/46F45C42-D679-404E-9812-6053DD59A0D2/Microsoft_Assessment_and_Planning_Toolkit_Setup.exe

Now the tool itself Is pretty simple, it comes with a SQL express where it will store all the data is gets. So first time you start it you have to create a local database.

Now as you can see here you have many options to what you can check.
For instance if we go to the Cloud option it can check whenever you can move your infrastructure to Azure or your users can move to Office365
And if you choose to run performace data against your virtual hosts you can get a report on what kind of Azure machine type your VM’s are (

Now if we go to the Desktop pane we can see if our computers are ready to transition to Windows 8 and Office 13

Now you can either use WMI discovery or SCCM to get this information, and if I run a report against Windows 8 readiness it will generate a report to show what clients we need to upgrade hardware in order to meet the requirements.
In my case I don’t need to do anything since I already have Windows 8
But ill show you an example of an report

And the coolest part of this tool is the usage tracking bit. IT allows for instance to monitor how many are actually using Lync Enterprise and how many are using standard, when you have this data you can compare it to the list with who actually has given enterprise option. (It does this by connecting to the monitoring service in Lync) The same goes for SQL (You can use it to monitor how many users are connected to a SQL server in date range.
The best part about this program is that it is free!
Many have tried it and it gives a clear picture about your infrastructure.