Introducing Microsoft Assessment and Planning 3.0 

For those of you who are considering the migration of your desktop and server infrastructure to Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008, we have good news for you!

As we’ve announced at TechEd IT Forum 2007 in Barcelona last November, the Microsoft Solution Accelerators team is going to release the expanded version of Windows Vista Hardware Assessment 2.1 called Microsoft Assessment and Planning 3.0 (aka MAP).

In short, MAP is an automated agent-less network-wide inventory and assessment tool that can quickly determine if your organization’s desktops and servers are ready for migration to Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

What do I mean by AGENT-LESS inventory?  Simply put, it means that you do not need to launch any software agents on any of those machines you want this tool to inventory and query - so no more security concerns and user interruption!

It offers quick network-wide inventory of machines and generate hardware and device compatibility reports with actionable recommendations in the form of auto-generated proposal documents - perfect documentation for your IT project planning in the new fiscal year!

The best part is that you can use this tool to inventory your environments ONCE and get multiple assessments and reports for not just server and desktop migration, but also various virtualization options from Microsoft (see our Virtualization Day Summit blog post here)! 

How it Works? 

Through the use of a sophisticated, agent-less and network-wide inventory engine, Microsoft Assessment and Planning will be able to discover machines on your network whether they are in workgroups or managed AD environments.  By way of WMI, Win32, SNMP and other protocols, we can then securely collect hardware and device attributes of each machine and auto-generate migration readiness reports in Microsoft Word and Excel for the user. 

What a great way to help you jump-start your planning process when you know your manager is waiting for your IT project plans for the New Year!

What’s New with MAP 3.0? 

• Full incorporation of the features of Windows Vista Hardware Assessment including the generation of reports and proposals in 7 languages including N. American English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese
• Windows Server 2008 migration hardware assessment
• Windows server virtualization assessment (supports Virtual Server 2005 R2; will also add Hyper-V assessment in later this year)
• Application virtualization infrastructure assessment for Microsoft Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid)
• New Graphical User Interface

Check it Out! 

• Download the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Beta Refresh today, give us your feedback, and see how you may get a free copy of Windows Vista software and more!
• Visit the MAP Team Blog to learn more or check out other great Solution Accelerators!
• Subscribe to the Windows Vista Team Blog & MAP Team Blog RSS feeds to make sure you’re the FIRST to know when MAP 3.0 will RTM (target date: February 27, 2008)
• Sign up to join our weekly Live Meetings and chat directly with our development team
• Download the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment - if you can’t wait for MAP RTM version (RTM on Feb 27)

See you next time!

Baldwin Ng - Sr. Product Manager, Microsoft Assessment and Planning + Virtualization Solution Accelerators 

This week we posted some new videos on www.windows.com and www.windowslive.com . We call them demos but really they’re little stories about people using Windows to do more, connect with loved ones and share memories. I’m excited about the videos for a Read More……(read more)

This week we posted some new videos on www.windows.com and www.windowslive.com. We call them demos but really they’re little stories about people using Windows to do more, connect with loved ones and share memories. I’m excited about the videos for a couple of reasons (besides the fact that it’s always fun to have something you had a hand in producing actually Out There – in front of real people who will have real opinions about them) – naturally I’m excited about the chance to paint a picture of Windows Vista and Windows Live working together and to showcase new features and capabilities in the product, but what I’m most excited about is the opportunity to put Windows in the context of people’s lives – which is an approach we haven’t traditionally taken with product demos on the Windows website.

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I went out on a limb a bit with these videos because of this – our initial storyboards revolved around the product, just showing the UI and talking about the benefits, but I felt very passionately about the fact that we have to talk to people about stuff that’s important to them. To my knowledge, most normal people on the street don’t buy technology because it’s cool or new – they buy technology because it helps them do things they couldn’t otherwise do, or do things more easily. I strongly believe in leading with people’s lives and having the product naturally integrate. Luckily I work in a group who are serious about getting better at talking to customers and helping customers to discover the capabilities of their Windows PCs so, after arguing my case, I was given the chance to try this new approach.

·        People want time to spend with people who are important to them, and Windows can help them do that by enhancing their productivity.

·        People have good times together and want to relive those memories or share them with others, and Windows gives them choices about how they can best do that.

·        People want to stay close to people who aren’t necessarily nearby, and Windows makes that possible. 

It makes me think about those Mastercard ads – “PC with Windows Vista, webcam and internet connection: from $600; Windows Live Messenger: free download; making distant relatives not so distant: priceless…”  

Putting Windows in context of people’s lives is my passion – I love Windows Vista and Windows Live together: I love that my niece and nephew are safer on the PC and online with our products; I love that I can have a video call with my Mom in deepest Africa; I love that I can share my life with my friends in Australia on my Windows Live Space, and that I can upload pictures to Facebook directly from my site… And if I can use stories to help other people see how naturally these products fit into and enhance their lives – their digital lives – I believe that they’ll start realizing the potential sitting right there in the PC in front of them.

Do you have opinions about the new videos? Is this a valid way to talk to people – not necessarily technical, geeky super users, but everyday people on the street? I’d love your feedback so we can keep evolving how we talk to customers!

On this most auspicious of days — assuming you’re into that sort of thing — I figured I’d continue the 10 Things You Didn’t Know series by highlighting what I think is one of the most universally applicable and beneficial developments in Windows Vista:  the addition of Photo Gallery.  Millions of digital cameras (~100M, to be precise) are sold annually and if you have a cell phone, you likely have a camera in it as well.  All the images we take each year require a place to store them and then find them when needed.

Enter Windows Vista Photo Gallery.  Not only does Photo Gallery make it a lot simpler to manage your photos, but the great thing is that all users can take advantage of Photo Gallery, as it’s included in all versions of Windows Vista.  In addition to automatically displaying pictures and videos stored in the Pictures folder on your computer, you can also easily add and remove folders to the contents of Photo Gallery by simply dragging them to (or deleting them from) Photo Gallery’s navigation pane on its left-hand side.  If you only want to add a couple of photos rather than the entire folder, you can do that, too, by dragging only those.  This is a big plus if you have digital media stored in multiple locations on your computer. 

Once you have the photos added, there are multiple ways to find them by searching the integrated search function for:

• Single or multiple tags
• File name or tag
• Day, month or year taken
• Multiple dates
• Ranking (something you assign yourself)
• Multiple rankings
• Combinations of the above

If you decide to remove a photo from the Photo Gallery, one thing to be sure you understand is the following, taken from Windowshelp: Photo Gallery is another way to view and organize your pictures and videos.  It displays pictures and videos that you’ve stored in Pictures and in other folders on your computer — it is not a replacement for folders on your computer.  As a result, you should not delete the pictures in Photo Gallery or the Pictures folder unless you actually intend to delete those pictures from your computer.  If you do, they will deleted from your computer and no longer appear in either the Pictures folder or in Photo Gallery (of course).