Microsoft News Tracker

Since Vista shipped to businesses last year they’re a bit late, but today Microsoft announced the final versions of six Vista deployment tools for businesses:

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of six new deployment tools that will help expedite businesses’ migration to Windows Vista™. The recently released tools are the Microsoft® Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007, the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.0, Windows Vista Hardware Assessment 1.0, the Volume Activation Management Tool, the Key Management Service for Windows Server® 2003 and Virtual PC 2007.
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The tools being announced today can help customers at every phase of their migration to Windows Vista, including assessment, planning, testing and deployment. Many customers that already have been using pre-release versions of these tools along with earlier pre-release versions of Windows Vista now can move to the final versions to complete their deployment process.

We mentioned Virtual PC 2007 yesterday, but as for the others:

• Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007 is a set of guidelines and tools that organizations can use for planning deployments.
• Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.0 is the old standby for evaluating whether customer wrtitten applications are compatible with new Microsoft operating systems.
• Windows Vista Hardware Assessment 1.0 is an enterprise-wide tool for assessing PC hardware capability for upgrading to Vista.
• Volume Activation Management Tool and the Key Management Service for Windows Server® 2003 are Microsoft’s new infrastructure for managing Vista activation in a multiple copy environment as promised last year.

As would be expected these are all free downloads - follow the link for more details.