Announcing The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool (Beta)

I recently attended DevConnections 2007 in Las Vegas, and on one of the sessions, a new SharePoint Tool was presented: The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool.

The tool is now released in its first beta version, and it can be downloaded here.

The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool is both a pre-sales/pre-deployment, and planning tool, and can be used for helping out companies in several scenarios. Here are some examples:

• I don’t know if I need 10 Servers or 1 server to meet the needs of my large law firm of 1000 users.
• Should I buy 10 Server CALs or 5? I know I need something to get started, but not sure where to start.
  
• I’m confused by the capacity planning documentation; I wish I just had a tool I could put in a few inputs to get me started.
  
• I don’t want to have to hire a consultant to tell me I can handle my small 200 person deployment with a single server, but I can’t figure it out on my own based on available product documentation.
  
• I’ve used the HP capacity planning tool and I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do, but I would like a more platform agnostic view.
  
• My deployment is blocked until I can figure out what kind of topology I should be running to get basic high availability

This tool uses the System Center Capacity Planner 2007 (SCCP) as an engine to provide for data collection, visualization, simulation and report writing.