Notification Services on SQL Server 2008

While Notification Services has been officially deprecated in SQL Server 2008, in lieu of Reporting Services' data driven subscription model, the product team at Microsoft made an official announcement yesterday to provide some support for SSNS 2005 from within SQL Server 2008.

 

Yesterday afternoon, a new Release Candidate (RC1) for the SSNS Components Package was posted to the MS Download site.  This component release is not putting SSNS back into SQL Server 2008, rather, it's allowing the use of SSNS 2005 from within SQL 2008.

 

There are lots of people who complained at the decision to phase out this product – although the numbers were slim.  But apparently someone at Redmond was listening, and made steps toward addressing the situation.  This should keep SSNS alive as a product for at least another revision of SQL Server, while support will continue its lifecycle for customers still in the 2005 platform.

 

Here are the details from the MS Download page:

Microsoft Downloads - SQL Server 2005 Notification Services Components Package RC1

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Version:	9.00.4014
Date Published:	9/8/2008
Language:	English
Download Size:	2.1 MB - 9.6 MB*

The SQL Server 2005 Notification Services components package provides the following server and client components that are required to deploy and run Notification Services:

·         Service components that enable the SQL Server 2005 Notification Services service to execute and provide notification-processing capabilities.

·         APIs that can be used within custom applications that include SQL Server 2005 Notification Services functionality:

o    Subscription management APIs that enable developers to create subscriptions and subscribers, and to manage subscriber devices.

o    Event submission APIs that enable users to specify events by using the event APIs or stored procedures.

The SQL Server 2005 Notification Services components package does not include the SQL Server Management Studio components of Notification Services.

This release of the SQL Server 2005 Notification Services components provides interoperability for running SQL Server 2005 Notification Services against either an instance of the SQL Server 2005 Database Engine or SQL Server 2008 Database Engine.

Note: This release is a pre-release version and is available only for testing. Product support is not available for this pre-release version.

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