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Notification Services extends capabilities for messaging in your applications. Read about the new enhancement to Notification Services in SQL Server Books Online.
These four steps walk you through choosing and obtaining Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Notification Services:
Determine which edition of SQL Server 2005 is right for you. Notification Services is available in SQL Server Enterprise and Standard editions.
Understand the licensing requirements. Notification Services requires a valid license for SQL Server 2005.
Ensure that you have Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 installed. To develop a Notification Services application, you will need the Microsoft .NET Framework (included with Visual Studio 2005). For more information, visit the .NET Framework site and Visual Studio 2005 Web site.
Download Notification Services through the 180-day free trial software of SQL Server 2005,
See the FAQ section below to get answers to key questions.
Learn more about Notification Services in SQL Server Books Online in the MSDN2 Library.
Connect with a SQL Server partner. These partners help organizations leverage the power of SQL Server.
Learn more about how to use SQL Server 2005 Notification Services to streamline notification infrastructure and enable robust alerting functionality for your Enterprise Data Management system.
Q. What is Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Notification Services?
A.
Notification Services is the premier platform for developing and deploying highly scalable notification applications. Capitalizing on the Microsoft .NET Framework and SQL Server, Notification Services provides an easy-to-use programming model for generating and formatting notifications based on personal subscriptions. This device-independent architecture can accept event data from any source and securely deliver it to a variety of mobile devices, including personal digital assistants (PDAs), cellular telephones, and more.
Q. How can Notification Services benefit my organization?
Almost all organizations with commercial Web sites and customer-facing enterprise applications can benefit from providing some form of proactive data subscription and delivery service for its customers. With Notification Services, developers can quickly build notification applications that send timely, personalized information updates, helping to enhance customer relationships.
Q. How can software application developers benefit from using Notification Services?
Notification Services provides a simple yet powerful application development model to build declarative applications that generate notification messages. By using Notification Services, developers simply build an application definition file in XML, structured query language (SQL) joins, and content transformation logic like Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLTs) that contains the central logic of the application. The model is easy to learn, enabling developers to build working prototypes of highly scalable applications in a day.
Q. Where can I get a demo of a notification application?
Notification Services includes a number of source code demos to help you understand the concepts and programming behind notification applications. You can find them in the samples directory, which is created after you install the product.
Q. What's the difference between Notification Services and Microsoft .NET Alerts?
.NET Alerts is an XML Web service run by Microsoft that provides delivery and intelligent routing of alerts generated from sources such as Notification Services. Notification Services complements .NET Alerts by providing a highly scalable matching, generation, and formatting server engine. Notification Services tracks and receives events from multiple event providers and generates messages, which it can deliver using .NET Alerts.Together, Notification Services and .NET Alerts deliver a compelling and scalable Web services package in which Notification Services generates the notification messages and .NET Alerts provides the assured delivery to the user based on the user's subscription.
Q. Is Notification Services a new management feature in SQL Server that sends the administrator alerts when disks or logs are full?
Notification Services is more than an alarm mechanism. Notification Services is a development platform for building notification applications, which can send critical information to customers, advising them of anything from stock prices to news postings to traffic conditions. By sending these updates, organizations can suggest next steps to customers, making relevant information more discoverable and increasing sales by providing direct paths to purchase information.
Q. Doesn't this conflict with MSN Mobile notifications?
No. MSN Mobile notifications are built using Notification Services.
Q. Can I get Notification Services separately and use it on other platforms or databases?
Notification Services runs on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005. It is designed to take advantage of the scalability features in SQL Server 2005.
Q. Do I need a separate server to run Notification Services?
Not necessarily, although a common strategy is to deploy Notification Services on its own server hardware. With this deployment, processing power on the server running Notification Services is dedicated to notification matching, generation, and formatting, while processing power on the database server remains dedicated to database services. However, specific components of Notification Services can be deployed on more than one server.
Q. What is the business value of Notification Services?
Provide a direct way to increase company revenue. Not only can a notification contain focused information relevant to customers, it can also contain links that encourage customers to return for additional information or to make further purchases.
Improve information flow and business efficiency. Enterprises can use Notification Services to send important information to employees and partners, keeping everyone up to date regarding projects, processes, and systems.
Empower subscribers. Whether they are employees or customers, subscribers define exactly what information interests them and when they want it. The application enables them to receive timely, personalized information on a variety of devices, within parameters they choose.
Q. How are other organizations using Notification Services?
Organizations have deployed Notification Services in a variety of ways. Notable examples include:
Project REAL. Project REAL is a cooperative effort between Microsoft and a number of technology partners in the business intelligence (BI) industry to build on actual customer scenarios to discover best practices for creating BI applications based on SQL Server 2005 and Notification Services.
Q. How much does it cost to license Notification Services?
Notification Services requires a SQL Server 2005 Standard or Enterprise Edition license. Licensing costs are based on SQL Server 2005 pricing, which varies depending on the deployment scenario. For additional information about licensing considerations, contact your Microsoft representative. If you do not have a Microsoft representative, visit the Microsoft USA site or the Microsoft Worldwide site to locate contact information for your local Microsoft office.
