Yesterday, the fine folks at Microsoft added an evaluation version of PAS 6.3 to the already available ProClarity Desktop 6.3 eval. You can download it here.

A few notes about this release:

·         ProClarity Analytics Server 6.3 – Evaluation contains the RTM version of the product; it does not include any of the ProClarity 6.3 hotfixes or cumulative updates.

·         You cannot upgrade this evaluation version with any PAS hotfixes or cumulative updates.

·         Support for this product (via the ProClarity TechNet forum only – http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1870&SiteID=17.) will only be available if no PAS updates have been applied.

·         This product contains only the server components of ProClarity Analytics Server 6.3—that is, the PAS Administration Tool and the thin client, ProClarity Web Standard. It does not include ProClarity Dashboard Server 6.3 or the following ProClarity 6.3 add-ins: ProClarity Web Professional, ProClarity KPI Designer, or ProClarity Selector.

·         To publish briefing books to PAS, you  are expected to use the evaluation version of ProClarity Desktop Professional 6.3.

With the RTM of SQL 2008, it looks like a slightly older version of the add-in has been removed from microsoft.com. Unfortunately, all of the search engines (including Live) are pointing at the old, dead page.

If you search for the add-in directly from Microsoft.com, you’ll find it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=200fd7b5-db7c-4b8c-a7dc-5efee6e19005&DisplayLang=en

Sheesh, take a day off from reading mail and you miss the chance to blog about one of the most important products on the day it RTMs. I’m a day late and a dollar short, but SQL 2008 released yesterday. It is build 1600.22, and I see it is already out on MSDN. It also appears to be available on connect.microsoft.com for TAP customers.

My next project is to install on PPS on a Windows 2008 VPC runing SQL 2008 and see what happens. I know neither of those are supported yet, but it appears that I should be able to get it to work using a couple of tricks.

I’ll post more details later!