IMPORTANT: Keep checking the MAP Blog and MAP Toolkit Content Index (en-US) for updates and changes , especially after new versions of MAP are released.
You should see the following collation settings page:
MAP is just one of the tools provided by the Microsoft Solution Accelerators team. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and Security Compliance Manager provide tested guidance and automated tools to help organizations plan, securely deploy, and manage new Microsoft technologies—easier, faster, and at less cost. All are freely available, and fully-supported by Microsoft. Learn more.
Download the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit. For more information and to download the tool, please see the MAP Microsoft site.
Ed Price - MSFT edited Revision 12. Comment: Removing "(en-US)" from the title. So the conclusion is that we don't add the English tag, since it's on the English Wiki. But we do add the non-English tags for non-English on the Wiki.
Michael Switzer [MSFT CSG] edited Revision 10. Comment: Added content index link
Michael Switzer [MSFT CSG] edited Revision 9. Comment: Added language tag
Michael Switzer [MSFT CSG] edited Revision 8. Comment: Removed SQL 2005 description
Fernando Lugão Veltem edited Revision 7. Comment: added portuguese version link
Ed Price MSFT edited Revision 2. Comment: UPdated title casing.
Why can't the MAPS installer be pointed to an existing instance of SQL Server that isn't a named instance called "MAPS" on the same machine we're installing the client on? This page should just say "no, you can't use another edition", because while it's technically true that you can use a manually installed instance, why would you install an instance called MAPS?
@Ryan: This is due to decisions that were made to save time in the development and testing of MAP:
1) the schema for the MAP database is loaded into the model database of the instance MAP is using. Therefore, any new database created in that instance automatically gets the MAP schema, and the MAP tool has to do nothing to make a new database ready for use, it's just ready and has the correct schema (tables, stored procedures, etc) as soon as the database is created by the database engine. If other applications try to use a database in that instance, there may be a name collision on schema elements (table names, stored procedures, etc.) unless they delete the MAP schema elements. We're pretty sure you wouldn't want this behavior on a database instance used for other applicaitons, so we insist that MAP have a dedicated instance.
2) If you point the MAP tool to an arbirary instance of SQL that doesn't have the correct schema in the model database, MAP will break because any new database created won't have the right tables, etc. for MAP to work.
To be clear, you can use any edition of SQL you want to use (and if you're in an environment large enough to exceed the file size limits of SQL Express, you should be pre-installing the Standard or higher edition of SQL Server to use with MAP). It's just that the 80% use case for the tool is that SQL Express is good enough for almost all environments that use MAP, so that's where the team invested the time to fully automate the installation experience, while leaving the possiblity open for environments that don't meet the 80% use case to still use the tool (via manually installing another edition of SQL Server).
We recognize that this behavior is annoying to some users (but not the majority of users) and we'll be looking at changing this behaivor in the future. It's definitely fixable and there are several ways we could do this differently. However, the feature of being able to install MAP on any arbitrary instance of SQL Server (local or remote) involves a significant amount of new development and test, which results in no net new feature that's core to MAP. (meaning, if for example, we're trading off building a new feature for MAP that can help you assess an upgrade to Windows 8 vs. being able to install the tool on any arbitrary database instance, the Windows 8 upgrade assessment is going to be the higher-priority feature).