So your company has just implemented SharePoint, and you're going to start using it on a daily basis. That's a good thing, definitely. You've heard about all the things you'll be able to do with it, and how its going to help you and your teammates work, communicate, and collaborate better (yeah, that last "C" word is probably the one you're going to hear the most). But there's a problem: you start investigating what SharePoint is and your head immediately starts to hurt thanks to information overload.
Why? Because the term SharePoint encompasses a broad range of products, licenses, configurations, and TLAs (Three Letter Acronym 
) that are very difficult to differentiate between if you're new to this game. So I'll try to briefly break down the basics for you, and explain the differences and purposes behind the major components of the SharePoint platform.
First, there's Windows SharePoint Services version 3 (commonly abbreviated as WSS). WSS is a free add-on to Windows Server 2003, much like IIS and Active Directory. Note the term "Services" in its name; a good rule of thumb to remember is that if you see a Microsoft Product with "Services" in the title, its most likely free (although I'm not sure this is always the case). WSS is the core building block for pretty much all SharePoint's functionality. With WSS you have the ability to create sites using several different site templates, including collaborative team sites, document libraries, meeting sites, wikis, and blogs. WSS sites are intended to act as independent sites centered around a team or group's activities. A single WSS server or farm can host multiple top-level WSS sites, but out of the box there is no way to easily integrate or aggregate information, users, or content between those sites.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is the full enterprise-ready, collaborative platform product offering from Microsoft, and is definitely not free. The biggest reason (I think) that things get confusing between WSS and MOSS is because MOSS is built on top of WSS. MOSS offers all of the features of WSS, but enhances and extends them while also adding new functionality. So you'll see the same site templates from WSS available to you when creating a new site in MOSS, as well as a host of new options. The other difficult thing about MOSS is that the features available to users in MOSS is entirely dependent upon which license was selected when the product was purchased. In the interest of time, I will cover the difference between MOSS licenses in a seperate post.
The most apparent benefit of MOSS is being able to wrap top-level WSS sites into a single cohesive portal environment. That means that a single pool of users can now access multiple top-level sites without their identities and credentials needing to be duplicated across these sites. MOSS also allows all of the content in these sites to be crawled and indexed, and then made available in a centralized search site. And of course there is the highly touted features including the portal site itself, tying everything together into a single package for the enterprise and personalized MySites for individual users.
One key difference between the two products is their administrative experience. WSS is designed to managed and operated by its users; once its installed and configured, end users can manage, update, and enhance their sites without a great deal of technical administration required. This helps to keep costs low because you don't have to have an experienced IT professional directly on hand for your site's care and feeding. On the other hand, MOSS is a very complicated product, and is designed to be managed by experienced IT professionals. Its vast scope of functionality and deep technical architecture are not something easily consumed by the basic user, you really need an expert to get the most out of it.
Posted
10-12-2007 11:45 AM
by
ferringer