Windows SharePoint Services v3.0 vs Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 are both powerful collaboration tools made available by the Microsoft Corporation. Build on the .net platform, many businesses today rely heavily on either or both products to communicate, collaborate, and share critical business information to contribute information and make decisions based on the most up to date information.
The most basic difference between the two solutions is the investment. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) ships bundled within a business’ Windows Server 2003 or Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 investment. This allows organizations to implement WSS quickly setup an internal company web quickly. The creation of sites and spaces is easy and once the underlying foundation is set up, requires little if no assistance from an organization’s IT team.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007(MOSS2007) takes the collaborative foundation of WSS to another level. With an additional software investment, MOSS 2007allows organization to take the foundation laid by WSS v3.0 and expand on it. Additional features can be created that sit on top of WSS, using the core WSS framework, and extending it in such a way that is beneficial to larger companies, enterprise deployments, and portal scenarios.
Below is a short list of key differentiating features and functions inherent to MOSS 2007. For information on the based WSS functionality click here. For more information please contact us.
· MOSS 2007 provides social networking features, including social networking Web Parts and profile linking. This functionality can use information about your organization, communities, and electronic communication in Public My Site pages to help establish connections between colleagues of mutual interest.
· MOSS provides the ability for individual users of a portal to create their own "My Site". My Site is essentially a personalized SharePoint page designed to provide users with a starting point through which to access content that you own and content that might be relevant to you. Personal profiles can be published here. Private images and files can be shared selectively in personal document libraries. Other key SharePoint features like lists, blogs, wikis, and announcements can also be selectively shared and unique to the individual user.
· Because MOSS 2007 sits on top to help manage WSS 3.0, it also provides a site template called "Site Directory". This template tracks links to sites, displaying site maps and site navigation lists, as well as searching through the site directory. This feature is invaluable to all SharePoint deployments in assisting to manage the taxonomy of the entire SharePoint site collection.
· MOSS 2007 also has increased user security by leveraging an organization’s pre-existing Active Directory schema and integrating it with SharePoint user profiles. This added security benefit can allow information to be visible only to the user, visible to his/her superiors, visible to colleagues, etc. With this added control target audiences can be setup for sites, libraries, or web parts.
· MOSS 2007 provides an easy drag-and-drop interface for managing navigation bars, navigation strips, portal hierarchy information, and more. In general, managing sites, site hierarchies, and hierarchical site content is made easier and the dynamic architecture of the site collection can be readily managed and manipulated.
· MOSS 2007 comes with templates for a Portal Sites not available to WSS 3.0 sites. Document Center, Search Center, Report Center, and Site Directory are valuable tools only available in the portal solution.
· MOSS 2007 uses an enhanced relevance algorithm for its search engine, and is able to include and search on content from multiple sites within an enterprise, including non-Sharepoint web sites, file folders and databases. In short, the MOSS 2007full text search engine is a powerful enterprise search engine with a relevance algorithm, while the WSS site-local search engine uses basic keyword search out of the box.
· MOSS 2007 allows user to extend SharePoint data by integrating business data from external sources such as Web Services or Relational Databases through its Business Data Catalog. This allows organizations to do things like display ERP data within a SharePoint portal, or add a column to a technical document stored in SharePoint that points to data stored in a Management tool elsewhere in your enterprise
· Increased SharePoint Workflow functionality is another benefit to MOSS 2007. Organizations can use out of the box workflows such as collecting feedback and performing a review of a document for approval. In addition by taking advantage of Microsoft’s Windows Workflow Foundation, custom workflows can be created using a custom Workflow designer like Microsoft SharePoint Designer to create powerful workflows to automate business processes with respect to serial and pre-emptive tasks.
· Excel Services is a MOSS-only feature that uses a Shared Services facility, to create a Microsoft Office Excel Server. What’s displayed are contents of excel spreadsheets within web parts, and the ability to selectively allow editing of secured regions of that spreadsheet, including formulas contained within the sheet and having the results display to authorized users in real-time. Excel heavy businesses have found this feature to be the most compelling reason to use MOSS 2007.
In short, MOSS adds additional user and administrative functionality that give it the value proposition for all SharePoint implementations. However, should a small company or workgroup wish to create a collaborative environment with the core SharePoint functionality, WSS provides a powerful low cost alternative that must be considered. Should you have specific requirements that you would like to discuss please contact us. We’d be happy to assist.