SharePoint is commonly used to refer to both WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. Both are great products and MOSS extends WSS. WSS standards for Windows SharePoint Services and is included with your Windows 2003 R2 server license and is free which is a compelling reason to use it. WSS can use full blown SQL Server or SQL Express. MOSS which stands for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server can also use full blown SQL Server or SQL Express but routinely is used with the full blown SQL Server rather than the Express version as the database sizes are typically larger. SQL Express caps off the database limit at 4gig each.
MOSS does cost money for both the product and the user licenses. If full blown SQL Server is used you also have to purchases licenses on the server as well. Although SQL Express doesn't require a license for each user the server is as optimized or feature rich of it's bigger brother.
For an official and
detailed explanation of the differences between WSS 3.0 and
MOSS 2007, including the different MOSS 2007 editions, download the Excel spreadsheet on the Microsoft Web site.
A quick wrap up of the differences are:
WSS 3.0
WSS
3.0 offers all the standard site templates to build team sites,
document workspaces, blank sites, blogs, wikis, and meeting workspaces.
You
can also use WSS 3.0 to create people and group lists. You can
integrate WSS 3.0 sites with Access 2007, Excel 2007, Outlook 2007,
Word 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. You can create RSS feeds and set up
alerts to notify you when content changes on a site. Version control,
task notification and alerts all come with WSS 3.0
MOSS 2007
MOSS 2007 offers all of the features included in WSS 3.0 as MOSS extends the functionality rather than replacing it so for many organizations they will start out with WSS 3.0 and then do an in-place upgrade to MOSS 2007 which will retain all their current setup and information and then add the new features that MOSS provides. Your organization will benefit from key business intelligence features that allow
you to track key performance indicators and build BI dashboards, Excel Services which offer digital dashboards, increased InfoPath forms support, the Business Data Catalog (BDC) which allows you to integrate your backend systems in a read-only fashion directly into a centralized portal and allow searching of this information through the SharePoint enhanced search engine.You get a PowerPoint slide library option that can give you a centralized library for standardizing and speeding up the creation of your PowerPoint slides, Records repository to keep read-only records of items within your system which is a requirement of some companies that need to meet industry compliance issues.
Additionally, MOSS
2007 will give you My Sites, which are individual mini-sites that can be
set up to show who in your company you’re connected to, allow for integration with Microsoft Office, what your tasks
and skills are, your contact information, and more.
Lastly, one large benefit is that MOSS has passed several compliance requirements for governments (another post will be coming on this in November).
Summary
One
of our team members was given the task of putting together a team site
for my group that summarized our My Sites and provided other links and
resources. He had about one month to build the site, but a big project
prevented him from doing it. He asked me to take his place at a
presentation of the site to a larger group in the company, giving me
two hours notice. Now, while I don’t recommend doing a site in two
hours, I was able to do this in less than two hours – more of a tribute
to how easy SharePoint is to use than to my skills.
The
features that are included in WSS 3.0 are easy for anyone to use and
set up. You can create your own team site, set up a blog in minutes,
create wikis, use Word to post your blog entries, create slide
libraries so that all your employees can find and reuse different
slides from different presentations and lots more.