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Differences between SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server Presentation Explained

A summary of the BoP SPUG presentation on the differences between WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007.

I have had some comments from people that would like some explanation about the presentation I posted last week. So here are the main points of the presentation:

The Stack

WSS 3.0 can be thought of as the base of the whole solution. Everything that MOSS 2007 offers is built on WSS 3.0. I will go into what WSS 3.0 offers later in the post. The next layer in the stack is the MOSS 2007 Standard licence, again I will cover this later. At the top of the stack is the MOSS 2007 Enterprise licence. If you have WSS 3.0 and you require enhanced search, you can bolt in SharePoint Server 2007 for Search, giving you the features outlined in the Search section of MOSS 2007 Standard below. Also, if you need online forms, Forms Server 2007 can be bolted alongside MOSS 2007 Standard and WSS 3.0.

WSS 3.0

WSS 3.0 is your one-stop project/team portal, offering a lot in the way of team collaboration... features such as:

Wikis - Collaboratively create, edit, link, and organise the content of a web site
Blogs - Regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video
Forums - Team Discussions, replacement for team e-mail discussions
Task and issue management
Presence and communication - Knowing who is online and how to get hold of them

WSS 3.0 also offers a much enhanced survey solution (as opposed to what was in 2.0), with branching logic and a nicer output screen. This is great for user surveys, feedback etc.

WSS 3.0 offers a bit in the way of search, but not much. It is fairly basic search and will return fairly relevant results. There is no ability to optimise the search or crawl other data sources.

Finally, WSS 3.0 integrates very tightly with the Office 2007 suite. As the image below shows, I have my tasks in Outlook, offering me a one stop shop for task, calendar and email management. As I work on several projects at the same time, it is really handy to see all of these in one place. As there may be several PMs on the different projects, they just need to log into the project site and they will see the progress of my tasks!

WSS 3.0 comes with a standard group of templates (Meeting, Team site, Document Sites), but there is a pack called the Fantastic 40 that can add some great sites to your WSS 3.0 deployment. Check out Ian Morrish's site for more details on the Fantastic 40.

WSS 3.0 has document management baked into it, something that was lacking in 2.0. All standard DMS functionality is out-of-the-box, including version control, check-in/out and the ability (linking with Outlook 2007) to take documents offline. WSS 3.0 also introduces Content Types, which are a great way to manage different types of documents, templates and metadata.

MOSS 2007 Standard

As mentioned above, MOSS 2007 Standard comes with all the features of WSS 3.0, but builds on it offering the following.

Portal

MOSS 2007 offers a portal environment as a replacement for the corporate intranet. Portals allows different groups of users the ability to publish information to the various divisional sites, taking the onus off the IT department to maintain sites.

Portals also give individuals their own space with the concept of a "My Site" being introduced. My Sites can be a total replacement for users' personal shared drives, giving them the ability to access their documents wherever they are. My Sites also allow users to publish information about themselves, which will increase the social network within an organisation (discussed more in collaboration).

MOSS 2007 offers a great deal more templates than WSS 3.0, including publishing portals and records repositories.

Search

MOSS 2007 allows us to crawl across multiple sources for information. For example, this means we can point the search crawler at a shared drive and let it index all the items on there. They would then appear along-side the items that are stored within SharePoint. Also, we can point the crawler at external Web sites. This means we can index industry-specific sites for information that will appear alongside our items.

MOSS 2007 offers increased relevance, meaning we can find the documents or items of data we want faster than with a WSS 3.0 deployment.

Another great feature MOSS 2007 has to offer is the People Search. This is a replacement for the corporate phone directory... think of it like a directory on steroids (see the collaboration section). As long as your AD is nice and tidy, the people search can be a great feature in MOSS 2007.

Collaboration

With the ability for users to enter information about themselves, this means more information is available to find people with. For example, on my site I have that I am an ASP.NET (web) developer, I use UML for modelling and I understand SQL. If a project manager was looking for a web developer that can understand the UML diagrams an architect has created, they can search for those traits in the people search and would come up with a list of people including me. Rather than hunting through IT for someone that understands UML they search and can fire me an email, or if we had Unified Communication Server, they could click on my name and give me a call.

Content Management

MOSS 2007 comes with several document workflows straight out-of-the-box. These include the feedback and approval workflows. These are great for cutting down the amount of documents being sent around an organisation. Instead this assigns a task to the reviewer and e-mails them a link to the document.

Document Management in MOSS 2007 has been aided with document policies and document management templates. Document policies allows record managers to set up retention periods for different content types, essentially managing the deletion and movement of a document through its life.

Finally, as mentioned in the portal section, content authoring and publishing in MOSS 2007 allows other business units to control the information on their sites. Content approval initiates a workflow to gain approval of a specified person or group before the content is published.

MOSS 2007 Enterprise

MOSS 2007 Enterprise is aimed at larger organisations, and gives the features mentioned above and builds on them with the following.

Business Process

The enterprise version offers Forms Server 2007 for publishing InfoPath forms on the web. Completed forms can be stored in forms libraries, where data from within that form can be displayed in columns. Completed forms can initiate workflow, meaning an application for leave can be completed online, a task assigned to the persons manager (AD lookup) and depending whether approval is given can proceed to HR.

Business Intelligence

A big thing to come in this version of SharePoint is the Business Data Catalogue (BDC). This allows SharePoint to look into other data sources (SAP, Oracle Financial, you HR system, etc) for information. This information can be displayed in search results, integrated into forms or documents or be used in a dashboard (see below).

MOSS 2007 Enterprise comes with a feature called Excel Services, which basically gives users the ability to publish their spreadsheets to the Web. If you have a spreadsheet that has a complex formula, you can keep that hidden and only allow others to enter information in the required fields. Excel services also allows graphs and table data to be published to the Web without any effort.

Business Data Web Parts and Dashboards give a great summary of information drawn from multiple sources, including Excel Services, Data warehouse Cubes and the BDC. An example of a dashboard is:

So which solution is best for you? I have a slide in my presentation that has a good summary and needs matrix (page 26 and 27), but as a basic summary for MOSS, if you need any of the items in the right hand side, you'll need enterprise!