1) What's the difference between SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services?
This is by far the biggest point of confusion for most people.
Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is a technology built into Microsoft's Windows Server 2003. It's a service that allows you to create team sites to assist with smaller group collaboration with features such as document and form libraries (somewhat akin to a shared file system folder, but with check in/out, version control, integration with office, etc.), custom lists such as issue, task, contact and any other types of list you can think up (think of a list as a set of columns and rows), simple search-ability, discussion boards, image libraries (for storing photos and other images) and surveys. That all said, there are valid reasons to create team sites that the whole company might visit. It takes a good process to determine when to put something in a team site and when to put it in the portal. That's where we usually help out with our SharePoint Information Design process. The good news: WSS is free. The bad news...it's so good you'll quickly need...
SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) is server product offering (read: not free) that helps you organize all of those great team sites you built using WSS. It also has many more enterprise focused features such as enterprise search which can search your company file shares, external website or other repositories and user profiles: allowing you to create a very rich enterprise employee directory (including great integration with Active Directory). It also includes features such as "My Sites" which allow each employee in an organization to create their own personal private and public web-spaces and a great tool for publishing corporate news. Even though it's called a portal, that doesn't mean a company would only have one of them. In some cases companies need more than one for various reasons. The Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Intranets briefly talks about multi-portal scenarios.
There is a Microsoft document on this subject, but it's not the best in the world...but for reference it's available on Microsoft's site here.
This is by far the biggest point of confusion for most people.
Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is a technology built into Microsoft's Windows Server 2003. It's a service that allows you to create team sites to assist with smaller group collaboration with features such as document and form libraries (somewhat akin to a shared file system folder, but with check in/out, version control, integration with office, etc.), custom lists such as issue, task, contact and any other types of list you can think up (think of a list as a set of columns and rows), simple search-ability, discussion boards, image libraries (for storing photos and other images) and surveys. That all said, there are valid reasons to create team sites that the whole company might visit. It takes a good process to determine when to put something in a team site and when to put it in the portal. That's where we usually help out with our SharePoint Information Design process. The good news: WSS is free. The bad news...it's so good you'll quickly need...
SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) is server product offering (read: not free) that helps you organize all of those great team sites you built using WSS. It also has many more enterprise focused features such as enterprise search which can search your company file shares, external website or other repositories and user profiles: allowing you to create a very rich enterprise employee directory (including great integration with Active Directory). It also includes features such as "My Sites" which allow each employee in an organization to create their own personal private and public web-spaces and a great tool for publishing corporate news. Even though it's called a portal, that doesn't mean a company would only have one of them. In some cases companies need more than one for various reasons. The Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Intranets briefly talks about multi-portal scenarios.
There is a Microsoft document on this subject, but it's not the best in the world...but for reference it's available on Microsoft's site here.
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