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Differentiating Windows SharePoint Server and Office SharePoint Server (more info)

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Okay, you want more information than that short and sweet answer so I will give you more detail but I will tell you to look forward to our visits to your city as we plan discuss Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) at our live events. Come out and get more information and ask more in-depth questions. We would be happy to meet you.

Prior to the release of solutions like Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server, many of you and your companies relied on traditional file servers for working on documents, long-term document storage, and software distribution. While file servers enabled basic file sharing, file servers created a number of problems such as discoverability, security and policy management.

Windows SharePoint Services addresses the problems with file servers by providing users and project teams with secure, easy-to-customize secure solutions for collaborating on documents, tasks, team calendars and custom lists – all of the data and information for a project; not only the ability to share documents. Windows SharePoint Services includes SharePoint site templates for creating team and project-based collaboration sites, document workspace sites and meeting workspace sites that are easily customized and deeply integrated with Microsoft Office applications such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft SharePoint Designer, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access as well as Microsoft Internet Explorer. You have the capability to create great web sites that are for your Intranet, extranet or the Internet.

Windows SharePoint Services is just the core collaboration piece of getting teams to that single version of the truth. You also have workflow and Outlook integration within Windows SharePoint Services. Overlay your calendars to make it easier to find time to complete tasks and take your SharePoint document libraries offline with you while maintaining a bi-directional synchronization with the SharePoint site. Once you reconnect, your changes will be synchronized to the server.

With Office SharePoint Server, you get enterprise wide capabilities that include collaboration, portals, search (across the enterprise and for people), enterprise content management, electronic forms, and business intelligence – focusing on the entire organization.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server is an intelligent, enterprise portal solution that connects people, teams, and information. SharePoint Portal Server provides a central place for a person to access, manage, share and interact with relevant information, documents, applications and other people. It enables quicker and better decisions, more effective sharing across teams and more streamlined business processes.

SharePoint Portal Server delivers business value that reaches across an enterprise to make the overall organization operate more effectively and more efficiently. This is different from the business value that Windows SharePoint Services provides to a person working to complete an individual task or a team working to complete the deliverables for a project.

To better understand and appreciate SharePoint Portal Server's unique business value, it is best to consider the following enterprise scenarios that SharePoint Portal Server was designed to support:

  • Organizing, finding and using knowledge and information – making it easier to locate and re-use knowledge and information wherever it might be stored
  • Collaborating across teams – enabling people to make decisions and complete project deliverables more easily and in less time
  • Streamlining business processes – through common access to back-end enterprise applications and integration of data and information across those applications

Some things that you can do in Office SharePoint Server that you cannot do in Windows SharePoint Services include:

  • Audience Personalization
  • My Sites
  • Connect to Project Sites
  • Excel Services
  • Business Data Catalog

When organizations deploy SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services, some organizations choose to deploy Windows SharePoint Services first followed by SharePoint Portal Server ("bottom up) while organizations with established practices for encouraging and managing the creation and re-use of knowledge by their employees will deploy SharePoint Portal Server as an integrated solution with Windows SharePoint Services ("top down").

SharePoint Portal Server supports the ability to deploy a "top down" solution especially in the case where an organization has existing corporation taxonomies for organizing people, information and documents, Web sites and any other information or source of information inside or outside the organization. Alternatively, organizations can choose a "bottoms up" strategy where Windows SharePoint Services is deployed first and the sites and content are aggregated into SharePoint Portal Server as a second phase of the project.

Built on top of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Office SharePoint Server 2007 delivers unique business value when compared to Windows SharePoint Services as well as other systems for organizing, indexing, searching, accessing, reporting and working with all the information in your organization – regardless of whether the information is stored on file servers, Web sites, other document storage systems as well as line-of-business applications. You have a great foundation on which to deploy that next line of business application to your environment.

SharePoint Designer is the next version of Microsoft FrontPage. You will use this tool to go above and beyond the designing of your sites via the browser. As the name reflects you are able to create and customize SharePoint sites and customize applications on the SharePoint platform.