About Microsoft Sharepoint

More on WSS and SPS

Though there is two very much acclaimed solution namely Microsoft’s Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal Server (SPS), making a choice is the point to ponder.

Windows SharePoint Services

WSS is a very useful solution when there is large number of project or team sites. WSS lends its services well to inter and intra team development in which provides the base capabilities of creating and managing portals. There can be many top-level portals that one may build one above another for various purposes depending on the entity. If the organisation is small in size then you can design the top portals for each functional department and each sub-site can be designed based off of group tasks and projects. For instance, there can be a portal for the IT department with a sub-site containing their current and upcoming projects and a separate portal for finance department with sub-portals for specific purposes such as Sarbanes Oxley. Across all portal sites there is common functionality for contact lists, event calendars, announcements, document libraries, and more. You can use these portals to share information within your department, across projects and meetings, or between your department and others. Of course, Sharepoint Services would not be terribly useful if you couldn’t secure sites based off of users and Active Directory group management, a feature often overlooked during evaluation.

WSS makes it very easy to create new portals and manage them. User roles are used to determine what areas are visible and portal users can even be notified on various events such as a document being added, a contact being changed, and the like. These notifications can be sent in real time when the event happens or via a daily or weekly summary of all events. WSS does not provide any search capabilities if it uses MSDE 2000 as its data store. When using MS SQL Server 2000, it can search within one portal, but it does not allow you to search cross many portals including sub-portals. So, you only can search for all the information within the portal from which you invoke the search.

SharePoint Portal Server

SPS is build on top of WSS so, by default, it provides all the capabilities WSS provides. The most compelling reasons to use SharePoint Portal Server 2003 instead of WSS is it has improved search capabilities, ability to target content to different audiences, and significant integration capabilities. SSP enables you to import portal users from Active Directory or any other LDAP data source on a one-time or scheduled basis. Audiences are used to target content to specific groups of Portal Users and can even “sense” the user and customize the content based on a property of that user’s profile. When importing portal users from an external data source, user properties can absorbed from LDAP, these properties can then map to the SharePoint Portal audience thereby giving you ultimate control over how to target content, whether this is the department, location, or any other property. SSP provides a feature "My Site" that is used as a personal portal for each user. This site provides a private and public document library, manage all alerts and links, and so forth. Any link or alert the user sets up on any portal shows on the "My Site" portal. SSP allows you to search across all existing portals; this provides a very powerful search, and through search scopes, you also can define the areas or topics that should be included in a search. SSP Single-Sign-On capability allows you to map portal credentials to credentials of other enterprise applications so that SSP can retrieve information from these enterprise applications without requiring an additional authentication by the user. Where a built-in or 3 rd party web-part can’t be found, Microsoft BizTalk Server can be used for integrations between SharePoint Portal Server and other enterprise applications. SSP also allows you to create server farms to scale over multiple servers and ultimately achieve the scale required for large organizations with thousands of portals.