HomeServicesCommunication and collaborationWindows SharePoint ServicesMOSS 2007 versus WSS 3

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) versus Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS)

WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 are both powerful collaboration tools made available by Microsoft. Built on the .net platform, many businesses today rely heavily on either one, or both, products to communicate, collaborate, and share critical business information to contribute information and make decisions based on the most up to date information.

CollaborationWSS 3.0MOSS 2007
Real-time presence and communication
The enhanced real-time presence smart tag icon, displayed virtually everywhere a person's name appears in the system, tells users whether a person is online and available for a telephone or audio conference call, instant messaging, or two-way video conversation.
Social networking web parts (widgets)
Include social networking web parts that use information about your organisation, communities, and electronic communications in public My Site pages to help establish connections between colleagues with common interests.
Standard site templates
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 includes the following standard collaboration site templates:
  • Team site
  • Document workspace
  • Blank site
  • Blog
  • Wiki
  • Meeting workspaces (5 workspace types)
Wikis
A wiki is a new site template in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 that makes it easy to create, edit, link, and restore an individual web page. Wikis can be used as creative forums to brainstorm ideas, manage knowledge bases, create designs as well as instruction guides or simply gather information in an easy-to-edit format. Wikis are easy to create, modify, and annotate; in addition to tracking contributions and changes. These key features include:
  • Fast and easy page creation
  • Easy and automatic linking
  • Version differences
  • WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) Web page editing
Wikis leverage existing SharePoint functionality including search, navigation, alerts, and custom fields.
Blogs
Blogs provide a publishing oriented experience for a single user or a team. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 includes a site template that supports:
  • Article posting
  • Reader comments
  • Archive views
  • RSS feed generation
People and groups lists
People and groups offer a unified place to find, communicate with, and manage people and their permissions, including support for custom fields such as Department, 'Office #' and Area of Focus; in addition to the new Person field type. The Person field type creates rich displays of lists of people including support for a People Picker for browsing a list of users. Member Group provides:
  • Re-use of groups across sites
  • Distribution list for the members of the site
Calendars
Calendars have been enhanced with richer calendar views, expanded support for recurring events, and all-day events.
E-mail Integration
Document libraries, discussion boards, calendars, and announcements can be enabled to receive new postings via e-mail. Similar to the functionality provided by public folders in Microsoft Exchange Server, e-mail enabled discussion boards support:
  • A highly scalable, topic-based architecture.
  • New 'super rich-text' field type.
  • Unified experience for both e-mail and Web-based discussions.
  • One-step creation of Active Directory distribution lists as part of the site creation process.
  • Unified SharePoint group and Active Directory management.
Task coordination
The new Project Tasks list template provides lightweight task management functionality including Gantt charts for visualisation of task relationships and status.
Surveys
Surveys now include conditional branching as well as support for inserting page breaks in long surveys such as annual employee satisfaction or and customer surveys.
Document collaboration
Improvements to SharePoint document libraries include:
  • Checking out documents locally
  • Offline document library support in Outlook 2007
  • Major and minor version numbering and tracking
  • Support for multiple content types
  • Policy, auditing, and workflow
  • Tree view support
Issue tracking
The issue tracking list template has been updated to use the enhanced versioning and version-history storage features of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
Enterprise portalWSS 3.0MOSS 2007
My Site personal site
The My Site personal site gives users an opportunity to aggregate information 'for me', 'by me', and 'about me'. Significant enhancements include social networking, privacy controls, SharePoint Sites and Documents Roll-Up Web Parts, and Colleagues and Memberships Web Parts.
Privacy and security
Use authorisations to control visibility of information in a My Site public view.
Content syndication
Use RSS feeds to syndicate content managed in a portal site.
Site directory
The site directory automatically creates a site map and presents it in an easy-to-use format. The enhanced directory now includes the option to scan for changed or deleted links to external content.
User profiles and the profile store
User profiles store personal information for system users. Improvements include multi-valued properties bound to taxonomy from Office SharePoint Server 2007, property-level security controls by person or group, open and closed vocabularies, and per-site property extensions. Profile synchronization and directory import support the extended capabilities of the User Profile Store with enhanced scalability and performance.
Audience targeting
Enables use of web part pages, web parts, and content to target distribution lists and groups in addition to SharePoint audiences.
Site manager
Manage a SharePoint site's navigation, security access, and general look and feel using this easy drag-and-drop tool. Site Manager unifies site management tasks for portals and websites, including management of areas, pages, listings, SharePoint site lists, and associated component parts.
Mobile device support
All SharePoint portal, team site, and list pages now render on international and North American mobile devices (including web enabled mobile phones) using a simplified text-only format.
Portal site templates
Preconfigured templates streamline creating, customisation, and deployment of divisional portals, organisation-wide intranet portal sites, and corporate websites.
SharePoint sites and documents roll-up web parts (widgets)
List all the SharePoint sites that a user is part of and documents the user has authored. The documents roll-up web part also supports more general capabilities for querying and filtering the documents stored in a collection of SharePoint sites.
Colleagues and memberships web parts (widgets)
List people the user knows and people who belong to common distribution groups.
Integration with Access 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Word 2007
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 easily integrates with smart client tools through a set of web services and documented application interfaces. Users can readily adopt these new tools because of their similarity to other familiar environments, such as the Microsoft Office system. For example, users of Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office PowerPoint, Microsoft Office InfoPath, Microsoft Office Project, and Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 can directly interact with information stored in SharePoint sites without having to manually download the content. Users can create workspaces, post and edit documents, and assign tasks, all while working on documents stored in SharePoint sites.
Integration with Outlook 2007
With Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, users can view calendars and contact lists stored on SharePoint sites, and create and manage sites for editing documents and organizing meetings. Outlook 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 support a new set of significantly enhanced functionality including:
  • Read/write access to SharePoint items: calendars, tasks, contacts, discussions, and documents.
  • Synchronisation of offline support of document library and lists.
  • Ability to check out and edit documents when offline.
  • Roll-up views of calendars and tasks across multiple lists and sites.
  • Unified view of personal and SharePoint tasks in Outlook 2007.
Integration with SharePoint Designer
Office SharePoint Designer 2007, based in part on Microsoft FrontPage technology, will provide tools for rich customisation of sites, and creating reporting tools and application templates, without any coding.
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