Jun5

To MOSS or not to MOSS? That is the question.

Categories: SharePoint

With SharePoint Portal Server 2003, a Team Site was virtually identical to a WSSv2 Team Site. Many organizations who only wanted the collaboration features didn’t see the value of paying for Portal Server given the amount of value that comes with WSS. WSS is almost too good to be true because you get more than you paid for, but there comes a time in every WSS deployment when searching across all the WSS sites becomes essential. Some people resent having to purchase Portal Server just to get this functionality (go figure), but if the current WSSv3 beta search functionality remains for RTM you will at least be able to search all sub sites of a site collection.

The real reason for this post is to point out that Team Sites in MOSS 2007 have some additional value over WSSv3 team sites so the business value of MOSS 2007 bight be a bit more obvious that with SPS (ignoring the new CMS web publishing features in MOSS 2007).

The search advantage provided by a MOSS 2007 server to a team site is that you can specify a custom search results page for each site from the Site Settings page. You can also specify custom search scopes and key words for each site.

The second area I’m going to look at is Site Usage Reports.

WSSv3 site usage reporting is identical to v2. MOSS 2007 site reporting, on the other hand, is much richer. In addition to nice graphs, there is the option to export the data to Excel or PDF (RTM features may not be the same though).

MOSS 2007 site usage reporting

The third advantage MOSS 2007 provides to a team site is the rich text editor used in the Content Editor Web Part.

WSSv3 Rich Text Editor...

WSSv3 content editor

The Insert Hyperlink and Image buttons just bring up a simple text box to provide the URL.

MOSS 2007 rich text editor...

In a Team Site hosted on a MOSS 2007 server, the insert Image button allows you to browse the image libraries on your server and select an image and its properties.
MOSS Image details