Both acronyms for these SharePoint technologies end with two s’s. That’s not all that is similar. Most people say ‘SharePoint’ and leave it at that. But it’s important to know the difference, because Windows SharePoint Service (WSS) is included with Windows Server, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is a separately purchased product that offers richer features for business. (Yes, that sounds very marketing, but in this case, it’s true, more later).

If your company has Windows Server, you can use the extensive features of WSS. If it isn’t set up for your company, you’ll have to ask your IT manager to set it up, turn it on, or whatever verbiage will get WSS in your hands.

At my last job, the company had Windows Server installed but had not ‘turned on’ the ‘included free’ WSS. Instead, their intranet was an HTML site that one person controlled. If she was out, nothing was posted. In addition, it was near impossible to find anything, as everything was uploaded without a plan or structure. Most of the divisions kept their documents in shared folders. The shared folders were nightmares to navigate and find.

Instead of looking through the shared folders, employees sent e-mails back and forth asking each other ‘do you have that document?’ In spite of an attempt to number some of the more important documents, they also had significant problems with version control. I’d used WSS 2.0 extensively, and I knew that it could solve a lot of their problems with finding documents, sharing documents, and version control.

I convinced them to turn on WSS and began setting up a more efficient intranet – just before they closed their Washington office. This bit of bad luck for them gave me the opportunity to be a SharePoint product manager and help you learn how to set up intranets using WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007.

I’ll move on to explaining differences between WSS and MOSS – but first, another digression. Since some people are using WSS 2.0 and haven’t yet moved to WSS 3.0. I’ll cover the differences between those in different post.

For a full and detailed explanation of the differences between WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007, including the different MOSS 2007 editions, download the Excel spreadsheet on the Microsoft Web site.  You may want to have this document in hand when you’re making a decision about which version to buy, and need to justify it to upper management.

A quick wrap up of the differences are:

WSS 3.0 offers all the standard site templates to build team sites, document workspaces, blank sites, blogs, wikis, and meeting workspaces.

You can also use WSS 3.0 to create people and group lists. You can integrate WSS 3.0 sites with Access 2007, Excel 2007, Outlook 2007, Word 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. You can create RSS feeds and set up alerts to notify you when content changes on a site. Version control, task notification and alerts all come with WSS 3.0

MOSS 2007 offers all of the features included in WSS 3.0.

In addition, MOSS 2007 offers business intelligence features that allow you to track key performance indicators and build BI dashboards into your team site. The dashboards can assemble and display business info using Excel spreadsheets, SQL, or integrate with line of business applications. Excel Services in MOSS go beyond simply displaying Excel spreadsheets, you can actually stream parts of a spreadsheet, showing or hiding various parts. Workflow can also be integrated into MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0. And don’t get me started on slide libraries – a much needed and unique way to share and reuse slides that is available in MOSS 2007.

MOSS 2007 also offers My Sites, which are individual mini-sites that can be set up to show who in your company you’re connected to, what your tasks and skills are, your contact information, and more. When I worked at a consulting firm, we used our My Sites to let co-workers know what we did so that they knew whom to call on for a new project. We used the My Sites to ‘advertise’ ourselves.

One of our team members was given the task of putting together a team site for my group that summarized our My Sites and provided other links and resources. He had about one month to build the site, but a big project prevented him from doing it. He asked me to take his place at a presentation of the site to a larger group in the company, giving me two hours notice. Now, while I don’t recommend doing a site in two hours, I was able to do this in less than two hours – more of a tribute to how easy SharePoint is to use than to my skills.

The features that are included in WSS 3.0 are easy for anyone to use and set up. You can create your own team site, set up a blog in minutes, create wikis, use Word to post your blog entries, create slide libraries so that all your employees can find and reuse different slides from different presentations and lots more.

But first you have to plan your site and decide how to organize it to help your team be more productive. In the next post I’ll show you some ways to plan your site.