• Provide a single workspace for teams to coordinate schedules, organize documents, and participate in discussions—within the organization and over the extranet.
• Easily author and manage documents, and help to ensure their integrity with enhanced features including the option to require document checkout before editing, the ability to view past revisions and restore to previous versions, and the ability to set document-specific security.
• Help people and teams stay on task with a variety of communication features that let users know when actions are required or important changes are made to existing information or documentation, including announcements, sophisticated alerts, surveys, and discussion boards.
• Provide creative forums for brainstorming ideas, building knowledge bases, or simply gathering information in an easy-to-edit format with new templates for implementing blogs (also known as weblogs) and wikis (Web sites that can be quickly edited by team members—no special technical knowledge required).
• Stay productive while mobile with enhanced support for offline synchronization through Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 that users can use to manage document libraries, lists, calendars, contacts, tasks, and discussion boards even offline, and to synchronize changes when reconnected to the network.

• Simplify the creation and navigation of workspaces with the improved user interface and site creation tools in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 that provide easy-to-use templates, professional-looking site themes, and the ability to rearrange site navigation from within the browser.
• Make it easy for users to get up to speed quickly by providing integration with familiar productivity tools such as those found in the Microsoft Office system—users can create workspaces, post and edit documents, and view and update calendars on SharePoint sites, all while working within Microsoft Office system files and programs.
• Track work and tasks more easily with enhanced integration with Office Outlook 2007 that helps users organize calendars, tasks, contact lists, discussion boards, and meetings.
• Customize workspaces with new application templates that provide custom scenarios for building workflows on the Windows SharePoint Services platform that address specific business processes or sets of tasks.
• Implement a collaboration environment with minimal administrative time and effort, and with the flexibility to change deployment settings.

Reduce the dependency of business units on your company’s IT department for site provisioning, implementation, backup, and support. Whether you’re a contributor to a team site, a site owner, or a server administrator, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides better administrative controls for managing content, users, and sites so that individuals and teams can operate more efficiently and effectively.

• Increase the security of business information with enhanced administrative controls that decrease cost and complexity associated with site provisioning, management, support, operations, and backup and restore.
• Give IT better control over your organization’s infrastructure with new and improved services for controlling access to information and setting policies for site creation that enable security to be set as deep down as the item level.
• Empower site managers and teams without compromising security by enabling them to initiate and control their own self-service workspaces and tasks, and manage the participation and access of others—all within parameters set by IT.
• Provide a more robust document storage environment with document storage, recycle bin item retrieval, and version-control features built in to team workspaces.
• Easily manage and configure Windows SharePoint Services by using a Web browser or command-line utilities, and enable a variety of custom and third-party administration solutions using the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Through a highly customizable and extensible platform, companies can tie these new tools and services to existing line-of-business applications, capitalizing on existing IT investments and valuable information stored in back-end systems.

• Manage business documents more easily with enhanced document library support and a common repository for document storage.
• Use the Windows SharePoint Services platform to build rich, flexible, and scalable Web-based applications and Internet sites specific to the needs of your organization.
• Take advantage of integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that expands the platform services and common framework for document management exposed by Windows SharePoint Services to offer enterprise-wide functionality for records management, search, workflows, portals, personalized sites, and more.
• Use Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to quickly and easily customize SharePoint sites and build reporting tools and applications tailored to specific tasks without writing or deploying new code.

More information is available in the TechNet Windows SharePoint Services TechCenter.

Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express is a free application delivering search across Windows SharePoint Services sites as well as file shares, Exchange Public Folders, and Web sites.

• Brief product demonstration
• Product information and screen shots
• Learn how to upgrade Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 to Search Server 2008 Express.

If you've heard about Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, you may wonder how it relates to Office SharePoint Server 2007. Windows SharePoint Services is an enabling technology that is included in Microsoft Windows Server 2003. It helps teams stay connected and productive by providing easy access to the people, documents, and information that they need to make well-informed decisions and get work done. Office SharePoint Server 2007 relies on the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 technology to provide a consistent, familiar framework for lists and libraries, site administration, and site customization. Any features that are available in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are also available in Office SharePoint Server 2007.

However, Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers enhanced and additional features that are unavailable on a Windows SharePoint Services site. For example, both Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services include site templates for collaborating with colleagues and setting up meetings. However, Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes a number of additional site templates related to enterprise and publishing scenarios.

The chart below shows a quick overview of the capabilities available under Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard edition, and Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise edition. For a complete breakdown of the features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, please download the product comparison chart (168 KB .xls worksheet). Visit the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 TechNet site for more information about this versatile technology.

* when deployed with Search Server 2008 Express.

Read the top 10 reasons to upgrade from Windows SharePont Services to SharePoint Server.