May 2009 Archives

Here's another difference between MOSS and WSS.  MOSS does much nicer usage reporting.  But either way, to answer another question that was posed at the webinar, there is site usage reporting available in SharePoint for your sites, blogs and/or wikis.  That means you can check to see who visits your blogs and wikis, and how often.

It's important to regularly check the site statistics for the sources that you diligently maintain.  If you've promoted your content well, organized it in a meaningful way, and update it regularly, you'll want to know if all your effort is paying off. 

The WSS site statistics are quite basic.  Here's an example, from my SharePoint site, which runs on WSS:

Here's one, complete with graphs, from MOSS SharePoint.  Much prettier. 

One of the questions that came up during the Thinking Outside of the Blog webinar was "What is the difference between SharePoint WSS and MOSS?"  That was one of the first questions I asked when I started working with SharePoint, and while I looked it up at the time, I couldn't articulate the difference well enough to provide an intelligence response.  I'm appending some links below that answer this question, but I'll also summarize the major points that seem most significant:

• If you have SharePoint, by definition you have WSS.  WSS is free to most companies.
• MOSS builds upon the features in WSS, offering additional features of particular interest to enterprise users.
• Both include wiki and blog sites.  There doesn't seem to be a significant different between WSS and MOSS in this area.
• MOSS includes RSS feeds, user profiles, audience targeting, social networking web parts, and web parts that can integrate content from applications outside of SharePoint.

For more information see:

• Windows SharePoint Services v3.0 vs Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - Includes a list of features in MOSS that are not included in WSS.
• Compare WSS v. MOSS
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) from Wikipedia

I hope this helps.