What is the difference between Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS)?

It's a common question. My answer? About £6000 as a minimum. That's right, since WSS is free on the Windows Platform and MOSS is a licensed product with Client Access Licenses (CALs). It's a bit tongue in cheek of course as there is a fair number of other differences too, the most notable being that WSS is a single server install only. MOSS is a single-to-multi server installation capable of supporting the largest organisations, WSS is geared for smaller things but is still highly capable, MOSS is geared to larger things and provides a platform for deploying Enterprise Applications.

With WSS you get the basic necessities for working with SharePoint, the ASP.NET 2.0 framework, plus 3.0 Framework for Windows Workflow. You get a Central Administration website where you can create web applications and site collections and configure, monitor, backup, restore those site collections. When you create a site collection you can choose from a selection of Site Templates or write your own. In those Site Collections, you can create Sites and SubSites and within those Sites andn SubSites you can create Lists and Libraries. The former are like database tables but more so and the latter are like file systems but more so. You can add, edit , delete entries in those lists and libraries and organise different views on them and you can add, edit and delete the columns and metadata in them.

What else? Well you can create workflows and link them to the lists and libraries. You can create web pages with or without webparts and style and brand those pages using ASP.NET masterpages and ASP.NET ascx controls and stylesheets. You get Users and Roles (Groups) which you can configure to security trim whatever items you want to show to people. You get a search engine which provides a basic site search capability, well pretty advanced really, better than you or I could write in a hurry for sure.

That's WSS, pretty much everything you need to build a ASP.NET Web Application. What you don't get out of the box, you can build yourself using the extensive Object Model combined with ASP.NET 2.0, or .NET 3.5, it all works. If you want to get fancy you can integrate jQuery, Silvelight, AJAX which all work. There are web services also to tap into, and yes, you can write your own. No limits really. Except it all happens on a single box. Well your database can be on a separate box, but your SharePoint installation basically sits on a single server.

What about MOSS? Well you get a bunch of extra stuff. You get what was Content Management Server, so there is a whole publishing, approval and authoring infrastructure. There is Enterprise Search, MySites, People Search, Excel Services, Audiences, Business Data Catalog but most importantly you have a mult-server capability and can scale out your deployment to support a large numbers of users. You get extra components adding to the Object Model, extra Site Templates and so forth. But ... and remember this ... it all starts with WSS. Given enough time and effort you could build your own MOSS using a combination of .NET code and the existing WSS installation.

So there you have it. WSS is single server, small scale. MOSS is multi-server, large scale. Simple really.

Back again soon.