Last year, when I first started having dealings with SharePoint, I was mightily confused by all this “MOSS”, “WSS”, “SPS” -stuff.   What did all these acronyms stand for? What was the difference between all these different versions of SharePoint? And did it really matter?

Well, one year on and I’m slightly less confused, but only slightly!  So I thought it might be useful, for me and for anyone else out there who suffers similar confusion, to list out the different versions of SharePoint, their usual acronyms and key distinguishing features – I hope it helps:

So, in the begining, back in 2001, SharePoint emerged as two distinct products.  SharePoint Team Services was a bottom up team collaboration product, SharePoint Portal Server was a top down, portal, search and document management product.

By 2003 Microsoft had gathered that although customers liked both products what they would really like was the capabilities of both, combined.  So in 2003 what most of us would recognise as SharePoint: collaboration, search, content management and portal capabilities all under one roof – was born.

WSS was the basic version, free with Windows Server OS. SPS, the premium version, built on the foundations of WSS, incorporating extra functionality primarily around the areas of search and document management. Jason Masterman and Ted Pattison writing in MSDN Magazine put it quite neatly:

In essence, WSS gives you a place to put all your content while SPS provides the means to navigate and search through your content when you need it.

In 2007 much the same formula was followed, with Windows SharePoint services as the free version for windows server users and Microsoft Office SharePoint Services the premium version.  The MOSS designation references the greater level of integration with the Office suite.

In SharePoint 2010 it’s all change again and Microsoft have dropped references to both Office and Windows, leaving SharePoint to stand alone in 3 basic flavours: foundation, the free version, Standard – the premium version, which adds lots of functionality primarily around the area of search, and Enterprise – super premium, where the extras are pricipally in the area of content management.

This is very much a whistle stop tour, not an attempt to give an all encompassing overview of what is in each of the many SharePoint versions we have seen over the years – but we hope it might help you to at least get the acronyms straight!

This is the final part in our occasional series on what’s hot and what’s not for the end user in SP 2010. A couple of weeks ago we focused on our favorite new feature for end users: FAST Search, which we think is going to make a huge impact on how people store and search for content in SharePoint 2010.  Last week we took at pop at Business Connectivity Services – which we feel could cause more problems than it solves. Today we are throwing stones at SharePoint 2010 Social Networking – which gets our vote for joint top turkey in terms of new features that have been heavily hyped, but in our opinion are not likely to deliver much real value for the end user. The thing with SharePoint 2010 Social Networking is that we just don’t understand why its there.  This is enterprise software – it’s not supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to help you get the job done.  Have Microsoft added these features just because “social” is so darned sexy at the moment?

(more…)

So here we are with the second installment in our occasional series on SharePoint 2010 features for the end user. In part 1 we looked at the new features in SharePoint 2010 that we thought would be most welcomed by end users.  Our vote went to FAST Search, because it’s going to make search within SharePoint much more like search in Google – which has to be a good thing. This provoked a lot of debate and whilst some of you agreed with us, others had different candidates for the top spot. A lot of people liked the improved UI and the introduction of the Office Ribbon, others loved the new Metadata features, tagging and voting, and others thought Records Management was going to be a winner.

But enough of all this positivity: (we are British after all: skepticism is our default setting!) this week we are looking at our pick for the #1 “turkey” feature SharePoint 2010, the feature that has been really hyped but that we believe could easily sink without a trace.

And our vote goes to . . . . well, we have a tie for top spot actually:

• Business Connectivity Services
• Social Networking

So, today we are going to talk about Business Connectivity Services, and on Monday we’ll come back to Social Networking- we wouldn’t want to bore you by gong on for hours!

(more…)