Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) is a significant new product with broad and deep capabilities designed to support a wide variety of enterprise functions to manage content, present business intelligence data, automate workflow processes, manage records, and build both public and private web sites. Although MOSS can be thought of as the next version of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS), it is really a completely new product. Its organizational structure and customization patterns are much different than those of SPS.

MOSS is based entirely on WSS technology and is a true superset of WSS functionality. Every enhancement you create in WSS will function identically in MOSS. This also means that the end user experience is consistent between MOSS and WSS. Navigation elements, styles, and site organization are the same whether you are in MOSS or WSS. This is a far cry from SPS, which often seems to have no relationship at all to WSS. For those who experienced SPS, you will find that the old Topic and Area structure has been eliminated in favor of a more flexible interface that can easily be changed.

Portal Features

Many of the portal features of MOSS will be familiar to anyone who has worked previously with SPS. Although the look and feel of MOSS more closely resembles the current version of WSS than the previous version of SPS, familiar capabilities of SPS such as Audiences, Profiles, My Site, and Single Sign-On (SSO) have been retained. These features differentiate a true organizational portal from a simple team collaboration site and should be thought of as one of the primary differences between MOSS and WSS.

Audiences in MOSS are used to target content at portal users. Within MOSS, you may define an audience based on user attributes such as membership in an Active Directory group. Then you may use that audience definition to show or hide content when a page is viewed.

MOSS user profiles allow you to define, search, and present metadata about portal users. Profiles draw information from Active Directory to provide basic information such as first name and last name, but you may also extend the metadata to include custom fields such as languages spoken or areas of expertise. Additionally, these custom fields can even be derived from other systems, for example like PeopleSoft. Once defined, profiles can be a search scope that allows users to locate people within the organization.

Along with their profile, every MOSS user can also be given their own personal site—
called My Site. My Site functions as a personal workspace for MOSS users and allows them to organize their own documents and information. Through My Site, users may connect to colleagues, manage their profiles, and be alerted when key information changes somewhere in MOSS.

Although SSO services were available in SPS, my experience is that they were rarely used. In MOSS, however, SSO takes on new meaning, because it is used to facilitate access to several new features such as data in line-of-business systems. SSO allows you to specify a set of credentials for accessing a secondary system and then give those credentials an application name that may be invoked later by either a MOSS feature or your own custom code.