WSS vs. MOSS for External Sites
MOSS is the right choice to build sites that require Web Content Management. Understanding the breakdown of WCM (previously part of MCMS 2002) features will help appreciate what MOSS provides when building Internet sites or Intranet sites, which usually requires branding and publishing features:
WCM features that MOSS provides:
- Publishing workflows – approval basically
- Publishing templates – Corporate Internet Presence template, Search Center templates, Content Roll-up templates, ...
- Scheduled publishing – putting schedules on pages to show/hide on specific dates.
- Web Content editor – to allow knowledge workers to author content.
- Page Editing toolbar - gives you a set of menus/commands to manage/edit a page's workflow, versions, etc.
- Document Conversion – example would be converting a word document to a web page.
- Page libraries – to host web pages of a site. Web Pages inherit Page Layouts (page templates) and use page fields (columns in page libraries) as placeholders for content.
- Reusable Fragments – having a list of text and html fragments to be reused throughout the site. Examples are: copy right text, company slogan, a date of an event …
- Site Variations - to build connected multilingual web sites.
- Content Deployment - moving content from staging to production farms in bulk, manually or based on schedules.
Other features of MOSS that are not directly related to content publishing, but greatly affects deployments:
- Enterprise Search: Search in WSS is limited to the local site collection, so you cannot search across multiple sites. Also, you won't be able to search business data, people profiles, file shares, other SharePoint sites, and external sites. These are features of MOSS.
- Site Directory - which aggregates a number of sites and lets you be able to manage the hierarchy.
- The concept of shared services: User Profiles, Excel Services, BDC, Search, …
So does WSS have a bright side?
From a web application development perspective - YES.
From a web content management perspective - NO.
You can use WSS from three different angles (or all together): building sites for collaboration (workflows, shared lists, workspaces are the tools), building sites for storage (lists and document libraries are the tools), building web applications with the former two in mind. To see examples of Web Applications built on top WSS, check the Fabulous 40 Application Templates.
To build WCM-enabled sites with WSS only, you need to go the hard way:
Build workflows (you have the Windows WF framework), Build authoring components (Web Editor, Document Conversion, Reusable Fragments, …), templates and a placeholder framework, Multilingual sites framework. You also need to build tools for content deployment.
By adopting MOSS 2007 with its WCM capabilities, partners/customers are relieved from building the above.
