Many people are only too aware of the major difference between WSS and SharePoint 2007. WSS is free and SharePoint 2007 isn't! So, why discount SharePoint's baby brother and go with the cost option?

WSS provides an adequate document management solution; SharePoint builds on this to provide an enterprise collaboration portal for intranets, extranets and internet facing collaborative solutions. The following are the main differences:

1.  My Sites - My Sites is not available in WSS. My Sites allows each user to create their own personal web site for personal documents and documents they want to share with colleagues. This is a major feature used in intranet deployments.
2. Social Networking - SharePoint includes the web parts that are used for Social Networking to help establish connections between colleagues with common interests.
3. Audience Targeting - WSS does not include support for audiences. Audiences can be used in SharePoint to target content to particular groups of people.
4. Portal Site Templates - SharePoint includes a number of site templates that are specifically designed for developing intranet/extranet portals.
5. Search - This is a major area where the 2 products differ. WSS only allows you to search and index content on the local WSS server. SharePoint includes a powerful search and indexing facility that allows you to index local SharePoint sites, other SharePoint sites, other web sites, files servers and external data referenced by a component of SharePoint called the Business Data Catalog (BDC).
6. Business Document Workflow Support - Again, a major area of difference. The in-built workflows for business document workflow, including signature collection, approval (serial and parallel) and disposition approval are only available in SharePoint, not in WSS.
7. Business Intelligence (BI) - these features enable a number of features, including Excel Services, the Report Center and the Business Data Catalog that allow you to bring in external data into SharePoint and display through Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and other web parts on an intranet site. These features are only available in the Enterprise Edition of SharePoint and require an Enterprise CAL.
8. Single Sign On (SSO) - SharePoint includes the same SSO service as in BizTalk 2006. This can be used to develop an application portal in SharePoint where a user signs into the SharePoint portal and then transparently accesses web based applications without being prompted for their authentication credentials again.
9. Roll Up Web Parts - Available in SharePoint. Allow the author to display summary information from a number of other locations.
10. Site Manager - Site Manager is a SharePoint only tool that allows the easy management of a portal hierarchy. This allows you to build scalable, flexible web farms and organise/re-organise the structure at any time.

These are the main differences between the 2 products however in reality there is a certain level of cleverness in Microsoft's positioning of the products. WSS is an adequate Content Management solution for document management. It is also an ideal product to replace Public Folders in Exchange Server which are looking like being discontinued in the future. Many companies start out with WSS and then migrate to SharePoint 2007 at a later date. If your company is intending on using a SharePoint product for your company intranet you will probably require the functionality of SharePoint 2007 at some point so the question is whether you would be better biting the bullet and starting off with a scalable platform rather than go with WSS and then face upgrade costs at a later date.

To download a complete comparison matrix in Excel please click SharePoint Products and Technologies Version Comparision Matrix.xls.