Over the last few years, I’ve had a couple of attempts at learning about the various Microsoft SharePoint products and technologies but I’ve never really had the chance to implement SharePoint for a customer. Recently though, I’ve had the opportunity to get involved with some work around Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 (which replaces SharePoint Portal Server 2003) but unfortunately, much of this work is commercially sensitive so I can’t really write much about it here. One thing I can write about is that in the course of this work I learned that my long-time colleague Andy May has a blog with lots of useful information about SharePoint products and services (I should probably point out that the Andy May that I work with shouldn’t be confused with Andrew May, who works at Microsoft and writes about SharePoint).

I’ve found Andy’s posts on WSS and MOSS client access licenses and feature differences between [Windows SharePoint Services] WSS and MOSS 2007 particularly useful as I’ve attempted to cut through the differences between WSS and MOSS (which is just as complex as it was with previous versions of WSS/SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal Server). Microsoft has a description of the relationship between the various SharePoint products and technologies but the diagram Andy uses (from Mart Muller) makes it all a little clearer.