What is MOSS ?

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
(MOSS) is the full enterprise-ready, collaborative platform product offering from Microsoft, and is definitely not free. The biggest reason (I think) that things get confusing between WSS and MOSS is because MOSS is built on top of WSS. MOSS offers all of the features of WSS, but enhances and extends them while also adding new functionality. So you'll see the same site templates from WSS available to you when creating a new site in MOSS, as well as a host of new options.

There are several features that you get with MOSS that aren't available in WSS:

• Search and cohesion across site collections - In WSS, each site collection is an island unto itself. MOSS adds the portal umbrella that pulls together those separate site collections and allows for searching across them.
• Personalization - MOSS allows users to have individual, personalized sites; WSS doesn't. (MySites are an example of a personalized MOSS site and available via a specific MOSS site template)
• User Profiles - MOSS allows you to import, store, and update personal data on your users, it's not available in WSS
• Audience Targeting - MOSS allows you to target content to specific user groups; WSS doesn't.
• Crawl and Index sources outside of SharePoint for searching- MOSS allows you to return search results for indexed sources such as file shares, web sites, Lotus Notes databases, and much more; WSS can only crawl and index WSS sites.
• Search administration and customization - MOSS gives its admins much more control over the configuration of its search engine; WSS doesn't.
• Site Templates - MOSS provides additional site templates (and workflows) for content management and portals; WSS does not have these templates.