Sharepoint Portal Services vs. Windows Sharepoint Services
Written on November 23, 2005 – 5:43 pm | by Sahmeepee
I’d be interested to know about how secondary schools use Sharepoint for their intranets. We are currently licensed for SPS, but I’m finding it hard to see compelling reasons for using it over plain WSS in a secondary school environment.
I don’t particularly want to implement personal sites at this stage as it’s not what we are trying to achieve with our intranet. Also, the scalability of SPS seems fairly irrelevant – our single-server Sharepoint on SQL Server install should be plenty beefy for the foreseeable future. It looks like Class Server can be installed into WSS, so that shouldn’t be an issue either.
From the information I’ve trawled through on Microsoft’s site and elsewhere, it seems that the extra features in SPS boil down to:
- Audiences – targeting items of content on a page at specific groups of people. This could mean that a particular news item is only visible to staff, with pupils seeing the same page minus that item.
- Personalisation – letting users tweak/turn off some web parts on some pages (for themselves only). We would probably have to disable that feature to remove an avenue for confusion.
- Areas (topics) – this is very poorly described in the Microsoft material (Damnit Microsoft, use some screenshots!). From what I can gather it allows you to have a hierarchy of WSS “site collections“, which appear to be hierarchies of sites anyway. Perhaps they are saying that subsites within a site collection have no navigation system and “Areas” fill that need. If that is the case, it’s a pretty poor omission from WSS.
I shall quote a chunk from the Microsoft Web-based Training (which I can’t link to because of their wacky site design).
In SharePoint Portal Server, areas serve two purposes. First, they provide a navigational structure or map of the portal site and related content. Second, they provide a centralized structure for information browsing. Areas direct readers to the information they seek through an organized hierarchy of topics.
Within each area you can create site collections; essentially a collection of Web sites in Windows SharePoint Services. A site collection has the same owner and shares administrative settings. Each site collection has a top-level Web site. This top-level Web site can have multiple subsites, and each subsite can have multiple subsites, down as many levels as your users need. Since sites are nested in a hierarchy within the site collection, it can be challenging to manage them all.
This hierarchy allows your users to have a main working site for the entire team, plus individual working sites or shared sites for side projects. Top-level Web sites and subsites allow different levels of control over the features and settings for sites.
- Improved search – search through file shares, external websites and numerous other things that can already be searched more effectively by other means. I don’t see much mileage in that one. I suspect it might overcome the problem that searches in WSS are only local to the Sharepoint site that you are searching in (i.e. they don’t search subsites), but that isn’t stated explicitly.
- Scalability
I feel that there is a great deal of the confusion between what features are available on WSS and what is SPS-only. This is made worse by Microsoft themselves using the term “Sharepoint portal” when they are seemingly talking about WSS sites. The Class Server FAQ illustrates my point. Possibly their own staff can’t quite discern the difference either.
7 Responses to “Sharepoint Portal Services vs. Windows Sharepoint Services”
I agree with your analysis of the differences, we use just wss for our school intranets and use sps & wss for our district wide intranet (mostly due to the audiances, areas, and better search.
Rumor has it MS will be taking the word Portal out in the office 12 version. I’ve heard talk about the new version and there is a blog dedicated to develoment information. http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint
Hi
Intresting comments about sharepoint portal and WSS, but you may want to keep in mind what microsofts plan are for the near future. They are aparrently droping class server and developing something called Sharepoint learning kit which is a web part for Sharepoint portal server 2007 (due to be released soon betas are available) Then if you are familar with the learning essentials for office 2003, the next version of this software will interact directly with the Sharepoint learnining kit and make it very easy for teaching staff to create course material on your Sharepoint servers. However with everything microsoft i would always wait a good few months to see wether other organisations get any headaches by jumping in the deep end first.
Thanks for the comment Chris. I’ll be happy to see some simple authoring tools for creating SCORM-compliant content. At the moment there’s very little content around and it seems to be due to a lack of simple, high quality tools.
From what I’ve read on the Microsoft site, it’s hard to tell what they’re planning for Class Server. It’s had a very unfinished feel for a long while now (currently we’re on version 4) and it seems they have a lot of difficulty making it integrate nicely into Sharepoint. As usual, the Microsoft site tosses the word “Sharepoint” around willy-nilly and rarely specifies whether the product requires Portal Server. Grr.
The information i found above about Sharepoint learning Kit was from the college I worked at until a couple of weeks ago. They are very intrested in going the Sharepoint route and using Web Dav for Students and staff home directories which is pretty cool as students or staff can see exactly the same files at home as well as class based resources. The School I am currently working at is a long way off anything like that. The ICT co-ordinator who doesn’t actually start working here until September want’s the school to use Learnwise as its what is used in the area she works in currently. IT seems this schools don’t quite get the idea of integration curently staff have to remember 3 or 4 passwords for all the diffrent services they have. Learnwise adds yet anoter one.
By the way if your looking to make SCORM compliant stuff now right now the only tool i can recommend is Macromedia’s Captivate
Integration does become a big issue when you start making services accessible from home. It’s been a battle to set Class Server up properly with AD accounts to authenticate – the lazy way out is definitely to issue another username and password. From talking to other network admins working in my local authority, integration is going to be a problem with a lot of the V/MLEs, including the SIMS Learning Gateway.
BECTA is trying to push a system based on Shibboleth:
http://www.becta.org.uk/corporate/display.cfm?section=22&id=4665
but it’s a long way off yet, and VLEs will be mandatory by then, so it will probably mean tearing out some existing VLEs and starting again. It’s a shame that the timeline of gov’t schemes often seems to be in reverse.
Well my current manager thinks things are more secure if you don’t use intergrated security and staff have to remember lots of diffrent passwords, I thoroughly disagree wit this. I even have to logon agian to use the RMCC3 managment console also the certificate that it uses isn’t trusted.
And as for Goverments dictating IT Policy in Schools what a Joke they never ever get it right with major IT projects as they are constantly out of step and out of touch with the latest technology.
Hi Chris and Sahmeepee. I can clear up some of your questions about the SharePoint Learning Kit, and if you have others, feel free to ask them in the discussion fora at http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=SLK.
First, neither SLK nor Class Server require Portal Server. Both work fine with WSS. Class Server will only work with WSS 2.0, and SLK will only work with WSS 3.0+ so as you can imagine, SLK is intended to be the successor technology to Class Server.
SLK is an e-learning delivery and tracking tool built on SharePoint. Unlike Class Server, SLK is fully integrated with SharePoint (it’s a SharePoint Solution), and is much easier to install, deploy, configure and use than Class Server.
SLK is a community-source project, and will be free for both customers and partners. Although SLK requires SharePoint (and when I say SharePoint I mean either WSS or SPS), it is built on a componentized e-learning runtime called Microsoft Learning Components (MLC), which can be built into any application and does not require SharePoint.
SLK will run Class Server content, as well as SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 content, but SLK will *not* come with an authoring tool. Because it runs Class Server content, you will be able to use the Class Server Learning Resource Editor (LRE) to create content for SLK, and the LRE will be made available to non-Class-Server users for this purpose.
If you have any other questions, feel free to post them at http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=SLK.
Thanks,
– David Gorbet, Group Manager, MS Learning Server