Friday, September 19, 2008

MOSS 2007 - You REALLY want the Enterprise version

Like I mentioned before, I've started a project that is pretty SharePoint heavy. Since we have a very flexible license with Microsoft, I could pretty much run whatever version I thought was best, a luxury that a smaller company doesn't have. However, if you are a Microsoft partner, you do have access to both version of MOSS as part of your partner benefit.

There is no reason to purchase and install the standard version, in my opinion. The additional search features, site publishing features, InfoPath support, Business Intelligence (BI) web parts, and default site types in the Enterprise version are extremely useful. If you have access to both, pick the Enterprise version.

I would strongly recommend that you look long and hard at the Publishing feature that is included with MOSS 2007. Rather than using the SharePoint site as a web-enabled file share, the publishing features lets you create documents as webpages directly. Since web pages are smaller, load quicker, and can be displayed on a wide variety of devices (cell phones, Macs, etc.) without special plug ins, it really simplifies the long-term life of the documents you are creating.

And, you get a multi-lingual option called Variations that can be quite useful... and amazingly irritating at the same time...

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