Have you joined the Sharepoint bandwagon yet? Well, I have… and if you have not, may be you should devote another hour or so, and that would be a time well spent. Start with this since this was one of the links that really got me started , and just for the records… I am not a sales guy! But I guess, even a technology guy is awestruck when he hears something like…

1 Billion USD in revenue!

75% of Fortune 100 adapting it!!

Fastest growing server product in Microsoft history!!!

 etc. etc.

I come from an ASP.NET/IIS background and was working as a Technical Lead for ASP.NET and IIS at Microsoft for the last 4 years. I have been troubleshooting IIS/ASP.NET and a variety of web applications which had different kind of issues. We collaborated a lot with the Sharepoint team, and one good day I met a couple of Sharepoint colleagues in person to find out more details. It sounded very interesting… and soon, after doing some research I was willing to get into a job which would give me opportunities to work more closely with Sharepoint. Eventually, I left my team and joined as a Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft. I was new, and very eager to learn Sharepoint. Thankfully, since I come from an ASP.NET background, understanding this was much easier than I imagined. I am yet to get into the “Guru” mode, but as most of the folks who were once new to Sharepoint, even I was surprised with the various flavors of Sharepoint available in the market. I wanted to know all the differences and was searching the net. I found a lot of posts, articles, etc which would talk about MOSS being a kind of superset to WSS, etc.

The article that defined the differences best for me was Microsoft (who else?!!)

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101978031033.aspx

If you visit the page above, you will get a detailed EXCEL file, which contains all the Sharepoint products comparison. Check it out.

My take on Sharepoint after going through the comparison was pretty simple… Start with WSS 3.0 since it is free, get comfortable (for me, it was love at first sight ), and choose the MOSS versions as per your requirements.

Some training links…

Training – WSS
SharePoint Server 2007 Courses

Until next time,
Rahul

Quote of the day:
I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up. - Tom Lehrer