Introduction

This document describes the relationship and the differences between Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003. You can use this information to decide if your organization should deploy Windows SharePoint Services alone or with SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

Relationship between Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2003

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies facilitate collaboration within an organization and with partners and customers. Using the combined collaboration features of Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2003, users in your organization can easily create, manage, and build their own collaborative Web sites and make them available throughout the organization.

Windows SharePoint Services is a collection of services for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 that you can use to share information, collaborate with other users on documents, and create lists and Web Part pages. You can also use Windows SharePoint Services as a development platform for creating collaboration and information-sharing applications.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is a secure, scalable, enterprise portal server built upon Windows SharePoint Services that you can use to aggregate SharePoint sites, information, and applications in your organization into a single, easy-to-use portal. In addition to the features of Windows SharePoint Services, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 includes the following features:

• News and Topics
• My Site, with personal and public views
• Information targeted to specific audiences
• Powerful indexing and searching across file shares, Web servers, secure Web servers, Exchange Public Folders, Lotus Notes, and SharePoint sites
• Alerts that notify you when changes are made to relevant information, documents, or applications
• Single sign-on for enterprise application integration
• Integration with Microsoft BizTalk Server

Because SharePoint Portal Server 2003 requires Windows SharePoint Services, all features of Windows SharePoint Services are available in SharePoint Portal Server 2003.