As we look ahead as an organization I’m considering different strategies to advance the architecture. One such strategy is to classify collaboration technologies such as MOSS/WSS as key infrastructure components. What is interesting about this approach is that WSS truly is an infrastructure technology. After all you can install it from the Windows install media. From an end-user, list based workflows in WSS is really not much different then BizTalk orchestrations. BizTalk gets systems talking to systems and WSS gets people talking to systems. I’m not proposing and end-around the process, but rather an enlightenment resulting from and understanding of the process itself.
As we begin to work with consulting firms on our SharePoint implementation, I’m curious how they approach the WSS/MOSS discussion. When I was at a large farm bank with WSS 2.0 and SharePoint, we didn’t need any of the features of SharePoint and rolled out WSS 2.0 only. Let me take that back. Our core IT folks saw Single Sign On featured on yet another Microsoft SSO product that wouldn’t work, and turned away. After spending hundreds of hours trying to get SSO working at the bank they shelved the effort. Our current infrastructure isn’t nearly as complicated and the IS staff here doesn’t have the same pain points in the SSO area.
The business doesn’t really care which collaboration technology they get to use as long as it facilitates their processes in a natural way. I believe the question most IS organizations are attempting to answer is whether or not MOSS brings a significant value add over WSS to meet the end-user needs. At the end of the day the end-user will either have an easy to use process or they won’t. Maybe we in IS can put some foundational infrastructure in place that allows them to realize a little more sunshine in their day.
The MOSS feature that really stands out is search. I’m curious how this goes head to head with the Google search appliances we are already using. It may turn out to be that the Google search rocks, but for business continuity planning we go with a software solution we can host in our VI3 infrastructure. Time to contact Google again and see if they plan to offer a virtual search appliance we can host in our VI3 infrastructure.
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At a recent SharePoint user group, someone there mentioned their opinion that Google search was better than MOSS search in performance and capability, but that if you add Ontolica
Local workshop
you get better features and performance than Google search.
I can't verify but I thought I'd share his opinion.
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