If you use Windows Server 2003, then you may or may not be aware that there are various free downloads (tools and feature packs) that are available to you, which can provide very useful services to your users.
One of these is Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) v3.
WSS allows you to easily create an intranet/extranet or even various pre-built web applications for you to use.
And let me repeat once again, that this is absolutely free. So there’s no good reason to not give it a go.
Here are some videos that will introduce you to the technology and features available. Note that these videos are from mid-2006, prior to WSS v3 being released; so the people on the videos will say that “the product will be released soon”, etc. You can safely ignore that, since the product is fully available today.
Videos:
- First look at the next version of Sharepoint (24 mins)
- Blogs, wikis, RSS (55 mins)
- Creating sharepoint sites for blogs and wikis (23 mins)
- Creating WSS v3 workflows with Visual Studio 2005 (30 mins)
You can also see a list of features in text format, if you prefer not watching videos. Note that although this seems to be the most thorough feature list I could find, some of the links leading off that page are now outdated. A more concise list can be found here.
Here’s the list of new WSS application templates made available by Microsoft. To install these templates you will have to follow some setup instructions.
Lastly, you can also walk through 8 virtual labs on WSS v3.
I suggest you start with the “What’s New in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Feature Walkthrough” virtual lab. This will take you 1 hour (or less) to complete.
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