SharePoint General Questions

What is Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services? How is it related to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?
Windows SharePoint Services is the solution that enables you to create Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services — a key piece of the information worker infrastructure delivered in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 — integrates well with client applications, including the Microsoft Office system, providing additional functionality and serving as a platform for application development.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on top of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to provide additional capabilities including collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management, business process and forms, and business intelligence.
How do I get Windows SharePoint Services?
Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 Service Pack 2 is a component of Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is a technology included in the next release of Windows Server, Microsoft Windows Server 2008. For information on updating Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 to 3.0, please visit the Windows SharePoint Services TechCenter.
What is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.
Who is Office SharePoint Server 2007 designed for?
Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be used by information workers, IT administrators, and application developers.
What are the main benefits of Office SharePoint Server 2007?
Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a single integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.
• Business users gain greater control over the storage, security, distribution, and management of their electronic content, with tools that are easy to use and tightly integrated into familiar, everyday applications.
• Organizations can accelerate shared business processes with customers and partners across organizational boundaries using InfoPath Forms Services–driven solutions.
• Information workers can find information and people efficiently and easily through the facilitated information-sharing functionality and simplified content publishing. In addition, access to back-end data is achieved easily through a browser, and views into this data can be personalized.
• Administrators have powerful tools at their fingertips that ease deployment, management, and system administration, so they can spend more time on strategic tasks.
• Developers have a rich platform to build a new class of applications, called Office Business Applications, that combine powerful developer functionality with the flexibility and ease of deployment of Office SharePoint Server 2007. Through the use of out-of-the-box application services, developers can build richer applications with less code.