Areas vs. Sites

This is like the SharePoint version of Freddy vs. Jason (or Aliens vs. Predator if that's your sort of thing). It's a debate that, IMHO, has been asked and answered a thousand times over in the newsgroups and emails but people still are confused. Bill English said it best to me once (and continues with this position which I completely share).

• SharePoint Areas are for aggregation.
• SharePoint Sites are for collaboration.

Read this. Learn this. Live this.

True, you can use the portal to create document libraries, check-in/out and all that good stuff but it becomes a bit of a nightmare in organization from what I've found. Moving it down to a WSS site and letting the user manage access and all that works much better. Also you can create public areas for the information and let users “publish“ information up to the portal into that area which lets them decide what they want to show. They'll go on in their WSS site adding documents and only pushing up to the portal what others need to see.