I’m amazed how many people ask questions on newsgroups and listservs about different .NET portal solutions but somehow don’t seem to find out about Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).  While there are several open source options that definitely have their set of strengths (DotNetNuke, Rainbow, etc.) and of course cons, WSS is extremely powerful, integrates with office products, is easily customized, and can even expose parts of the framework programmatically (lists for example). And…to top it off it’s free (although it does require Windows 2003 which could be a stumbling block for some companies).

One of the nicest features available for companies with investments in the Office 2003 suite is WSS’s built-in support for Office applications like Word and InfoPath.  Users and business teams can easily create a central place to go for document exchange, meeting notes, schedules, contact lists, etc.  Plus, WSS is quite flexible and can easily be customized with WebParts. We’ve recently experimented with using WebParts as a façade to consume ASP.NET User Controls.  By doing this HTML code can easily be change or updated without having to re-compile the entire WebPart and end users can drag and drop the appropriate WebParts that relate to their business focus onto their pages from the WebPart gallery.  

WSS does have some cons such as searching across documents in different Team Sites.  To do that you need to step up to SharePoint Portal Server (which has it’s associated software, an indexing server, and a job server…and definitely isn’t free), but for companies looking to get documents off of shared drives and into a more flexible framework WSS is tough to beat.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/sharepoint/default.mspx