Microsoft started working for SharePoint from late 1990's. Before SharePoint, Microsoft released several different products like Site Server, Digital Dashboard etc, and finally by the mid 2000 Microsoft released STS and SPS. this was the first major release in this series.
2000
STS | SPS 2001 |
SharePoint team services | Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server |
Used for collaboration | Document management |
No enterprise search | Enterprise search |
No strict document management | |
Used for collaboration |
The name was only SharePoint but they don’t share any thing between them. They were built on different data storage technologies.
2003 (Microsoft combine these two products)
WSS 2.0 | Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 |
WSS became the platform product | SPS 2003 was built on the top of WSS |
WSS was built on the top of .NET | |
Framework 1.0 | |
WSS became the platform product |
Inconsistencies were in the product because of consolidating two separate products. Like WSS was providing some functionality which SPS 2003 was not providing, however; SPS 2003 was built on the top of WSS 2.0 so it must provide base line functionality provided by WSS 2.0.
2006
WSS 3.0 | Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 |
WSS was still the platform product | MOSS 2007 was built on the top of WSS 3.0 |
WSS was built on the top of .NET | Web content management |
Framework 2.0 | Enterprise search |
Collaboration | User profiles |
Document management | BDC (Business Data Catalog) |
Visioning | InfoPath form services |
Portal | BI (Business Intelligence) |
Excel Services |
Microsoft renamed the product from SPS to MOSS because new features were added in that release and they were not only related to the portal functionality.
Now it's the 2011 and SharePoint 2010 has been released with lots of changes, enhansments and improvements. I am not gonna talk about it in this post.
Hope you guys like this information.