How to Choose the Best SharePoint Version For Your Firm
Microsoft SharePoint can be a great way for firms to manage any matter related documentation, including emails.
There are two varieties – Windows SharePoint Services (“WSS”) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Service (“MOSS”). The difference between the two is that Microsoft pitches both at different markets.
WSS is includes free with Windows – i.e. properly license Windows and you get this fully-functional document management system for nothing. This means for small to medium sized firms, WSS offers a single repository for documents for just the cost of setting it up.
MOSS is a paid product and builds on the functionality found in WSS. It is designed for larger teams.
Microsoft say that WSS works up until you have about 80-100 users, then it is worth going up to MOSS. The reason for this is that WSS is designed to allow a team to store and store information. MOSS is designed to allow disparate teams to discover information that are created by discrete teams around the organisation. Essentially to understand MOSS, picture a large, multinational company where individual groups in different regions are doing similar things and that information needs to be discovered.
For law firms, although MOSS is designed for information discovery it is not designed to be anywhere near as advanced as the intelligent “e-discovery” tools that are routinely pitched to law firms. MOSS essentially offers a text-based search, whereas good e-discovery tools are designed to work on the basis of finding intelligent information in a corpus of text-based data.
Essentially we recommend SharePoint as a great document repository for storing documents and emails related to matters, mainly because the “free/bundled-with-Windows” version takes care of even large law firms because whilst Microsoft does not consider 80-100 users as being particularly large, for a law firm that level of user count is representative of a pretty decent sized firm.
This is why we designed Topaz Filer to work with SharePoint out-of-the-box. As part of the standard package you get the SharePoint connector that will store emails in:
- Windows SharePoint Services 3,
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007,
- Windows SharePoint Services 2,
- Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003.
You will also find that our hosted trial is based on a WSS installation, and that the screenshots on the How Topaz Filer Works page are also WSS.
Microsoft’s Web site offers information on MOSS here and on WSS here.
If you do not have a SharePoint implementation in-house and would like to talk to us about implementing one, please visit our page on SharePoint implementation here.
If you already work with an IT partner that provides you with an off-site, hosted SharePoint solution, we can support this scenario - see "Deployment Options".
