Moss Lady

I recently installed MOSS 2007.  As a user of SharePoint 2003, here are some of my first impressions.

First impression.  Yes, this is a SharePoint site all right. 

• Microsoft would probably be insulted by my calling their look and feel for the two products similar—I am sure they spent a lot of effort improving 2007—but that’s what it looks like at first glance. 
• A little sprucing up of the styles, some cleaner design, but overall it still looks like a SharePoint site.

Second impression. Is this a portal site or a WSS site?

• Look a little longer and it’s not so simple.  In fact, it’s quite confusing.
• If it wasn’t for My Site and a couple of other portal-type things I couldn’t tell if I was looking at a MOSS site or a WSS site.

Third impression. I am so confused.

• How on earth does one do anything here?

Fairly standard reactions for a major upgrade, I would say. The product looks good, although at first glance the changes imply a steeper learning curve than I was hoping.

I must say that by the time I really understood SharePoint, and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS), we had heavily customised our site, so I can’t really compare out-of-the-box SPS 2003 with out-of-the-box MOSS 2007.  Even so, my overall impression is that in MOSS 2007 the WSS roots show through far more that they did in SPS 2003.