I don't know much about WSS itself (we're looking at MOSS) and I'm not a developer, but that strikes me as a pretty good question.
If you can develop your own solution using WSS cheaper than the MOSS licence cost, then perhaps that's the way to go. But you'd need to include all the costs of planning, developing and supporting your product, plus the cost of licensing any other platforms/products your solution uses. Then compare that against the full licence/support cost for MOSS.
In our environment I imagine that MOSS route will end up cheaper overall, given that MOSS seems to offer most of the functionality we need with just a bit of configuration and no development. But that's not to say in-house dev isn't better for someone else.
There are a lot of functionality that you will not get with WSS only a couple of examples are Excel Services, Form Services, Business Data Catalogue, Enterprise Search capabilties.
Ofcourse you can do a lot of development with WSS and make it work good. The product choice all depends on what needs you have. In our corporation we have to use MOSS 2007, we have multiple farms in different locations, we have some 22000 users all over the world, we have to be able to do enterprise search through out our company along with integration with other systems (such as SAP etc).
Yes I agree on the Enterprise Search part.
One question on thous Business Data Catalogue though.
Everything is done in ASP.NET so what's to stop you connecting to a database, SQL server or SAP, through ASP.NET code and creating a page for that in WSS ?
Not sure I really understand how the BDC helps in this regard.
The BDC is a resonable BI tool for connecting to other data sources but it is an out of the box tool, so there are some limitations.
We recently had to develop an aspx search page designed specifically for accessing and searching a SQL 6.5 database. This worked fine but as with most development sof this kind if changes and new data descriptions start to happen you have top get to the coding again. This is where the BDC helps and makes it easier.
On the other hand why not use a Web service. Thes work wondeful with DataViewWebparts (DVWP).
To your original question, you get what you pay for! WSS3 is a good taster for MOSS. MOSS is the corner stone of the new Microsoft religion!! Draw your own conclusions.
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