Before going to Sharepoint we have to know some thing about portal technology.
What is portal technology?
Portal is nothing but gateway through which members of a comapny can access business information and if it set up in a proper way, it is the first place where employee of a company will goes to access anything important information.
Sharepoint is also a enterprise information portal where members of a company can access the information on Intranet, Extranet and Internet. It allows the people of a company to connect and share their work.
With Sharepoint, normal business people can create, deploy and manage team websites without depending on any administrator or developer. That means normal people can manage the data in a easy way.
Sharepoint consists of two parts.
Windows Sharepoint Service 3.0 is a free offering available to Window Server 2003. It contains core functionality needed for document managament and collaboration, such as document libraries and lists .
Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 is also offered same features as WSS in addition it also offered functionality required for Enterprise content management as well as Excel form services, Business Data catalog and Business intelligence. Sharepoint also offers robust search engine feature and dispays the information in a cutomizable format.
By default, WSS is free with Window Server 2003, but for Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 you have to pay some money.
For WSS, you can download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D51730B5-48FC-4CA2-B454-8DC2CAF93951&displaylang=en
For Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 Trial version, you can download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2E6E5A9C-EBF6-4F7F-8467-F4DE6BD6B831&displaylang=en