Some Technical Terms in Sharepoint

.a quick lesson in WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 terminology and functionality

WSS 3.0 - Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 which provides a mechanism to easily create, secure, store, search (per site collection), restore, perform workflow within, and customize sites with collaborative features

MOSS 2007 - The next version of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 which offers the same aspects as WSS 3.0, but includes "features" which extend it well beyond collaboration environment. Some of these additionally installed "features" include the following:

• Additional workflows
• Browser-based content management of pages
• Excel Services for rendering of trusted partial or full workbooks in a browser page or web part
• InfoPath Forms Services for electronic forms submittal through the web browser (no InfoPath client needed to run InfoPath-created forms)
• BDC - Business Data Catalog for accessing external data through database or webservice calls
• User Profiles and Audiences to locally store Active Directory information within SharePoint, so Audiences can be used to target information to the appropriate people (show / hide content based on rules you specify).
• MySite - What I like to refer to as the web-based My Documents or Home drive. MySite is a site collection created per user to host that users content (Documents and lists). It has a public and private facing section by default. The public section defaults to showing their contact information provided by your User Profile import
• Search extended to allow search through the sharepoint web applications, into other websites, your BDC, User Profiles, Exchange Public Folders, Shared Folders, and so forth
• Records Repository for compliance (keeping of records for some certain specified time usually)
• Many more things I just can't think of now

Feature - A simple way to think of a feature is to think of a packaged customization. This customization might be in the form of a workflow, web part, list definition, EventReceiver, etc

Solution - Usually multiple features packaged together to perform a much larger task, such as installation of custom Code Access Security policies, deploy web parts to multiple locations, install DLLs, or even create site definitions (highly customized site templates)

Web Part - Usually the primary point of customization within SharePoint. Web Parts consist of XML / XSL metadata in the case of a DataView (created in SharePoint Designer - the new FrontPage) or .NET code (created in Visual Studio 2005). Once the XML / XSL metadata, or .NET code has rendered contents to the web browser, this just becomes a snippet of HTML used within a page to provide content within the context of SharePoint that might not be SharePoint related (your custom application might be rendered here)

Farm - An environment in which multiple servers host the SharePoint Services in conjunction with each other. The farm is managed by a special web application called SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration

SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration - At first look, this site just looks like a normal web application with special links to help define your SharePoint architecture. Even though this site is so much more than that, trust is, it is also still a web application, and therefore you can still create lists / subwebs within it. Take care you are not in SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration when you create lists / subwebs, as this site should not be accessed by anybody other than designated SharePoint Farm administrators. Note: It is not invalid to create lists / subwebs within the Central Administration context as long as they correspond to SharePoint administrative functions. For example, you may decide to create a document library to host your SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration planning documents downloaded from the http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/ site.

Shared Service Provider - A MOSS 2007 feature that gives boundaries for User Profiles and Audiences, BDC, Search, and Excel services configuration for sets of web applications

Web Application - A set of zone-based URLs that connect to a specific set of content databases. Content databases are what stores all your SharePoint content (documents, lists, sites, etc). You can have one or more IIS websites pointing to this web application. Each individual IIS website can facilitate Network Load Balancing or possibly differing authentication mechanisms.

Site Collection - A collection of webs that correspond to similar security requirements / roles. These are scoped per web application

Top-Level Site - A web that acts as the entry-point into your specific site collection

Web - A single site consisting of Pages and lists. Pages typically refer to a special document library MOSS 2007 uses to give the SharePoint site a friendly web interface (part of the content management aspect)

List - Content that would have normally been stored in a SQL database, but is propogated through the SharePoint UI to simply the application creation process. You might also think of this almost like an Excel spreadsheet with column headers and obviously your content in rows. Content within lists can be easily grouped by adding folders. List items (and folders) can be secured if necessary, but you should try to avoid that if possible to reduce administrative overhead.

Library - Special type of list that instead of thinking of the list as being the collective properties, is more centrally thought of via the document stored per row. Document Libraries, for example, store a document per row, but can have additional metadata (such as Subject, author, and other custom information) associated with it via columns within the same row. The new security feature of WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 allows for the securing of list items, which means you can "deny" access to a particular file if you need to. This is usually not recommended due to the complexity added to maintain such an environment. Again, folders can be created and secured individually if necessary.

I think that covers the major pieces you need. With that being said, here is my recommendation:

Unless you have an overwhelming number of users (over 5000, I believe is the typical number), one web application should be fine. I personally suggest creating a site collection per department as this tends to be the best separation of roles within your organization and site collections tend to be the best security boundary for SharePoint. If you have exceptions to the rule, then you can still define those security exceptions per web, list / library, or even list item / file / folder. I hope this answers your question.