SPS Areas vs. WSS Sites

The following question comes up a lot in my interaction with our training participants:  What are some of the advantages of using a WSS site vs. a sub-site on the Portal?

Here are my thoughts on it:
All if not most collaboration functionality of WSS is available in the Portal (since WSS is the root product of the Portal).

However, few things should be considered when deciding whether to use Areas or Sites for your collaboration:

1. It is recommended to use only One Portal per company.  If a company needs their disparate locations to be able to collaborate on sites locally, it would be to their advantage to generate new sites locally (using WSS)


2. All WSS sites from many geographical locations could be aggregated under one Portal umbrella


3. WSS Sites can be used to create permanent as well as ad-hoc sites.  While Areas in SPS can be "orphaned" if their parent areas are deleted.  Thus, the organization of these “containers of data” would be better served using WSS sites instead of Areas

I’ll be back with more random thoughts soon.