Information Management Policies: WSS 3.0 vs MOSS
I just wanted to point out a potentially hazardous piece of information everyone out in the land of SharePoint should be aware of.
For those (like us) that are using both SharePoint and WSS 3.0 extensively, and often as platforms for development, it is relatively easy to confuse the two during development and testing, especially when you are deploying all your code and assuming the same basic infrastructure is available to you while ignoring what you consider to be out of the box functionality in the platform.
It is important to realize that Information Management Policies are not supported in WSS 3.0. Some people believe that Microsoft simple doesn't ship any of the ones that you would normally receive with a full MOSS license. Items such as the Auditing features, bar coding, labels, etc. This is all true. Some people believe that you can, however, write you own custom policies for WSS 3.0. This is NOT the case. The underlying Microsoft.Office.Policy assembly is not included with, or installed by WSS 3.0. When you attempt to register your custom policy you will receive an error about the assembly not being found.
There are a couple lessons here (aren't there always). The first is to know your product and platform, and keep it in mind as you prepare features and architect your solutions. The second is to keep your SharePoint development environments (VPCs I hope) as close in software installations and versions to your production environment as possible.
I hope this helps,
-Ryan