We are looking to present a published list of content (mostly documentation) in a SharePoint WSS 3.0 Site (not Portal Server) such that some of the content is open to the public and a subset is available only to internal company users. External users should search through a custom form and see only those records approved for public viewing. Internal users should be able to search through the same form and get results based on the entire population. Ideally there would be only one instance of each document and of each record pointing to the document.

This list is meant to be solely a distribution tool and as such we have no use for all the normal “Document Library” functionality (check in / out, version control, etc.)

We have been looking for View level permissions as a way to do this – the view for the external users would obviously filter out all confidential materials while the view for the internal users would not. Since this functionality is not available in WSS 3.0 we are looking for the next best way to accomplish this.

Any help/suggestions would be appreciated.

This idea probably isn't in the ballpark of what you're looking for, however, you could create two seperate doc. libraries and only give the internal users access to both. Then using the Object Model you can access the contents of both lists and expose the user to the content which they are authorized to use. In this regard you don't get caught up having to do a lot of work on assigning permissions.

There are problems associated with this approach and as I said probably not what you're looking for, but it came to mind so I thought I would throw it out there.