The nice thing about this server is it allows every group member to have access to the group site rather than having one member use his/her people.emich.edu site. I suppose that could also be a downside because one member could potentially overwrite what someone else has done. However, I did not find that to be a problem when I last used yipe.
This site seems to have all the information contained on the people.emich.edu page but it is more to the point. So, if you know what you need, software wise, you can just go to yipe.emich.edu and download it: filezilla, Winscp, Fugu, putty, MacSSH etc.
The people.emich.edu site is a little less to the point and doesn't seem to have all the download links that yipe has.