1000 SharePoints of Light
What’s the deal with all the names Microsoft has given to its SharePoint product? The folks at Microsoft who work on SharePoint branding need to just take a chill pill.
SharePoint is the shining example of why you shouldn’t let committees name products. I mean, come on. Really? How many different names do you need? It’s not confusing enough putting out two proucts with similar names and similar functionality - one you get free with so little marketing done that many people don’t know they have it, and the other is extremely expensive. Just to make sure no one knows what the hell the products are, every single version upgrade has to have a different but similar name too.
So let’s see. The first iteration brought us the free SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2001. Most people just called it SharePoint. What is it? Well, they might not even know. The second iteration brought us Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003. The portal upgrade was straightforward, but we lost the Team on the services, which seemed to be the big differentiation, and obviously someone in the committee thought we didn’t realize it ran on Windows and needed that in the title to remind us.
So we go on to the next iteration of the product. Someone decided that we didn’t realize that SharePoint integrated with Office, so they made a big deal out of moving it into the Office Product line rather than it being a server product and called it Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Now both the Team and Portal designations were gone - so how does anyone know which version this is? Oh, and the freebie version is called Windows SharePoint Service 3.0, so at least that one kept its name. Of course, with the free version going up by ones and the paid version going by years, it makes it just that bit harder to keep track of it. And Microsoft wonders why they have a hard time selling it to their customers. Arrrgggggghhhhhh!!!!!