Talking about SharePoint in Copenhagen today and yesterday reminded me of an interesting point. While I like to talk about the practices and tools of search, web content management, or social software, to my audience, that whole spectrum was simply "SharePoint" (or MOSS).

Sure, that which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet. What's in a name? Well, according to Microsoft, MOSS currently smells like "connecting people, process, and information." Which is a tagline that could also be used for a bus. Or a train.

It would be easy to blame Redmond for this, but they're probably right. While WordPress can be described straightforward as "blog software," even their customers aren't always quite sure what they're using. The WordPress showcase has such gems as the Fox Forum (which isn't a forum), and WikiRoma, which isn't a wiki. To most people, the content management spectrum actually is a little bit like a rainbow -- there are no clear distinctions between the colors (though there's obviously a lot of them).

Still, in order to be able to discuss the various ways you can apply the software, it's useful to have at least some grasp of what it is we mean with, for instance, "purple." Even though it's difficult to define purple, and even though rather counter-intuitively, it's not the same as violet.

So if you're looking at SharePoint, don't just see it as all colors at once. Try to separate its uses a little bit, so you can effectively compare them with other products (which might be better suited to a task) or third-party add-ons (which might do a better job than SharePoint out-of-the-box). And who knows -- there might even be a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.