What's in a name?

Monday, Dec 15, 2008 2 minute read Tags: random rant
Hey, thanks for the interest in this post, but just letting you know that it is over 3 years old, so the content in here may not be accurate.

Something that really annoys me is that when people don't use the correct name of a product, and by not using the name of the product completely miss what the product is for.

I think that certain people do do it just to stire me up, but for example a product I do a lot of work with is RedDot CMS. But RedDot produce another product, RedDot LiveServer which is completely different in what it does.
RedDot CMS is just a content management system, and to be honest it's one of the truest examples of a content management system. Most common CMS's really blur the line between content management and application serving.

Application serving is what RedDot LiveServer is about. I'm not a fan RedDot LiveServer (for reasons which I wont go into here) but RedDot CMS I believe is a good CMS product, if you're after a CMS.
But I'm digressing.

Another example, one which I see even more often is SharePoint. I can't count the number of times I've heard "They want a site in SharePoint" or "Their site is built in SharePoint".
Great, fantastic, what can you tell about my car if I tell you it's a Ford?

SharePoint is a technology base, the SharePoint family is broken into two major components, Windows SharePoint Services (v3 is current) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
And then within their families there are a number of different versions, depending on what is provided in the project.

Similarly when I started development on the Umbraco Interaction Layer I spent quite a while thinking about what would be the name of the project. I eventually decided on UIL because of it conveys what the project is all about, providing a layer for better integration/ interaction with the Umbraco API.
Sure it has also been nick-named LINQ to Umbraco, but really the concept of a LINQ-like API for Umbraco is actually a very small part of what the UIL is all about.

So next time someone comes and asked for info on how to build a site in SharePoint, or use any other ambigiously named product, just look blankly at them and ask them what said technology is!