It used to drive me nuts when people came up with goofy names for their portals – usually because they could come up with some real doozies, spawn of the .com boom and generally more clever than they needed to be. But at the end of the day, you need to name your sites.
We had a guest speaker at the MNSPUG a few months back that was describing his company’s uses of SharePoint. During that presentation, he made a statement that stuck with me about naming his site – actually about naming the sites and solutions that were built on the SharePoint platform. I can’t quote him exactly, but he essentially stressed the importance of coming up with names rather than calling things ‘SharePoint’. There are a couple of advantages to this.
- If you have more than one instance or solution, calling everything ‘SharePoint’ can be confusing. Naming each solution reduces confusion. When talking about ‘SharePoint’, let it be about the platform itself.
- SharePoint is a product and a platform. In the unfortunate instance where something isn’t working correctly and users are becoming disenchanted with a solution – its better that they are frustrated with a specific solution rather than the entire platform. Let people say there’s something wrong with ‘UberSource’ instead of saying there’s something wrong with SharePoint. SharePoint is so much bigger than a single implementation – don’t get your users down on it unnecessarily.
It seems like a simple and somewhat silly thing to call out, but the bottom line is to name your SharePoint instances / portals / solutions – whatever. It’ll make your life easier.
Carry on!