The Jan. 8 Computerworld article reporting that SpikeSource offering SuiteTwo, announced in 2006, was being discontinued should remind you that the term "suite" can be misleading.

Different products bundled under one price don’t make a product a suite. SuiteTwo proves the point (although Computerworld segues the news into proof of the failure of Enterprise 2.0. See separate blog post coming soon). Integrated and maintained by SpikeSource, SuiteTwo included blog-publishing software from Six Apart, RSS content-syndication software from NewsGator, and SimpleFeed and wiki software from Socialtext.

I use half of those products directly, but my experience is from the user side, not as IT staff.  It would be interesting to see how many of you use them separately from the IT side. It would prove either there was no strong need for integration and/or there was no demand that they be integrated.

But, according to the article, SpikeSource was providing some value-add. The bigger issue to watch for is so-called suites from a single vendor that are really multiple products simply cobbled together with no service or software value. Sometimes the word "suite" is just tacked on to a set of products in a marketing brochure, but it never appears in the price list.  Even worse, the bundle appears on the price list as a suite, you -- or more likely your manager --  expect to find an integrated deliverable, and instead, after you acquire it, you have to do five, six or more separate installs.

Not so sweet.