Seth Dillingham recently created a nice, long summary in outline form to answer the question he hears from clients — What Is Conversant? Its pretty exhaustive, and I don’t really have anything to add to the specifics.
To Seth, Conversant is groupware. To me its a sophisticated toolbox for categorizing, arranging, ordering and indexing information that really is realtively easy to use.
There are some very nice, very easy-to-use blogging software platforms out there like Movable Type. They’re very good and very powerful for what they do, but its difficult to do things outside the blogging model with them.
On the other hand, there are extremely powerful but also extremely difficult-to-use (at least for non-experts) content mangament systems like Mambo. I don’t have time to take a course in PHP to administer my web site.
Conversant lives in the happy middle with all the power of a system like Mambo but with a much shorter learning curve. If you need a site that goes beyond the blogging basics, but don’t want to deal with learning programming or hiring someone to install and code the specifics (as I would have to do if I were going with something like Mambo), Conversant hits the sweet spot in the power vs. convenience tradeoffs.