Happy 25th Birthday Microsoft SharePoint – from Savvy’s President, Becky Bertram
On March 2nd, Microsoft celebrated SharePoint’s 25th birthday. I am privileged to say that I have been working with SharePoint for 20 of those 25 years, and I worked with a predecessor to SharePoint starting in 2001. In this month’s blog, I’d like to take a trip down memory lane, to share my experience with this product that has stood the test of time.
I graduated from Calvin University in 1999 with degrees in Art History and German. While studying abroad, I taught myself HTML in order to deliver my term paper on Egyptian art as a web page instead of a printed file. After graduation, I cold-called companies until I got hired by a company who placed me as a contractor at Amway. Amway was in the midst of building their new eCommerce platform called Quixtar.com. The company had written its own content management platform using Active Server Pages (or “ASP”).
After Quixtar.com launched, I rebuilt the Grand Rapids Business Journal’s website using a new product called “Microsoft Content Management Server 2001” or MSCMS.
In 2002 I moved to Dallas and had the opportunity to work on Verizon.com, which was using MSCMS 2002 as its back-end system. MSCMS had the ability to keep track of content “variations,” which meant having a “base” template of content that could be changed per variation. This came in handy for a company selling products in 50 states, where regulations varied from state to state. During this time, the .NET framework was released and ASP became ASP.NET. I taught myself object-oriented programming during this time.
Verizon utilized SharePoint 2001 as a glorified file share, so I was familiar with the product. However, it wasn’t until SharePoint 2007 was soon to be released that I realized that MSCMS was going to be incorporated into SharePoint Server and renamed the “Publishing” feature. As a young adult who relied on recruiters finding me based on product names and keywords, I was terrified that I would no longer be able to find work. My resume was full of a product that would soon no longer exist! Knowing this was coming, it took about a year for me to land a job where I was tasked with managing a SharePoint website. It was 2006 and I started working with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) at Countrywide Bank in Plano, TX, in advance of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server’s release.
Shortly thereafter, I got married and moved to southern Illinois. I worked briefly for Microsoft Consulting Services but soon returned to the independent contracting lifestyle I was happy with. Being in a new part of the country and knowing no one, I was happy to get involved in the local user group community in St. Louis. I spoke at my first St. Louis SharePoint User Group meeting in September of 2008, and I worked with other St. Louis community members to hold “MOSS Camp” in April 2009. In September, I attended my first “Ignite” conference (which at the time was a partner-only conference!) in Dallas, and then in October I attended the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. Right before the conference, I was awarded the MVP Award for the first time, in the award category of SharePoint, making the conference a professional highlight.
The subsequent years were filled with traveling the country to visit “SharePoint Saturday” events in Dallas, Kansas City, Chicago, and Branson and speaking at user group meetings across the country and locally.
I blogged prolifically, wrote SharePoint exams for Microsoft, and even co-authored a paper book on SharePoint 2010.
When SharePoint moved online, initially as part of BPOS (Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite), it felt very much like the on-premises product, just hosted by Microsoft instead of any other hosting company.
However, this was Microsoft’s first attempt to “marry” its various products into a single service offering. BPOS included Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online and Office Live Online. BPOS was rebranded Office 365 in 2011 and is now known as Microsoft 365.
During this time of transition to the cloud, I decided to transition from subcontracting under various companies (locally and elsewhere around the country) to starting my own business. In 2012, Savvy Technical Solutions was born.
The confluence of starting my own company at the same time that Office 365 was born meant that I found myself transitioning from working on enterprise-sized projects to working with small businesses, since the same tools that had been prohibitively expensive for small businesses in the past were now made accessible through Office 365. Whereas I had spent a decade building intranets and document management systems with MSCMS and SharePoint Server for large companies, I now found myself replicating the same idea but at smaller scale. While the technological approach remained the same, I learned about the challenges that small businesses faced when setting up new technology without the luxury of developers, project managers, or content editors, that I had benefited from on the enterprise projects I had taken part in.
In 2017, Microsoft released Teams.
This was an extension of Office Communications Server, Live Meeting Server, and then Skype for Business. Teams depended on a new type of security entity called an Office 365 Group. Each new Office 365 came with a SharePoint site called a Team site. While the concept of a “Team Site” had existed in SharePoint since its inception, Team Sites now took on new meaning when attached to Microsoft Teams. Document management now took place in the context of Teams. When the pandemic shut down office work in 2020, many companies who had planned on moving to Teams in the future, decided to accelerate those plans and transition immediately so employees could work from home. Whereas many of us wondered if SharePoint’s days were numbered as an “elder” product, this coupling to Teams breathed new life into the mission-critical nature of SharePoint. And, in fact, SharePoint’s long track record meant that it was a solid product that users could depend on.
During this transition to Teams, another transition was happening, and that was the rebuilding of SharePoint’s web interface from a legacy “classic” user interface, to one that was dubbed “modern.”
This Modern UI was responsive, meaning the items on the page could render nicely on a mobile device as well as a desktop computer. Whereas the initial SharePoint web design looked like it was designed by a database developer, Microsoft engaged actual user experience experts to rethink how SharePoint web content could look.
In recent years, Microsoft has continued to invest in SharePoint as a platform.
- OneDrive has gone from simply being a document library owned by individuals, to being a personal dashboard for employees to see an individualized view of their work.
- Microsoft elevated SharePoint lists into “Microsoft Lists” and doubled down on efforts to provide custom rendering of columns and views, (long after the days of custom field rendering through code deployed to a server.)
- Within the last year, Microsoft has released a massive amount of functionality in the SharePoint web experience, by providing the ability to add backgrounds to sections, arranging web parts in an ad-hoc way in the “flexible section” and even releasing new web parts like the Editorial web part.
- The entire document library and list experience has been overhauled in recent months to make the experience more user friendly and a new web publishing experience is currently being rolled out.
And of course, starting several years ago, we now find that SharePoint is once again playing a key role in the advent of AI, as companies realize that the quality of their data organization and security, stored in SharePoint, is paramount to rendering secure and accurate results from AI queries. In the last several months, Microsoft has released SharePoint agents, the Knowledge Agent, the SharePoint pages agent, and the momentum is building to do more.
I could never have imagined in 2001 that I would still be building intranet and document management solutions for clients 25 years later. Savvy now provides services to small, midsized and enterprise clients, taking with us the lessons learned over the course of 25 years of SharePoint. I am excited that Microsoft continues to invest in SharePoint, helping the product to evolve with the times.
In celebration of SharePoint’s 25th birthday, read the post from product manager Adam Harmetz about the new functionality coming to SharePoint in the coming months as innovation continues.
