Today, March 2nd, we’re celebrating 25 years of Microsoft’s set of software and services branded as SharePoint and the community that’s formed around SharePoint.
The first install
My own personal journey with SharePoint started when I was a manager of software development at a startup in Evanston, Illinois. Our team developed the web-based delivery platform for our company’s main product: data about print ads, mainly in newspapers. My manager, the director of IT, and my former roommate in college, suggested I check out this new software from Microsoft that he’d heard about. I installed it on a test server, poked around with it, and told him I wasn’t sure it was ready yet. We were nimble and built on Microsoft’s web server and database stack. However, we both had experience with Microsoft’s early versions of new products in the past. They often delivered less than they promised in version 1.0.
Customizing SharePoint
After my first install, I continued developing web apps and eventually moved to consulting. I first encountered Microsoft Content Management Server while consulting for a company recently acquired, at the time, by AT&T. I wrote a component that dynamically generated the sitemap for their public website. Based on that work, I later wrote a web part for Dell’s intranet that dynamically generated a list of all the events across internal human resources sites. It was interesting work, but despite the encouragement and training by coworkers like Matthew McDermot and Richard Calderon, I wasn’t sold on SharePoint until the Microsoft Office Developers’ Conference in Redmond in 2006.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: MOSS
At the conference, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft Content Management Server would be discontinued and SharePoint would replace it as Microsoft’s web publishing platform. The new product with expanded web publishing would be known at Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, too long to say often, so it was affectionately known as MOSS. After reading the 50-page overview documentation and the 50 pages of installation documents, I practiced installing and setting it up a few times before going onsite at San Antonio’s largest employer, a large financial services company that prefers not to be named. There, probably to Jeff Deverter’s dismay, I was representing Microsoft Consulting Services under a sub-contract as Microsoft’s on-site “SharePoint expert.” Together we explored with our friend Kent Kingery who we’d both later reconnect with at Rackspace’s SharePoint 911 consulting service. Over the next 6 months, I setup most every capability possible in that lab. We proved what MOSS could do for the large financial services company.
Microsoft Certified Master in SharePoint 2007
I submitted the architecture of a SharePoint 2003 to 2007 migration with my application for the highly competitive Microsoft Certified Master program. Vesa Juvonen and company grilled me on the details of my work and rejected my application for the very first cohort of students. When I arrived in Redmond for 3 weeks of training after being accepted to the second round, I found myself in rare company. Out of the 30 or so students, I might have been the only one who didn’t work for Microsoft. I definitely was the only one bold enough to show an iPhone to get a picture with Spencer Harbar after his presentation to the class. Eventually, I passed the tests and joined a small group of experts recognized by Microsoft for large enterprises to rely on for help install, configuring, and customizing SharePoint.
Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP)
Meanwhile, in parallel, that first pairing with Jeff Deverter had led me into the SharePoint community. With Jeff, I started attending and eventually leading the San Antonio SharePoint User Group. Also, I started writing about SharePoint on my own personal blog. Eventually, I wrote 200 articles, mostly about SharePoint. With that portfolio, Microsoft Press asked me to co-author two books on SharePoint. The writing, combined with my work organizing events like SharePoint Saturday San Antonio and presenting at dozens of events across the US, led to my first MVP award in 2013 and another in 2014.
Content design for OneDrive and SharePoint
The most amazing result of those first 10 years of SharePoint led me to Redmond full-time for these last 10 years. I’d learned Redmond was a great destination during the many trips for conferences, MCM training, and MVP Summits (the annual gather of MVP award winners). In Redmond, my content design began while preparing for the release of the SharePoint mobile apps for iOS and Android devices. I’m proud of the many ways I’ve helped improve the user experience of SharePoint as a content designer. And for the last year, I’ve led content design for AI features and the Photos experience in OneDrive. OneDrive’s close relationship with SharePoint is another story.
SharePoint at 25
I once read that if SharePoint were a standalone software company it would be one of the top 10 software companies in the world. Almost every large company in the world depends on SharePoint to deliver intranets and file sharing. Because SharePoint is a platform unlike most apps, the role of the software confused many people. A smaller group of people embrace the unique opportunity SharePoint provides to bring content to coworkers. We call that group of people the SharePoint community. And today, the community celebrates our shared past with SharePoint.
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