Tahoe Server
25 years ago, I was a Windows Admin in Austin, TX at a place called Vignette (bought by OpenText years later). Back in the day, if you were Windows admin, you likely had an MSDN subscription with Microsoft. If so, every so often, they’d send big plastic cases filled with CD's including lots of their software, Windows versions, SQL, Exchange, etc. They’d send pre-released software sometimes. I remember pulling a “Tahoe Server” CD out of the case, installing it one of our dev servers & standing up Vignette’s first instance of SharePoint (circa 2000). That same night, I found a feature in the interface for indexing PDF’s. I made a ‘site’ for their legal department & pointed the PDF indexer at a folder that had thousands of PDF legal case files. By the next morning it was fully indexed, and I sent an email to the legal team with link to the site. They began working much faster than they’d ever done before. It was like having Google for all their legal cases where previously they’d manually dig through one PDF at a time & even print paper and hire people to read to find, highlight, review, etc. Several months later, I received a call from the CIO in the middle of the night. “Tyler, this is John C. That tool you setup our legal dept. is offline, and they need it back up ASAP!” I drove an hour into the office (cause that’s what we did in those days) and discovered that ‘Tahoe Server’ had expired. I was on the phone with Microsoft until long after the sun rose, migrating the Tahoe database to a fully licensed & officially titled “SharePoint” server.
Lessons learned:
- PDF Data Extraction. SUPER POWERFUL!!
- Don’t put pre-released software into production… unless you’re prepared to suffer the consequences.
- Share the story someday.