“SharePoint: 20 years young” 🎂📺🎙

Mark-Kashman · ‎Mar 27 2021

Sooooo many candles. Inhale, deep breath… SharePoint – make your wish a good one.

Time flies when you’re powering productivity. And the young feels flow with the vibrancy of a community energizing you month-over-month, year-over-year, decade-after-decade.

Soak it all in below: this multi-media blog brings a special sizzle video to celebrate all that SharePoint is at 20, a unique episode of The Intrazone interviewing several of SharePoint’s original engineers, and some fun singing and singalong gems for the community at large. Quite a tech journey – none of which would be possible with the collective people that nurtured, critiqued, used, pushed and pulled SharePoint in and beyond the enterprise over these last 20 years.

Visit SharePoint’s 20^th Birthday Party! page. Join in the fun all day (Saturday, March 27^th, 2021), with 2D and 3D options. Stories, videos, and prizes await across all time zones –Jeff Teper (CVP Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive engineering) kicking it all off at 9:00AM PDT – sharing his own stories, fun videos, and a catchy community singalong. What follows is a day designed for everyone – a day to celebrate amazing people and technology across the community.

The Intrazone: “SharePoint: 20 years young”

Reminisce along with the “SharePoint: 20 years young” podcast episode of The Intrazone. You’ll hear from some of the people that built SharePoint and shaped it into what it is today. SharePoint’s own captain, Jeff Teper, takes us back to the days before SharePoint had a name: Project Tahoe. And then navigate the years with some of the earliest members of the engineering team as your audible historians: Lauren Antonoff who led program management in the early connections to Office, Rob Lefferts who helped define document management, Adam Harmetz who rooted much of its ECM foundation, Bjørn Olstad who joined Microsoft as part of the FAST acquisition and now leads our Microsoft Search efforts, and community leaders Adis Jugo and Spencer Harbar – the duo behind SharePoint’s 20^th Birthday Party event and longtime SharePoint consultants. Loads of fun in their stories, favorite moments, plus some special audible timeline tidbits with a song or two to round it all out.

Intrazone guests – clockwise, starting top left – first row: Jeff Teper (CVP | Microsoft), Lauren Antonoff (President, independents | GoDaddy), Bjørn Olstad (CVP | Microsoft), Rob Lefferts (CVP | Microsoft) – bottom row: Adam Harmetz (Partner director of program management | Microsoft), Adis Jugo (Co-founder and CEO | Nubelus), and Spencer Harbar (Enterprise architect).

Hosts and guests

Jeff Teper | LinkedIn | Twitter [guest]
Lauren Antonoff | LinkedIn | Twitter [guest]
Rob Lefferts | LinkedIn | Twitter [guest]
Bjørn Olstad | LinkedIn [guest]
Adam Harmetz | LinkedIn | Twitter [guest]
Adis Jugo | LinkedIn | Twitter [guest]
Spencer Harbar | LinkedIn | Twitter [guest]
Mark Kashman |@mkashman [co-host]
Chris McNulty |@cmcnulty2000 [co-host]

The history of SharePoint timeline – Visio diagram and list of key milestones

Timeline view of the history of SharePoint (1998 - 2021).

Additional date contextual list of the what and when for SharePoint growth across versions, acquisitions and product/services spinoffs:

1997-1999 | Site Server & Site Server Commerce Edition
1999 | SharePoint begins as codename Tahoe connected to WebDAV

Alongside codename Platinum - aka, the next version of Exchange

1999 | Digital Dashboard Starter Kit (tools to help you customize Outlook 2000 - already billed as "

knowledge management solution from Microsoft)
- Introduced "Nuggets", what would become web parts
2000 | Digital Dashboard Resource Kit, aka, Tahoe beta 1 sitting on SQL Server 2000
2001 | Add a portal UI to the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit and SharePoint Portal Server 2001 is born
2001 | Microsoft acquires nCompass; re-branded the product Content Management Server 2001
2001 | Free Office 2000 add-on = Microsoft SharePoint Team Services (aka, the start to an online, extensible, collaborative platform)
2003 | SharePoint Team Services becomes Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 emerges
2005 | Microsoft acquires Groove (Peer-2-peer sync; pre-cursor to OneDrive sync) & Frontbridge and enters hosting infrastructure market

Note: Sarbanes-Oxley rears its head related to document and records management practices.

2005 | Microsoft introduces Hosted and Collaboration version 3.0; includes SharePoint Services 2.0
2007 | Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, aka MOSS, combines STS, CMS

Microsoft acquires ProClarity and rebrands as Microsoft Performance Point 2007 – aka, the basis for BI at Microsoft.

2008 - 2009 | Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) expands to offer Exchange Online, Office Communications Online, Office Live Meeting, and SharePoint Online (built using SharePoint Server 2007)

Microsoft also acquires FAST, the precursor team and technology behind Microsoft Search

2010 | SharePoint Server 2010; Groove is renamed SharePoint Workspace
2010 | Steve Ballmer's famous "We're all in" speech at UW (March.4.2010)
2011 | BPOS rebrands - Office 365 launches, with SharePoint Server 2010 as it's foundation

Live Meeting and Office Communicator are combined to form of Lync 2010 Online - the precursor to Microsoft Teams

2012 | SharePoint Server 2013; Groove sync tech is rebranded as SkyDrive Pro
2014 | OneDrive for Business, Office Delve, Office Graph (now Microsoft Graph) & Office 365 Video
2016 | SharePoint Server 2016
2017 | SharePoint Framework #SPFx, Microsoft Stream and Microsoft Teams
2018 | SharePoint Server 2019
2020 | Microsoft Lists & SharePoint Syntex
2021 | Microsoft Viva (Connections, Topics, Learning, and Insights)

Bonus fun you can sing along with

Jeff Teper's, Beatles-inspired, "SharePoint at 20" birthday singalong:

"Happy Birthday, SharePoint" sung by 100s of SharePoint engineers via Teams:

Subscribe to The Intrazone today!

Listen to the show! If you like what you hear, we'd love for you to Subscribe, Rate and Review it on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Be sure to visit our show page to hear all the episodes, access the show notes, and get bonus content. And stay connected to the SharePoint community blog where we’ll share more information per episode, guest insights, and take any questions from our listeners and SharePoint users (TheIntrazone@microsoft.com). We, too, welcome your ideas for future episodes topics and segments. Keep the discussion going in comments below; we’re hear to listen and grow.