On this Digital Workplace Today Podcast, Daniel Cohen-Dumani takes a look back into the early days of SharePoint. Daniel is the founder and CEO of Portal Solutions, and he has been a part of the SharePoint world since its beginnings over a decade ago. He joined us today to help us understand the history of SharePoint.
Listen to the episode to hear it all, or read the show notes for an overview of the conversation and links to key items we discussed.
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READ THE SHOW NOTES
Today we talked to Daniel Cohen-Dumani about the history of SharePoint. Daniel is the founder and CEO of Portal Solutions since the start almost 14 years ago. To start Daniel shares how he first learned about SharePoint. In truth, he came across SharePoint by accident in 2000. It has been interesting to see the large ecosystem that has built up around this single product.
The Early Days of SharePoint
In the late 90s, Microsoft was working on an internal initiative called the Digital Dashboards. Today we talk about dashboards but at that time, this was something that Microsoft built inside of Outlook. It came out as a place to assemble HTML pages and widgets. Then in 2000, Microsoft released two products that were the first generation of SharePoint.
Back then, Daniel shares, it was two different products with completely different architectures. There was SharePoint Portal Server 2001 which was a document management and enterprise search tool and was based on Microsoft Exchange on the backend. Then there was SharePoint Team Services, which was an evolution of Office Web Services or OWS. This tool was for team collaboration and had a sequel backend with an ASP front end. The only thing these two had in common was the name, and it caused a lot of confusion.
Daniel continues that these two products were revolutionary for their time back in 2000. At the time, there were dozens of portal products like Plumtree, IBM, and BEA. Some of these products don’t exist anymore, but it was the beginning of the idea of the concept of having a place to go to get information internally for an organization.
SharePoint was revolutionary partly because of the pricing. The team services were free. If you had Microsoft Office, you could license your sequel backend and have a collaboration tool with features that are still available today. Microsoft came in under the radar of big competitors with two affordable, if disjointed, products.
SharePoint also had an advanced search function with metadata, tagging and sort tools. This was pretty advanced at the time.
The Evolution of SharePoint
Daniel explains that the two products merged in 2003. This was a big challenge early on because they quickly realized that people needed both. They needed tools to collaborate with groups but also with the organization as a whole.
In 2003, Microsoft released two new products, but one was built on top of the other one. The foundational team services was renamed Windows SharePoint Services, WSS. On top of that was Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003. From a technical architecture perspective, this change made it a sequel based dot net product. This was a unification from an architectural standpoint and addressed one of the key challenges early on.
Back when Microsoft launched SharePoint, they were outsiders. They were slowly getting into the enterprise space. At that time, Exchange and Windows Server were both relatively new, and there was tough competition.
One of the biggest challenges early on was a lack of knowledge. If you looked at Amazon at the time, there might have been two books on SharePoint. Today there are thousands and thousands. That kind of knowledge was lacking, and that’s really why we started Portal Solutions.
The other big challenge was the feature set was very small compared to what we are used to today.
Even today SharePoint is pretty inexpensive compared to the competitors. A big competitor in the early days was Plumtree (which was bought by BEA and then WorldCom), and they had better features at the time. But Plumtree was challenged with a lot of other product offerings.
After the release in 2003, Microsoft bought Content Management Server (CMS). That became the foundation of SharePoint 2007 which is also known as MOSS 2007. At that time, it continued to have a dual architecture. In 2007, Microsoft also added the web content management capabilities or publishing sites.
Daniel shares that SharePoint grew through acquisitions and from internal innovation over the years. Microsoft purchased a company called Fast that could bring a better search engine and ProClarity for business intelligence (BI) offerings.
In 2010, Microsoft renamed the Windows SharePoint Services product SharePoint Foundation. And they dropped the “O” from MOSS and became Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. The product had evolved and had better capabilities.
In 2013, there was another evolution of Microsoft SharePoint Server. Now, in 2016, we’re seeing yet another change where Microsoft is dropping their SharePoint Foundation. It took almost ten years to merge these two products into something that is consistent.
In the last three years, the advances have been focused on the cloud. In 2010, Microsoft clearly realized that they need to have a hosted cloud offering. They started with Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) which combined Exchange, SharePoint, and a few other products.
The Impact of SharePoint
Daniel shares that SharePoint 2007 was the point where a lot of companies started embracing the product. The web content management convinced people that they could create a pretty site that could be branded and still had the functionality for team collaboration. From 2006-2010, that was when there was the largest growth in the marketplace.
Jenny asks Daniel if anyone thought that an industry would grow up around SharePoint in the beginning. Daniel shares that he believed it in the very beginning. Frankly, that was why he founded Portal Solutions. Not a lot of people believed that Microsoft was an outsider. The legacy of this product is the incredible ecosystem that has built up around it.
At the 2003 SharePoint Developer Conference in 2003, Daniel remembers there were only 500 people there. The last conference had over 16,000. If gives you a sense of the evolution of the popularity.
Conclusion
SharePoint continues to evolve, and it is going to be hard to move away from the legacy of the last 15 years. It’s good to reflect on the past and review this evolution, but Daniel thinks what we’ll see a lot more revolution and change in the way that Microsoft approaches collaboration and communication.
Moment of the Week
But what does Portal Solutions wish Microsoft would do next? Daniel says that he has been using a Surface book for almost a month now, and it’s been a challenge. He wishes Microsoft would come out and apologize for the bugs. Bugs are not to be unexpected, but it’s just not working well. There are updates constantly, and Daniel still has challenges. He hopes they’re going to fix that soon.
Don’t forget…
Come back next week to continue the conversation about SharePoint and hear about what is coming in the future.
Office 365 Planner Preview has been released and is a tool for teams to work on activities together. This tool provides a place to see progress, what’s going on, get updates, share information, chat about things, and get on the same page.
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