Not long after I started at Microsoft I got to work on a project called Tahoe – it was formed to some extent form another product I worked on, Site Server. At the same time there was a project internally known at Polar. Ultimately Tahoe won out and eventually became SharePoint and for its first few years I worked selling the product to enterprise customers. It was a hard sell to be honest with strong competition from companies likes Autonomy and Plumtree. Both of those products do different things which tells of the early problems establishing an identity for SharePoint. The product team kept improving it and look at it now – growing at over 35% and last financial year an $800m product. WOW!

Why is it the new Lotus Notes though? Well when I started in IT, everyone wanted Notes. Everywhere you looked this product appeared a both an enterprise mail platform but more tellingly a departmental groupware solution. It defined the phrase groupware and was the scourge of IT departments as servers sprung up in whack-a-mole fashion.

Now SharePoint holds that mantle. Every Microsoft Partner I speak with is doing SharePoint work and like their Notes brethren of 10 years ago, SharePoint consultants are in high demand. It’s fascinating to have seen the pendulum swing from the once unassailable Notes. It’s a good reminder of how things change – though not always as quickly as predicted.

Two things this left me thinking

• I wonder how Ray Ozzie feels as he looks at Notes place in the market and SharePoint’s growth? I don’t mean that in a bad way…I just think it’s something else you wouldn’t have predicted 10 years ago. Ray Ozzie at Microsoft. Wow
• SharePoint Online will bring an interesting new dynamic to the market as SharePoint specialists can rely on a Microsoft hosted service to sell departmental solutions quickly and easily and spend their time and their consultants time on big, hairy, complex SharePoint projects.

Glad I got this post off my chest…it’s been a while coming.

Final random thought…when I started in IT, my Dad worked in the same company as a Lotus Notes administrator. As you can imagine, we had some fun when I moved to Microsoft and he maintained that Notes was best :)