Thank you for a banner year for SharePoint!
Wow! What a fantastic year for SharePoint products and technologies! For those of you who haven’t seen the news yet, we just announced that SharePoint Server passed the US$800 million mark for revenue for Microsoft’s previous fiscal year (FY07) that ended on June 30th. In fact, SharePoint Server is the fastest growing server products in Microsoft’s history. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for your continued support, advocacy, and adoption of SharePoint.
With these great results, it's time for a little nostalgia and some looking ahead. I have personally been working on and off the SharePoint business since 1998 – anyone remember Tahoe? When we decided to start development on SharePoint Portal Server 2001, it was a big step forward for Microsoft. We were making a big bet that collaboration, portals, content management and enterprise search would become mainstream and gain the same kind of broad acceptance that personal productivity tools such as Microsoft Office had experienced. We were growing the Exchange Server business, Outlook had just released and was growing in popularity, and Windows NT 4.0 and SQL Server were growing in enterprise usage. SharePoint was the new kid on the block, and we thought we had a winner because we had listened closely to what customers and partners were telling us and tried to put SharePoint to work solving the business problems they described.
Fast forward 6 years to 2007 and 85 million user licenses later, SharePoint has exceeded our wildest expectations in terms of growth, and I hear from customers almost daily about how they’re taking advantage of the improvements in the latest versions of WSS, MOSS, and SharePoint Designer. Overall, we have over 200 MOSS 2007 case studies, but I'd like to highlight some of my favorite customer stories. Customers ranging from Del Monte to MTV to Mary Kay are running SharePoint to solve all different business problems -- click on the hyperlinks for the respective case studies. One area that has grown very fast for MOSS 2007 is moving from inside the firewall to being the platform and application of choice for customers’ extranets and Internet facing sites. My favorite ones are are Glu Mobile, Hawaiian Airlines, and Paul Mitchell. When I show these sites to other folks inside and outside of Microsoft, the first reaction is always “No way! This isn’t really a SharePoint site! It looks nothing like a team site or portal!” Exactly! And I’d expect to see many more public web sites deployed on MOSS 2007 in the next year.
While we have added hundreds of new features and even entirely new capability areas such as Records Management, e-forms, and line of business integration, we are still working towards the same SharePoint vision, which is making the optimization of business productivity based a common technology infrastructure a practical reality for all users within a corporate intranet, on an extranet, or on the Internet. In future versions, we will continue to work on achieving that vision by innovating across all the product capabilities.
Thanks for indulging me for a quick look back at SharePoint over the past several years. In closing, if you are an existing customer or partner, thank you very much for your continued support and usage of SharePoint. If you are a new customer or partner, thank you for getting started with SharePoint. We will work hard to make all of you enjoy every minute of your use of SharePoint and the business value you get from your SharePoint investments. Let’s keep the conversation going and continue to make SharePoint the product that you want to address your business productivity needs.
Here’s to a great FY08 and continued success to all of our customers and partners! I look forward to seeing many of you at the SharePoint Conference in Seattle on March 2-6, 2008!
Tom Rizzo
Director, SharePoint Product Management
