SharePoint - yes, we've certainly come a long way! And happy new year to you!
As the "banner year" for SharePoint comes to a close, on behalf of the entire business group responsible for SharePoint products and technologies at Microsoft, I wish you a happy and prosperous new year in 2008!
Some of you might not be aware that the development of SharePoint had started almost a decade ago. So, I recently asked Jeff Teper, Corporate VP of SharePoint Server, who was the Product Unit Manager for SharePoint Portal Server 2001, to provide some juicy tidbits of SharePoint's history centered around why and how "Tahoe" had been chosen as the codename for SPS 2001, and here's his response:
As far as why "Tahoe", at that point, most Microsoft teams were using locations as codenames so we went with that. One attraction besides being cool a place was it looked good on T-Shirts and Sweaters that it wasn't this big giant Microsoft Logo so you could go without leaking the name of a then secret project. We had a nice skier logo. I still wear my Tahoe Sweatshirt but its on its last days. Most teams never went on trips to the place of their codename (I think there were a couple exceptions) so no we never went to "Tahoe". It is true there was a FoxPro release that used this codename first. We found this out after we'd been using it a while but decided it wasn't worth changing.
There were a few independent incubation projects which later converged. "Tahoe" became SharePoint Portal Server 2001. "Tahoe" was built on ASP and a modular version of the Exchange store called "Magma". "Office Web Server" was a project combining the FrontPage Server Extensions, the Office Server Extensions (web discussions and subscriptions) and an incubation effort called "TeamPages" which became the list features of SharePoint today (and where CAML was invented in the very early XML days). This became SharePoint Team Services. Our branding team came up with the name "SharePoint" initially for "Tahoe" (I loved the simplicity), but we decided it was a better fit for OWS given the collab focus. We decided to target "Tahoe" at portals aggregating team sites and other info and higher value document storage. We finally came up with the "Team" and "Portal" labels pretty late in the release to indicate the positioning and long-term roadmap. As folks may remember, we shipped these with the Office XP wave and then in 2003 brought them together on ASP.NET + SQL Server, which was a major new architectural bet for Microsoft, SharePoint, and Office.
Since then, we just refer to the next release as "V3" or the "12 wave of SharePoint" to coincide with the "Office 12" wave that became the 2007 Office system. This keeps attention focused on the real product customers can use today and avoids building equity in some temporary codename vs. building equity in the long-term brand.
The SharePoint community has also come a long way in just the past couple of years. I'd like to especially thank over 100,000 of you, who have visited this blog at least once every month. Shown below is the chart of browser-based stats for the SharePoint Team Blog during the past year.
I'd also like to thank those of you, who have actively contributed to answering questions in the SharePoint community forums at http://MSSharePointForums.com, as well as the growing number of you, who are submitting and recommending links to useful SharePoint oriented content at http://SharePointPedia.com. In the next year, we will continue our investments toward improving both of these essential community resources.
We will also enhance the SharePoint Community Portal at http://MySharePointCommunity.com with Windows Live ID authentication, an always up-to-date Technical Readiness resource list, content rating, community FAQ wiki, and much more so that the portal can truly be "the default starting point for the worldwide SharePoint community." If you have any suggestions for improving the portal, please leave a comment here.
Last but certainly not least, in partnership with select user group and community organizations, we will launch a program and website to support the growing number of SharePoint oriented user groups around the world with content and collateral, a speaker bureau, sponsor services, member management, and event management. Details will be provided at the SharePoint User Group Services launch session during the SharePoint Conference 2008 event this coming March.
Thanks again for being part of the SharePoint community! I am very proud for having been your Worldwide Community Lead during the past two years, and I feel tremendously honored and excited to continue that role in the coming year.
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