Microsoft Ignite will open the window to our vision, strategy, and future for SharePoint and provide a first look at most recent developments with SharePoint Server 2016.  From the business value for organizations looking to modernize their workplace and infrastructure to the technical value it will deliver to IT Professionals and Developers as well as new hybrid investments for those customers looking to enrich their existing investments with cloud innovation. With Microsoft Ignite just around the corner, it’s time to look back and provide a little historical SharePoint information. There have been 5SharePoint releases.

1997-1998

“Exchange and SharePoint become best friends” Exchange Server works on a new information store (Web Store) to support document, web content, and e-mail management. Codename Tahoe (the genesis of SharePoint Products and Technologies) advances Platinum introducing document management capabilities through WebDAV – Document Authoring and Versioning in addition to an improved search and indexing engine. Platinum and Tahoe would represent a new, next generation messaging, collaboration, and document management platform. Learn more about the evolution of SharePoint’s storage architecture at http://blogs.technet.com/b/wbaer/archive/2012/12/20/shredded-storage-and-the-evolution-of-sharepoint-s-storage-architecture.aspx.

1999

“A gem is found in nuggets” Microsoft makes available a free download called Digital Dashboard Starter Kit introducing our first portal framework.   Solutions based on the starter kit enabled a user interface that could reside within Outlook through visual aids called “nuggets” that displayed information from a variety of content sources – “nuggets” would later take on the name Web Parts.

2000-2001

“A rolling milestone gathers no moss” Tahoe reaches its beta 1 milestone in early 2000 and the Digital Dashboard Starter Kit is renamed the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit.  In mid-2000 Tahoe reaches another important milestone (Beta 2) with important changes to include a new user interface based on the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit creating a “true” portal user experience and subsequently retiring its codename in favor of SharePoint Portal Server 2001.

2001

“So it begins” SharePoint Portal Server 2001 is released and creates a portal web site that allows users to share documents and search for information across the organization and enterprise, including SharePoint Team Services-based Web sites—all within one extensible portal interface. SharePoint Portal Server includes robust document management features that allow companies to incorporate business processes into their portal solution, but is limited by the Web Store and Digital Dashboard. Web Store performance and scalability limited the expansion of SharePoint and Digital Dashboards were developed outside of the core development platform (Visual Studio) which limited the audience for extensibility. In parallel the fledging portal market began to see unprecedented growth and overlap with the existing  Web Content Management (WCM) market which included CMS 2001. As the growth and adoption of SharePoint Portal Server 2001 continued to rise in the then new portals market, SharePoint Team Services was released in conjunction with Office 2000 providing web-based team-centric collaboration capabilities.

2002-2003

“Raise the roof” The Web Store, the storage foundation for SharePoint Portal Server 2001 is replaced with SQL Server as the storage backend – on the other side of the topology Digital Dashboards were phased out in favor of ASP.NET improving overall scalability and portal capabilities at the expense of some document management capabilities, notably document profiles and workflow that were to be removed from the upcoming SharePoint release. This was also a tumultuous time for SharePoint Team Services – but in the end the teams responsible for SharePoint Portal Server and SharePoint Team Services were converged.  In parallel to the changes affecting the technologies that powered SharePoint, CMS evolved as well leveraging ASP.NET on the frontend and delivered as CMS 2002. In 2002 SharePoint Team Services officially was renamed as Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and packaged in Windows Server 2003 as a Feature of the server – like SharePoint Portal Server it also provided a collaboration store and Web Part user interface build on ASP.NET. In this same period SharePoint Portal Server (v2 at the time) was officially branded Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (no longer referred to as codename Matrix), built on top of Windows SharePoint Services, but delivered independent of Windows Server 2003. This new release contained important scenarios such as search and indexing, but also ushered in personalization (people-centric collaboration), and enhanced taxonomy capabilities with improved overall manageability.

2004-2005

“Got SOX”? SOX or Sarbanes-Oxley is introduced to the world and changes document and records management practices.  In response, the CMS and SharePoint Portal Server groups converge in 2004 and Web Parts built using ASP.NET were enabled for developers.  The extensibility era begins… Near the end of 2005 ASP.NET v2 launches to include new native Web Parts and Windows Workflow Foundation becomes a native add-on to Windows Server that provides a new workflow service that other applications can build on.

2005

“Time to Groove” In 2005, Grove was acquired, a peer-to-peer (P2P) team-based collaboration product that also includes synchronization of SharePoint sites.

2006-2007

“Who puts MOSS on a server anyway” Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is born signifying a leap forward in experiences. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 was defined as a Microsoft server product that creates a portal website that allows users to share documents and search for information across the organization and enterprise within one extensible portal interface. Windows SharePoint Services moves forward, but now as a standalone product versus Windows Server feature. Groove Server 2007 is released with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which provides the server software and tools that IT organizations can use to best deploy, manage, and integrate the Groove functionality that comes with the new Groove 2007.

2009

SharePoint Server 2010 is released, the first in two successive releases to drop the Microsoft Office branding. Groove is renamed SharePoint Workspace and released as Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010, the server management platform remains Groove Server and released as Groove Server 2010.

2012

10/11/12 the world is introduced to the most recent generation of SharePoint Products and Technologies, SharePoint 2013. Personal sites, a staple of SharePoint people-centric collaboration are rebranded and paired with a new sync client powered by Groove as SkyDrive Pro, over the course of the SharePoint Server 2013 release these capabilities will become OneDrive for Business.

2015

The next generation of SharePoint is revealed as SharePoint Server 2016 – want to learn more…  Register now for Microsoft Ignite.