As SharePoint celebrated its 23 year birthday last week, as mentioned by Veronique Palmer and many others, I thought it might be nice to share my personal history with SharePoint.
The beginning: SharePoint 2001
The first version of SharePoint that I worked with, SharePoint 2001, was a document management solution. It was comparable to the current document library, but with very limited functionality and a different design. There were folders and subfolders, you could subscribe, you could set permissions per (sub)folder and that was it.
The picture below has been taken from this post.
At the company I worked for at that time, we had developed our own “document cabinet” functionality on a different platform. It was just one flat list of documents with permissions on the cabinet level.
We provided the SharePoint solution to “serious” users only: people who had experience with document and records management, such as research departments, quality control functions, finance etc. Everyone else, such as Communications or Marketing, had to make do with the document cabinets, as SharePoint was considered “too complicated” for “normal people”. Can you imagine? 😁
My first intranet: moving to SharePoint 2003
We had built an intranet around the year 2000 using our own document cabinets, a third-party Discussion Forum functionality and Frontpage webs. When we started to develop a new intranet for the organisation, we found out that the next version of SharePoint, SharePoint 2003, was something more than just document management. It was a complete intranet platform, so we could replace everything with SharePoint! It sounds very simple and obvious now, but at that time we were so used to building things ourselves that we were very confused at first. How would this work? How should we replace our Forums? Could we move documents from our cabinets to SharePoint? What would it mean to our developers? How could we inform people about this complicated new functionality?
Despite making a few mistakes (such as wanting to replicate old functionality) we created a rather successful intranet on SharePoint 2003.
I wrote about that here: My very first SharePoint intranet.
My second intranet: moving from SharePoint 2007
After that came SharePoint 2007, which had more functionality. After that, there was a split in SharePoint on-premises (the installed version on an organization’s servers) which has versions SP2010, SP2013, SP2016 and SP2019 (I do not think any versions have been added since) and SharePoint Online, which is the cloud version used by most organizations, I think.
I have worked with SharePoint 2007, struggling with storage space, and moved to SharePoint Online from there. I wrote about that here: My second SharePoint intranet.
My third intranet: moving to SharePoint Online
The third intranet project I was involved in meant moving to SharePoint Online from a very outdated non-Microsoft platform. By that time (2021) most employees were already familiar with SharePoint Online and the complete Microsoft365 suite. Combined with just a few requirements and a very good project manager, this was a model project completed in record time. I wrote about it in this post: My third SharePoint intranet.
So, I have worked with various versions in the years that I worked with SharePoint. And I still love it, it can do so much!
Next time, I will discuss the external capabilities of SharePoint. It used to be more than what you can do now. Did you know?
Ellen's Digital Workplace 
I’m not sure if I started with it before 2003 but I remember then it was really two products that had a different genesis – SPS and WSS. Now it’s so integrated with M365 that it finally is the digital work environment we wanted after Lotus Notes first showed the way. I think it’s an awesome and subtle system, but I observe two things that may be related: mostly organisations only use the simplest fraction of it, despite paying for it all. Mostly users are pretty grudging in their admiration of it! SharePoint hasn’t won users’ hearts and MS hasn’t addressed that. It’s odd that I’m often asked by users for the most specialised customisations (that would be possible but not within my resources) yet rave about alternatives that are far, far more limited, but more “consumerised”. Random example, Yammer or whatever it’s called vs WhatsApp. Thanks, I always appreciate your posts.
Hi Robert, thank you for your reaction! It may have been two systems at first but I was only involved with the “user”part of it all – so did not know what was under the hood. As for the usage: it has always been part of my role to move usage to the complete suite, replacing stand-alone apps with Microsoft suite apps. And my own experience is that people often ask for a visual interface that they know, so it is easy to get into, rather than that it is a hard requirement. Actually, the last org I worked for is still raving about SP, as I hear from my former colleague. They actually love it! (Partly because the old system was so hard to work with 😉). Well, after all this time SP is still a discussion topic – isn’t that interesting? Cheers, Ellen
Oh, this brings back memories 😁. I also started with SP2001, I still have some screenshots of the first ‘portals’ I created. Now we use SharePoint Online, and I managed to create an appealing intranet homepage 😉 even though SPO has/had less functionalities than the versions on premises.
Hi Claudia, thanks for your reaction! I never knew you were involved with SharePoint that early. I wish I had saved some screenshots from the old version, but at that time I did not know that I might need them many years later 😁. Good luck with your current intranet! SP Online may not be as sophisticated as websites, but I think it finds a good balance between good looks, ease of creation and maintenance for non-designers, and usefulness for work purposes. Cheers, Ellen
How our baby has grown up. It’s become a bit of a rebellious, I know everything 20-something year old but that’s a story for another day. 😀
Not sure if it will ever be able to stand on its own two feet, though 😁. Guidance may always be needed…