Happy Birthday SharePoint! Fifteen years! Wow!
Get ready for March 2016! It’s Happy 15th Birthday SharePoint!
If our good wishes are several weeks early, it’s because we’re excited for Microsoft — and for us.
Microsoft SharePoint is in good company. 2001 marked the year in which Wikipedia launched. It’s also the year in which Microsoft launched Windows XP, and the year in which Apple released the iPod.
In March 2001, the first of SharePoint’s multiple releases debuted. Just weeks later, AISN Vice President of Network Operations Terry Engelstad, our lead SharePoint hosting expert, was installing SharePoint Team Services 1.0.
AISN is proud to have hosted Microsoft SharePoint for clients for almost a decade and a half now. Certainly, our Microsoft SharePoint Managed Services has grown out of that rich and rewarding experience.
Today, SharePoint is in use by well over 100 million people all over the world. Eighty percent of the Fortune 500 companies rely on it. That’s some success! Between 2006 and 2011, SharePoint growth was at its height. Microsoft was adding new SharePoint users at the rate of 20,000 per day. That works out to about 7.3 million new SharePoint users each year.
SharePoint truly is one of the most unique enterprise solutions available to businesses today. In the last five years alone since its 10th birthday, Microsoft has vastly improved SharePoint’s breadth of functionality. Enhancements in social collaboration, mobility, search, website development, eDiscovery and more have made all of the difference for SharePoint.
What we appreciate most about SharePoint, however, is the people. There’s a strong ecosystem of exceptional developers around the product. In that, we include our wonderful and very talented partner, Ed Grossman of SimplePortals. He’s a specialist in creating and customizing apps for Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365, and we’ve been fortunate to work with him a number of years now. We look forward to continuing that. It’s good to know that despite all of the hot new improvements in the upcoming and highly anticipated SharePoint 2016, a significant opportunity still exists for the developer ecosystem to build on and enhance native functionality in SharePoint, while also adding deeper integration with non-Microsoft products and technologies.
SharePoint 2016 is scheduled to hit the market later this spring, and we can’t wait. This new version should compensate for some of the missing features that Office 365 now has. It also promises a better user experience, greater integration, better compliance, and new services – both on-premises and in the cloud. Stay tuned. Until then, Happy Birthday SharePoint!
Laurie Head is Vice President, Marketing Communications for AISN.