SharePoint Retrospect: A Productive Decade
May 17, 2011
At ten years old, SharePoint has evolved from a simple file-sharing program to a multi-collaborative platform. Lafe Low of TechNet magazine interviewed Jared Spataro, director of SharePoint product management in “SharePoint 2010: The First 10 Years” and asks about SharePoint’s future. The entire article comes off in a positive light, but it doesn’t really focus where SharePoint is going. When asked this specific question, Spataro only explains the new market territories he wishes to explore, not specific products or services in the works.
He does see collaborative technology as a way for the world to work together and make it a better place.
“The future of collaboration is for a more integrated, seamless experience for people to work together. We have videos of SharePoint customers, and we do a lot of storyboarding. What it looks like is making it feel like you and I sitting here looking each other in the eye.”
If you look back on an actual time line of SharePoint, you will see that it was a hybrid technology from a content management product and nCompass, purchased in 2001. Microsoft’s products had overlapping functions in 2002, so they began to use SQL server as a data store and ASP.NET. Three years later SharePoint was transforming into a portal and in 2007 it was the hot product for business intelligence. In 2010, SharePoint became more of a collaboration tool and design functions need to be handled by native tools and Visual Studio.
The interview delivers an “interesting” view of the product’s actual trajectory. SharePoint remains a platform that requires extra add-ons to deliver the experience Microsoft intends and users expect. SurfRay, while being an extension product, overshadows all others by giving the users what they expect and demand from the SharePoint Search experience.
We’re looking forward to an even more productive decade going forward.
Torben Ellert, May 17, 2011
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