2001 A SharePoint Odyssey - SharePoint @24 ?? Microsoft @50

Today, I am excited to celebrate SharePoint’s 24th anniversary during Microsoft's 50th anniversary year.

It was time for Office to get a server! In March 2001, we launched Office XP with SharePoint Teams Services and Portal Server evolving Office from personal to organizational productivity with an integrated document collaboration and intranet experience. We followed with SharePoint 2003 spanning personal (now known as OneDrive), team, and portal sites on a new ASP.NET + SQL Server architecture and the rocket ship took off.

At the 2008 SharePoint Conference, Bill Gates announced SharePoint was Microsoft’s fastest product to $1 billion and it would be part of a new “Microsoft Online Services” (later BPOS) available to all organizations. The attendees of the SharePoint Conferences became “the best community in tech” hosting SharePoint Saturdays around the world and becoming the foundation for the Microsoft 365 Community that we are grateful for today. Thousands of people are signed up for the two week SharePoint Hackathon starting next week.

We continued as disciplined engineering team shipping five rounds of the server on a predictable schedule from 3/2/1 to 10/11/12. Steve Ballmer declared “we’re all in the cloud” and the GA of Office 365 in June 2011 marked our transition in SharePoint to a cloud-first organization that would ship every day with an elastic service bringing our customers more value faster.

SharePoint’s next inflection point was also a Sci-Fi moment - Star Wars Day – May 4, 2016 – which Satya Nadella kicked-off and we announced new experience, platform, intelligence, and security features. The next year, SharePoint grew with the GA of Microsoft Teams followed by acceleration of cloud adoption during the pandemic in 2020. SharePoint continued to evolve as an app and platform powering OneDrive, Teams, Power Platform, Loop, Stream, Viva, Copilot, and more. Every day, customers create 2 million sites and 2 billion files on SharePoint fueling collaboration, business processes, and knowledge management – and now AI.

In January of this year, we released our latest experience at SharePoint for the AI Era enabling customers to use AI to create files, sites, apps, and agents. This builds on the heritage of SharePoint as the easiest way for anyone to create an intranet site - now being the easiest way for anyone to create a secure agent.

SharePoint is growing and innovating faster than ever in the AI Era. We just finished our ODSP All-Hands and I’m so excited about our next wave of updates this year. We are excited to celebrate Microsoft 50thanniversary on our way to celebrating SharePoint’s 25th anniversary next year. We look forward to seeing the Best Community in Tech next at the Microsoft 365 Conference in May. Thank you for SharePointing!