Modern SharePoint: A Brief History of Product Making

SharePoint's modern era began on May 4, 2016 at the Future of SharePoint event . At that time, customers' tastes were changing from valuing consistency with SharePoint's on premises UX aligned with a "lift and shift to the cloud" migration strategy to instead preferring cloud-born sites with a much higher design and usability bar. It was here that the newly expanded SharePoint team (with a design team double its previous size) defined the key principles of modern SharePoint that would transform the product's user experience:

• We clarified that SharePoint has four durable concepts of site, page, list, and file library - and we'll constantly improve these core UX experiences based upon data and customer feedback. Each concept can be used independently or put together in creative ways by our customers or other apps from Microsoft (e.g. OneDrive, Lists, Stream, Loop, Teams, Viva and more all rely on these SharePoint primitives).
• We affirmed a commitment to great mobile experiences, in both responsive web and in dedicated mobile apps. At the time, we launched the SharePoint mobile app and added support for enterprise data to the OneDrive app and today our premier SharePoint mobile experiences are also inside the Microsoft Teams app.
• We introduced the SharePoint Framework (SPFx), a web parts extension model for SharePoint pages that enables UX customizations using open-source toolchains and industry standards for web development. We have since expanded SPFx into Microsoft Teams as well. It has grown with community support to be the most popular way for web developers to extend the UX of Microsoft 365.
• We integrated SharePoint with the PowerPlatform for process automation and low code rapid application development. Today, the SharePoint connector is one of the PowerPlatform's most popular connectors, and the SharePoint maker community remains as foundational to the growth of the PowerPlatform today as it did in its early days.

This was a lot of change at the time, and the history of SharePoint has long been one of tight partnership and co-development with our community and fans - so we also renewed our investment in our MVP program , adoption guidance , community events , change management best practices, and early adopter programs (fun fact: our first EAP for modern SharePoint was run by our awesome UX research team and codenamed "Polaris").

Intranet Excellence

Intranet modernizations began in earnest in 2018 with the introduction of SharePoint Communication Sites – which enabled out of the box portal site creation within Microsoft 365 using the new SharePoint UX. Knowledge, news, tool and site wayfinding, and departmental homes were the most common scenarios that powered the feature list. Since then, we’ve seen steady growth as the package of higher design ethos, industry standard web UX extension framework, and necessary depth in content governance & freshness features (translation, publishing approval and scheduling, dynamic content, and more) achieved product-market fit. Indeed, Communication Sites was one of the fastest enterprise products ever to over a hundred million monthly users and continues on a rapid growth rate today.

Alongside this it became apparent that the long-form status and news sharing functionality inside a Communications Site could be expanded into an entire publishing system designed to draw people to the site, for instance by transforming a news post into an email or embedding a snippet into the Microsoft Feed that powers the Microsoft Edge New Tab Page. This is called SharePoint news and today it accounts for over 20% of total page creation and generates 1.5B+ impressions to SharePoint content every month. While Communications Sites ensures branded & dynamic "content at rest," SharePoint news ensures the right eyeballs see the content with "content in motion."

To get a sense of how this all comes together, you can check out a customer like Arla , who encapsulates what a very common intranet and news modernization project for organizations in this timeframe looked like.

One more important piece of customer wisdom that we heard during this time was that communicators in an organization often have a hard time "breaking through the noise," so they are always looking for novel ways of creating compelling content. This led to SharePoint spearheading Microsoft 365's Mixed Reality experiences with the announcement of SharePoint spaces in 2018, enabling anyone to rapidly create an interactive 3D space - indeed, it's as easy as creating a page. (Fun fact, the codename for spaces was "Project Hiro"). Customers like ESPN used it to uplevel their career learning material. Today, this scenario lives on as Microsoft Mesh, where the mainstreamed space creation is merged with the real-time Teams Meetings capability to transform experiences like town halls and learning days.

Integrated User Experiences

As the page authoring and site infrastructure UX matured with more usage, we made significant investments in UX horizontals – consolidating the search box with the release of Microsoft Search, introducing a left nav to speed along inter-site navigation, and introducing hierarchy to the site structure with Hubs. Microsoft apps were starting to consolidate on SharePoint as their underlying content platform, for instance Microsoft Stream (video sharing) and Microsoft Loop (collaborative notetaking) are both SharePoint-backed. We transformed OneDrive into a single place for viewing and sharing of all files - SharePoint file libraries and personal files combined.

With the introduction of Microsoft Teams, the primary collaboration workspace for a group in Microsoft 365 became a Teams Channel, and SharePoint supported deeper integration of file libraries, sites, lists, and pages into Teams. This included specialized use cases, where for instance today the default class home page for a schoolteacher in Teams is a simplified version of a SharePoint page. Customers like Mark & Spencer show the power of bringing all of Microsoft 365 together inside Teams.

Re-envisioning the Front Door to Employee Experiences

By 2021, customers had taught us that the root level, front-door site on their intranet was so critical and disrupted by mobile paradigms that we created a depth experience for it called Viva Connections (fun fact: the original codename of Connections was "Mobile Employee Experiences (MEE)"). This enabled customers to have a dedicated app for tool, resource, and news discovery (inside Teams to make it simple to find and acquire).? After 3 years in market, Connections is one of the top 10 most popular apps in Microsoft Teams, so it achieved product-market fit and scale, with frontline worker use cases as a particular success pattern. Carlsberg & Etex are examples of a customer who embraced Connections as the front door to their intranet.

More Solutions & Apps

This past year we introduced more dedicated apps built on top of SharePoint sites and news. To address the specific analytics and cross-posting workflow needs of corporate communicators, we introduced Viva Amplify . We solution-ized our first structured document management portal with the Agreements App for managing and esigning contracts and other legal agreements. And we announced that more solutions will be forthcoming. Many of these will leverage a new and expanding set of SharePoint AI-based content processing services like extracting text from images and auto-filling of metadata. ?We introduced the brand “SharePoint Premium” at Ignite 2023 to encapsulate our ambition for premium services and solutions on content (another fun historical naming fact: SharePoint Premium was originally called Microsoft Syntex, but was changed to clarify that all of these services and solutions build on top of customers' existing SharePoint investments).

Not all our efforts to app-ify common SharePoint use cases have panned out in their first take. One example is Viva Topics, which we launched in 2021 and retired in 2024. It was a knowledge system built on SharePoint that promised an AI-updated "Wikipedia for your enterprise" but it didn't reach the scale we had hoped for before the Era of AI redefined customer expectations. However, many of the learnings and customer insights from Topics show up in Copilot for Microsoft 365 today, grounded in the data already in SharePoint.

More UX Modernization: Compelling Content, Simpler Authoring

Despite the wave of solutions and first party apps, customers rely on us to maintain the strength of SharePoint as a web development platform where the long tail of sites are created.? Indeed, our 2018 UX was getting dated by 2022, so we embarked on another SharePoint UX refresh that provided deep focus on the craft of the page authoring experience and moved forward the design ethos of the SharePoint sites experience yet again.

Internally, we called this look & feel surge the “SharePoint Creators Update (SPCU)” to champion the important role content creators play in making SharePoint both beautiful and filled with critical knowledge. Indeed, this UX refresh included an update to the SharePoint start page that enabled customers to visit a single place to learn what they can use SharePoint to create.

The Era of AI

As the Era of AI dawned in 2023, we prioritized generative AI for both simplified content generation (Copilot in SharePoint enables you to have a site designer sit alongside you) and curated knowledge sharing (custom copilots in SharePoint are as easy as creating a folder and enable you to provide your team with a subject matter expert grounded on the content you choose) - with lots more to come. Content is the fuel of AI and with two billion pieces of content added it daily, SharePoint will play an increasingly larger role in an organizations' AI transformation.

Customer Trust

Throughout this entire eight-year journey, customers have trusted us with some of their most important data and knowledge. So, an important tenet of our strategy is that all content in SharePoint is protected under the same security and compliance envelope. Whether that's using SharePoint's integration with Microsoft Purview , leveraging SharePoint Advanced Management , checking out the refresh to the SharePoint admin experiences , or deploying the new SharePoint Backup & Archive products , customers expect all content stored in SharePoint - whether that's a document, image, video, page, or custom copilot - to be managed together.

Learn More: Join the SharePoint Community

And that brings us to today. From what I see in my interactions with customers, interest in investing is an organizations' digital content estate is at an all-time high. The Era of AI is putting a spotlight on turning content into knowledge and renewing investment in a holistic content governance strategy across files & sites.

So there is no better time than now to be a sponsor of SharePoint in your organization - and of course join our community to meet likeminded tech enthusiasts and give us feedback on our product direction. I look forward to seeing you at one of our hallmark community events - be that the Microsoft 365 Community Conference , Microsoft Build , Microsoft Ignite , or one of the hundreds of self-organized community events listed on Community Days . And if you didn't get enough from this post, check out all the SharePoint sessions from the May 2024 M365 Community Conference . Onwards to an even more beautiful SharePoint!

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