Ages of SharePoint

There once was a time when I was usually the youngest person in meetings, but alas no more. This week, SharePoint showed up my age. No, not the wrinkles gained from past endeavours explaining why there was no search license (and now there is), why the workflow was removed (and now its back), (ditto doc profiles/metadata), why nuggets became web parts, when is a taxonomy not a taxonomy, or why it took so long for CMS and SPS to get married…

No, the age issue was highlighted during a session explaining just how the next release of SharePoint (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – MOSS) collected its feature set. I’m currently working on a couple of MOSS 2007 projects and sat down with a colleague to do some SharePoint skills transfer. The start point for these discussions (I’ve done a few of them over the past couple of years) is always the time line of products involved. And so the meeting began..

me: “In the beginning, there was Site Server…..” (scribble 1998 and Site Server on to whiteboard)

colleague: “Blimey, I was still at school then!”

Not funny. Not funny at all. Two cups of coffee later and, talking about Tahoe and Platinum, we reached the next ‘agestone’…

me: “The first version of SharePoint Portal Server was launched in 2001”

colleague: “I went to university that year.”

Still not funny! 🙂 It’s bad enough that my inability to to write mobile texts with my thumbs shows up my age…

Anyways, in case you are interested, the attached diagram (jpg, 350Kb) charts the SharePoint lifecycle to date. I’ll post up the notes as soon as I’ve written them…