Author: Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President; Sharepoint
This week is the 10th anniversary of the first release of SharePoint Portal and Team Services. As I was digging through my closet to find the first SharePoint T-Shirt to wear to work, I reflected on how timely it was to both look back at the progress as well as look forward to the next chapter where SharePoint Online will help even more people and organizations as part of the upcoming release of Office 365.
The team and I feel incredibly fortunate to have reached so many customers and partners around the world – in fact we have been adding nearly 20,000 new SharePoint users a day for the last five years. Still, the most fun part of our jobs is to hear the amazing variety of stories of how SharePoint helps organizations of all sizes and types be more productive. When we started the group, some thought we were bold if not crazy. But we saw a tremendous opportunity to help our customers break down silos between people and technologies. The notion that we could deliver users an experience that transcended the web and Microsoft Office combining traditional collaboration, document management, search and portals capabilities with an architecture spanning personal, team, intranet and internet sites challenged many assumptions in the industry about what was possible. Today, SharePoint is the industry leading collaboration platform used by tens of thousands of organizations and supported by a wide range of partner solutions innovating in a multi-billion dollar ecosystem. While we continue to provide the simplest team collaboration solution, we have added deep capabilities ranging from powerful FAST Search to advanced Excel and PowerPivot Business Intelligence to line-of-business integration including Microsoft Dynamics and SAP via Duet. One fun fact is when I last looked, there were over 1,000 SharePoint books on Amazon.
The engine that has always pushed us forward is the passionate feedback of the SharePoint community. We saw that in full force at the SharePoint Conference where we unveiled SharePoint 2010 and have been amazed by your response. Thank you to those who attended and are planning to attend our upcoming conference this fall. The most common theme of the feedback we hear is that SharePoint succeeded because we made many things easier than before and you want us to take the unique SharePoint balance of simplicity and flexibility to the next level. While we have delivered our SharePoint Online cloud service for the last couple years, we will take a big step in simplifying access to the easiest and most powerful collaboration technologies as part of Office 365. We have a great team working hard on that as well as releases to follow that I think will surprise and delight people even more than our past releases of SharePoint. We’re excited to see what you do with it and hear what you think of it.
Thanks again to all our customers, partners and employees for their support of SharePoint during the past decade and the years ahead. The best is yet to come!
Jeff
