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My Debt to SharePoint


by James Townsend

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jeff Teper announced last week that SharePoint is now reaching 200 million cloud users worldwide. This is an impressive milestone by any standard, even the high adoption normal for Microsoft.  This announcement made me realize that I owe a professional debt to SharePoint.  Back in 1999, my company InfoStrat was one of the first Microsoft Gold Partners to embrace SharePoint development when the product was code-named "Tahoe." 

Along with two of my InfoStrat colleagues, I wrote a book on SharePoint and related Microsoft server products called Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers - a title only a search engine would love. 

SharePoint was many things rolled into one, from document management to a Lotus Notes groupware competitor to a platform for departmental apps (although the term "app" had not been coined).  We helped companies and government agencies roll out SharePoint, and built SharePoint tools and utilities, including one for Microsoft itself. 

Even after all these years, and some of its features migrating to other products, customers are finding value in SharePoint, and it remains one of the pillars of Office 365. SharePoint integration provides document management capabilities to related products such as Dynamics 365. 

I am grateful to Microsoft for creating SharePoint and giving me the opportunity to use it to solve business problems for customers. 


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