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SharePoint Online is a Huge Success But Dark Clouds Lurk Ahead
March 27 marked the 23rd anniversary of SharePoint Portal Server 2001, the forerunner of what we have today in SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online. The date in SharePoint history was marked by several tweets, including one from the urbane Mark Kashman, the well-known SharePoint marketeer. The tweet included an updated timeline for SharePoint (Figure 1), refreshed from an original version issued to celebrate the product’s 20th anniversary.
I debate the accuracy of some of the dates listed in the SharePoint history. For instance, Delve and the original Office 365 Video solution are listed for 1 January 2024. My recollection is that these solutions were revealed at the first Ignite conference in May 2015 as part of the “next generation knowledge” portals promised by Microsoft at the time. As we know, marketing promises don’t always transfer into actual technology at the predicted date. Delve and Office 365 Video arrived, but the next generation knowledge portals never did. There’s also no mention of Office 365 Groups (now Microsoft 365 Groups), something that has had a huge impact on SharePoint Online.
Personal SharePoint History
Although I am probably better associated with Exchange, I have a long history with SharePoint going back to Portal Server 2001, which I had deployed at Compaq soon after its release in a nascent attempt to persuade technologists to share their knowledge with their peers. I even helped Microsoft Latin America launch SharePoint Portal Server 2001 at an event in Cancun.
SharePoint Portal Server 2001 worked well at a certain level and I took it forward into HP after the HP-Compaq merger in 2002 where it displaced a large UNIX cluster that HP Services used for document management.
As SharePoint Server developed I became exasperated at the development group’s attempts to build what seemed to be everything into a single server instead of focusing on document management. I thought that SharePoint Server 2007 was a mess and expressed that view quite strongly, something that didn’t make me many friends in Microsoft. The 2010 and 2013 release weren’t much better. The zenith of incompatability within the Office server lineup was reached when Microsoft tried to make Exchange and SharePoint work together in the ill-fated site mailbox project. Only 53 operations had to be carried out with absolute precision to make the two servers co-operate.
The Cloud Made the Difference
SharePoint achieved its full potential in the cloud. Administrators were freed from the task of looking after server farms and could concentrate on leveraging the product’s strengths in document management.
The introduction of Teams in 2017 helped enormously by providing a more user-friendly face for document storage. The growth in Teams usage to 320 million monthly active users propelled SharePoint Online usage into the stratosphere to a point where petabytes of data are added monthly.
The introduction of SharePoint Embedded as a platform for developers to build on is an interesting evolution to encourage even further usage. The Loop app is a good example of an app that uses SharePoint Embedded for storage with a UI that has no connection to what people might think of as traditional SharePoint.
Dark Clouds on the Horizon
Everything seems to be on the up in the SharePoint world, but I see some clouds on the horizon. The fact that Microsoft has been forced to introduce Restricted SharePoint Search to allow customers to progress Copilot for Microsoft 365 projects is an admission of failure in information governance.
Restricting users to searching 100 curated sites might seem like a good answer, but it admits that the tens of thousands of sites created by Teams are an unmanageable tangle. Inside those sites obsolete, misleading, and erroneous information might lurk in documents ready to corrupt the results generated by Copilot. It’s perhaps the greatest challenge faced by those considering Copilot deployments.
Digital debris is a big black cloud over SharePoint. Copilot is an accelerant that highlights the issue, but Microsoft 365 customers without Copilot should also focus on gaining control over the information held in SharePoint. This a wake-up call for tenants to ask questions about how they control the creation of sites (with or without Teams), how documents are stored and managed, how they use retention policies to remove old information, and so on. The issue won’t go away. It grows worse every day as users add petabytes of documents to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
The Microsoft 365 conference takes place in a month’s time. I’m sure that the SharePoint community will applaud the achievements and popularity of the platform. I hope that they take some time to address the information governance issue and that the current threat to continued success in SharePoint history abates.
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