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So sorry. Will fix.

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Jan 25, 2022Liked by Steven Sinofsky

One of the last things I did before I left Office was have a meeting with MikeKo about looking into the idea that eventually became SharePoint. His theory was everything would live on the web and be backed by database storage. It was one of the first times I saw that URLs did not have to be file paths and that indirection I thought was really powerful. I am really glad I said yes and approved the resources.

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Feb 16, 2022·edited Feb 16, 2022Liked by Steven Sinofsky

Great read. One link is missing for the "market literally pulls the product out of the company". Try letting the author know they've linked to a private page. Can you kindly fix the link?

Thank you for fixing the link. https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html

https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/publish/post/47465138

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Jan 24, 2022Liked by Steven Sinofsky

SharePoint was truly my first experience feeling like life could be "on the internet". I remember the first time I tried out a service that was based on that technology. The feeling of magic, clicking a link in IE and having it open the file on my computer's local installation of Office... it truly felt futuristic. I didn't need floppy disks or zip drives or to feel like my files were "at home". My life was on the web, and it was seamless, as long as I had internet and my school district didn't block access to the website.

All the fun I had with SharePoint led me to have a field day with my own personal space when I interned at Microsoft. I still have fond memories of how much time I spent curating my space in the first week of my internship (I got around to doing actual work after that)

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Jan 23, 2022·edited Jan 23, 2022Liked by Steven Sinofsky

From a customer perspective, I can say that the early days of SharePoint were confusing and the product often took a back seat to other projects underway at the same.

The naming didn't help. It wasn't easy to determine what the difference between SPS, STS, and WSS were. Those days, despite the explosive growth of the Internet, keeping up with industry news was still primarily done with trade magazines. We didn't have the time to read all of them and do a deep dive into these competing (or complimentary? It wasn't clear at the time.) products when we were also deploying Office 2000 or we were wrapping our heads around moving from NT domains to Active Directory to support Exchange 2000.

If I remember correctly, we did install STS and played around with it a bit. We all thought, "Hey, this is cool," but were quickly taken away by other projects that the business was asking for. Also remember that during this time being on the Internet and having access to email was far more important to the business than exploring SharePoint. I saw many in IT management viewing it as Bill did ("another place to store files") and many IT administrators viewing it as "another server to run." The result was sticking with SMB shares and concentrating more on having a presence on the Internet.

Don't forget all the user training that was going on. At this time having Internet access at work but not at home or even having a computer at work but not at home was still relatively common. Even for those who were computer literate, it was very likely someone's first interaction with the full Office suite was at work. Outlook especially, since the early iterations were so focused on Exchange mail while everyone was using POP at home.

I like to remind people of two SharePoint facts nowadays. #1, yes, everything is a list and #2, it's a core workload in Office 365. Every Team has a SharePoint site, and every OneDrive is a SharePoint list...etc.

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Jan 26, 2022·edited Jan 26, 2022Liked by Steven Sinofsky

In my second tour at Xerox, 1988-1998, I was immersed in document-management and document-format products and standards efforts, some of which I continued in my retirement for 15 years afterwards. Interoperability had my attention. I have three lengthy reactions about those times.

1. In the "document management space" the concerns were eventually around what Microsoft might be doing or where they might swoop in. At the same time, any vendor that did not support Microsoft Office documents should simply leave the room. This was already happening inside Xerox, replacing all those out-of-production Xerox workstations used internally. It was also a directive from Bill Lowe, who ran Xerox Development and Manufacturing for a time as part of an IBM-executive influx, to be using what customers used in their office work. Lowe also ensured that Netware servers intended for managing jobs and storage in front of the to-be-announced Xerox Docutech would accept PostScript via an Adobe-provided coprocessor for conversion to the Interpress format consumed by the Docutech coupled over XNS, Xerox's networking stack. This was also a time when there was movement from Win16 to Win32 on the desktop and all that entailed, along with arrival of Windows 95 and the Internet. It was a saving grace of the Open Document Management API (ODMA) middleware model that Microsoft Word provided for integration in its open/save dialogs via Windows registry settings, something that may still matter somewhere on the planet although changes in how Office uses the GUI has long-since impacted the integration UX.

2. As Sharepoint emerged, the "everything is a list" seemed to me to be some sort of concession to IEnumerable everywhere, and the setup operations early on did not seem that appealing. I am older now and I appreciate how this allowed adopters and a class of power users to have an easier conceptual model and on-ramp, whatever one might envision about scaling and interoperating with other business systems down the road. In the time Robert Scoble was in Redmond, I attended a 2004 meet-up in the Belleveue Crossroads, one where I think Joel Spolsky was visiting. Across the table from me there was a fellow who, once I described myself as being a Powerpoint and FrontPage programmer, went off on how FrontPage had to be killed off and Sharepoint was the answer in some sort of Highlander-mode rant around his advancement and that of the Microsoft share price. It was a serious WTF? moment. I was dismayed. I should not have been surprised, since most of my career was in corporate life and I had seen this sort of internal behavior more than once, just not so bare-faced and in public. I still run FrontPage on IIS with Visual Source Safe; I need to retire all that while my Windows XP Tablet PC still runs.

3. I have been reading some action-adventure fictions about modern warfare, where the grizzliness and chancy outcomes are featured, along with the fear and uncertainty into which warriors must act. Failings of middle-management (i.e., Captains and Colonels) enter into it along with all manner of happenstance that determine outcomes of battles and, eventually, wars. Corporate hierarchical organization and the view of competition (internal and external) as warfare is easy to recognize. I was involved in two efforts to fuel consortia that did not go so well, in contrast to the acceptance of ODMA. Document Enabled Networking (DEN) was a conception between Novell and Xerox that was intended to be accomplished with Netware servers for starters. I had promoted it to Novell by appealing to the Microsoft WOSA model :). The Shamrock effort was sponsored by IBM and based on Saros Mezzanine, the product of a Bellevue WA developer. There was much howling and insistence in the document-management world that these two efforts be combined somehow. The standards-focused arm of the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) sponsored some co-located meetings of the growing consortia and it was agreed to figure out how that could be. At the technical level, there was one lead from each of Novell, IBM, Xerox (myself), and Saros to hammer out a possible consolidated architecture. Meanwhile, the higher-ups haggled about who would run what. That pretty much came down to negotiation between Bill Lowe's successor at Xerox and a VP from IBM. Xerox was throwing its weight around, playing the Document Company card, something I found puzzling. Xerox got to be the big dog behind the Document Management Alliance (DMA) that was formed. With DEN we were always having to explain to Novell folk that, although yes, you could think of a directory service as a database, that's not how one should host a document-management system. We resisted successfully. The Image-Enabled-Netware folks in a Kodak spin-off were not so successful and they were contractually bound to implement so tightly in the Netware server. In DMA we managed to reject an IBM effort to base the integration model on an object-service broker of theirs, sticking to in-process COM binary interop, thank you very much. We went along working up new specifications and holding technical meetings on DMA. The IBM delegates started begging off. Then the Lotus merger was announced. And FileNet acquired Saros Corporation only to eventually be acquired by IBM themselves. DMA also resisted including a Documentum proposal for their document-oriented SQL. Documentum was a Xerox Ventures company that the XSoft president had wanted killed off over who had the document-management franchise. Thus ended a very cordial relationship I had with some Documentum senior members. In DMA, that was all behind us and we did want Documentum's participation. Novell wandered off from DMA, wanting to follow a road tied mysteriously to email services, a route that XSoft chose not to follow. Then XSoft was shut down with pieces moved into other organizations. Ultimately, the only use of the DMA model (but not the APIs) was in Japan. I am grateful for the travels to Japan that afforded me. It strikes me, now, that this was an everyone-but-Microsoft effort, although it just didn't come up as it would in the case of Document formats and document-processing software frameworks. I suspect we were simply not much of a blip on Microsoft's radar.

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