History of SharePoint

A quick look at the history of SharePoint clearly indicates how SharePoint has evolved to become one of the fastest growing products for Microsoft. SharePoint first came on the scene in 2001 in the form of two products: SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2001. Both these products were just a start and had limited functionality compared to what SharePoint today provides. However the products quickly became popular. Customers liked the WYSIWYG HTML editing of SharePoint Team Services and the web part declarative and reusable editing of SharePoint Portal but wanted to use both models on the same site.

Then came the next release of SharePoint in 2003. SharePoint Team Services evolved into a more scalable and flexible platform and SharePoint Portal Services was built on top of it. Some features of SharePoint 2003 are listed here:

• Real-time presence and communication

• Standard site templates

• People and groups lists

• Calendar

• Surveys

• Document collaboration

• Issue tracking

• My Sites

The next release of SharePoint happened in 2007 in the form of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office Server 2007 and took the product to a new level. Content management was the biggest area of improvement in this version. Microsoft had a separate product for content management before this release, but with this release the content management features were integrated into SharePoint itself. With the addition of new features such as workflows, document and records management, Excel Services, and InfoPath Form Services better integration with Microsoft Office and integration with Information Rights Management were added. In addition search functionality was highly enhanced in the 2007 release.

SharePoint 2010 is the latest and current version of SharePoint. Like the 2007 release this version of SharePoint comes in two parts. The first is SharePoint Foundation 2010, which is the platform for SharePoint Server 2010. You can consider SharePoint Foundation 2010 the equivalent of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2010 as the equivalent of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 though both provide many more features than their predecessors.