SharePoint Shifts

Welcome to Fusion talk with Anouk and Steve.

How did you see the changes from the beginning until now?

It's interesting because when you think about them over time, changes always seem relative or they seem kind of small. You don't. It's a bit like watching a tree grow. You know, the tree's growing, if you sat there and look at it for an hour, it doesn't actually change. But if you look back at it over 10 years, then it does change. and at the beginning, we had no idea where this was going to go.

Yes.

Shall we tell you what we're talking about now?

No, let him wait a little bit longer. We didn't knew where it was going, but, as soon as people start to use it, they saw there was potential in it, otherwise it was not still there.

But it's a little bit like you go to a client today and they ask you, what can SharePoint be used for? And you give them the siloed view of what is available today. So 25 years ago, because, hey, SharePoint is 25 years old, 25 years ago, you, you just told them what was available and that was the remit and nobody expected any more than that. And it was difficult trying to get things working and sorted out at that point, just as it is today.

True. So, for the people at home, we are going to talk about the evolution of SharePoint from, 25 years ago until now. And we have an expert here because he is doing it already that long.

I'm an old bugger. Yes. Yes, I do remember the release of it. There's only probably half a dozen of us.

So, yeah, I came in later. I started with the version of 2007.

Yeah. So you missed the release team services, 2001, 2003, 2007. So we did have a little bit of help from Holly and Amy, our chat GPT buddies, and we basically asked them to give us, a list of changes at 5, 10, 15, 20 years. 25 years. and it was an interesting graph, so we just thought we would work our way through it.

Yes.

and see what happens. So you asked an interesting question which might have a different context now that we have people kind of around this. effectively SharePoint is a first change. The biggest difference was that you did exactly the same as things you did on your file share.

Yes.

But you did it on a web page. So you had the ability to see all the documents, you had some rudimentary search. you had libraries, you had metadata.

Yes.

nothing sensible like manage metadata. but and that was kind of it, really. You could create rudimentary views. There was a kind of sync feature, but the problem is it synchronized all the code down to your laptop as well. So if you deleted the wrong file on your laptop, you basically disconnected the library and blew everything up and everything was gone. So it had lots and lots of rough edges.

So just out of interest, so you can create, you could create views on it. Was it something an end user could do or was it more something that needs to be broken?

Site owner, same as site owner. today you can do public or private views. That was something that came later. 27, I think, might even in 2003. But what is also interesting is we had published pages then which disappeared for a while because Microsoft tried to separate off the content management server. but yes, so we had the ability once 2001 came out and 2003 to do a kind of published page. But that's not really what we want to look at. We don't want to look at the features, we want to really look at how businesses were using it and what they were doing. So basically, why don't we just recap the first five years of SharePoint and what focus it was. So it was really about the core use was document libraries with version control, check in, checkout. And that was the big thing because you could not do that with file shares. You overwrote the file, you didn't have version control, so you had to have all those different names and everything else. and we basically had team sites and basic internal comms portals. So there was the publishing place that you could do things with, but it was a little complicated. so that's effectively what we had. And as you say, who could control it. And it was mainly around it stuff.

Yeah, it was, it was a little bit more like aesthetic site creating, but with some extra features like the check in, check out and the versioning control, which was a game changer for a lot of companies because they now could check back what was older and who did it because something went wrong. Somebody overwrote something what wasn't supposed to be.

Yeah, I mean, you had that capability but you couldn't compare versions that didn't come along till later on. So basically the step change was being able to see your work better, being able to access your work better. but it tended to be IT departments that played with it because it was just that basic the way it was working.

True. And also, for people that came in the game a lot later, they still Needed to install servers for it.

Oh yeah, it was on premise. Absolutely on premise. In fact what happened was you used to get it free. So you had server 2000 and whatever the number was, that was the current server at the time and on it was WSS. So Windows SharePoint service and that was just free. So it was basically when I used to train this, I was always joking that this was Bill Gates giving away crack cocaine and getting people addicted to it. So you basically got it for free. But once you got it and you wanted to pay for those premium services, you then had to buy a license. Until then you basically got basic document library functionality. Before then Team Services was even more basic than that. It was just a web page with a little patching window that you would upload a little document into.

I think I never seen Team Services.

You didn't miss much Windows Services. Actually that's not true.

Windows Services and Moss I have seen, never worked with it, but I have seen it. So I can imagine me something with it. But yeah, Team Service, I never seen it.

When did you see your first power automate flow in whatever it was called and how did you feel then?

The first flow ever seen was on SharePoint 2007.

I know, but it was a game changer bringing that to the industry level. So how did you feel when you saw that? Was it, oh wow, Jesus, I've got a new career ahead of me. Or was it that impressive or was it. It just okay, yeah, kind of expected.

Or it was like more oh, this is dangerous.

In some respects that's what we did. I mean I, I taught, I taught people how to install and set up SharePoint on premise. That was the first job I had in this space. It was a five day training course. what's needed? Yeah, yeah, the five day training course. and basically in the old days to do the logo there was ah. I don't remember what the folder was called but you went onto the server and you, you got into the SharePoint code.

Yeah, that public one underscore. It's somewhere on your user or on the C drive.

Yeah but on my version before you got hold of it, the only way you could actually customize it was by physically replacing the icons with different images. So you had to pull the old ones off and replace the new ones in. And then everybody had the same one of course because you didn't have templates or anything else along those lines. But yes. So you taught people how to basically run it and how to do it and it wasn't one server?

No, still in the latest on prem version of SharePoint. It's not one server.

No, I guess that's true. I've not done on prem.

They can't do it just to make sure everything keeps working.

Yeah, but that's resilience. But I mean then you had to have the SharePoint Services stuff. You had to have a search server, you had to have your database. yeah, I think that was the three you had to set up and install. So when I taught this, you had to run three virtual machines on your laptops and get it set up anyway. I can't remember all the details of course.

That's why they had some powerful computers.

At that time, kind of to.

Run the virtual machines.

In the training course we're doing virtual machines, but that's okay. So from an end user perspective it was exciting and new. I mean you just kind of got Windows coming in, sort of just starting to get a hold of things and so you suddenly then had the same kind of interface, but it really was only document management, no sharing, no, no manual controls for you to deal with anything along those lines.

It came afterwards, it came from 2007 it started but it was more in 2010 that you had a little bit more of that flexibility to have ah, apps and workflows and info platform forms and web ports and all of that.

Yeah, that is quite true. I'm just so, I mean I think that in those days it was just 5 shares so there was not a lot else to do for the first five or six years until as you say you got to 2007.

2007, 2010.

Well 2010 was a big change.

Yes.

so up until 2007 it was really just focused on good version control, easier access, better security model, making it easier for the end user.

I ever tried to create PowerShell scripts for 2007 that was a hell.

But all those things have become easier because I think the biggest change that Microsoft are responsible for here is putting more computer power into the user's end user's hands.

Yes.

I mean today they can set up their own permissioning. I mean that was unknown in this period of time. absolutely unknown. So you just weren't allowed and you couldn't do it.

So if we move on, we are now at the next step of SharePoint. So the core use at that point of time, according to our nice friends, was more based on enterprise search and also workflows.

Where are we at 2010?

Yes.

You're jumping too soon. There's so much stuff to do. That's 10 years you suddenly decided to jump.

No.

Yes.

That's what our dear friends are making excuses.

Enterprise search came in 2010, but in 27, that was the next big leap. Search, no, not necessarily search search was part of that process, no doubt about it. But it was no difference as such. but it was really about, So it had been around a while. People were looking for intranet type technology. The smart people were looking to use SharePoint for intranets.

Yes.

All right. Because basically intranets are just used to deliver a lot of stuff you could already do, like forms and, you know, expense forms, request, annual leave, a bit of news for people and that kind of stuff. And you could do that. So you could. It wasn't very good, but you could do that. And I remember having a big debate at one of my customers with the IT manager at the time. and, the IT manager, well, really know the, the, server manager at the time about. I'd gone in there to install SharePoint. We, we'd installed 2003, and then over the summer we immediately upgraded to 2007.

So.

And that was upgrading for 2003. 2007 was a database migration job. You had to take the old databases, reformat them, put them back in, and that got you to 2007. But I remember having this debate where he wanted to build an intranet using web technology, all right? Just basic stuff that allowed him to build his pages and look pretty and everything else. Whereas we really wanted to have an integrated content strategy. So I was on the side and it was really quite funny, because the IT manager, the lady that ran it, Sue, God bless her, because she's passed away now, but she was in a chair and I was one side and this guy was the other side. Just justifying why we should go with SharePoint. No, no, no. If we do SharePoint, we got this problem and we should go web pages, and vice versa. And basically she was just in the middle, like a tennis game, going one side to the other and eventually she went and stopped. I'm going to bring in somebody to actually decide this for us. So, and then eventually we went SharePoint.

Yep.

So we, we built SharePoint. and, and that was then 2007, we upgraded to that and that was a big leap because the pages, the pages were. We did. We lost the publishing functionality that the old WSS came, but we could create pages and put content on there. And display document libraries in there with some limitations. And if I think back to those limitations now, I think how the hell did we survive?

True. Was 2007 also the time for extranets on SharePoint? We had a time that we can do it.

We did. But it, I, don't think it was 2007 but I can't remember. We could ask and find a specific date. Yeah, I, I, you know me, I don't do timelines. So I'm afraid I, I can't remember the specifics. I do remember there was a couple of things. 2003, no 2007 allowed you to rename columns for metadata columns. and I remember horrible for developers. It was, I remember one night, about 5 o' clock in the night, I was building a custom list for somebody and I changed title to name. I know it was a sin of a thing to do, so I changed title to name. And when we came back in I was quite completely oblivious. I'd done the list and everything else. Somebody said, hey, title has changed in the document library. It's now not document title, it's name. I went, you know that feeling in the stomach when you realize that I think you've just majorly up.

Yes.

So I sat there and admitted to the IT guy, the, the surfer guy whose name will come to me in a minute. I can see his face. But I forgot his name. But that's okay, that's me all over. And he went, I said we'll just change it back. So then when you try and change it back, he went, no, you can't change it back to title because title is a reserved name. So I'm not even going to attempt to do it. And so yeah, so from that day onwards, every document library, instead of having title had the word name. It reminded me constantly. So when we did the upgrade to 2007 it was really hoping that we could achieve would change it. But no it didn't because it was just a database conversion. It just kept everything looking the same. So. Poor soul he was.

Yeah, but there were the things that people try to do and up a lot of things with.

Yeah.

And it was acceptable.

True. So I'm going to go and talk about one of my claims to fame now. So. So we did 2007, we had it installed and we were basically working for a council in the UK and we were trying to put in our content in. Now it was a government organization and so we used to get driven by taxonomy. Yeah. So everything was, had a Title and a name. and there were these special kinds of people that dealt in taxonomies and they'd created local government taxonomies. And there was. The name will come to me in a minute. The number will come to a minute. But it was some ridiculous amount of number. It was like 3,000 lines of taxonomy. So you know, you had Calendar, then you had calendar school, then you add calendar school, parents, evenings, calendar, school, health, inspected, calendar, school, teachers. Yeah, basically you had these seven layers of metadata that would describe every single document in the local council. You know, calendar, health, gym, leisure center, all of those things. So basically the first thing you had to do is to try and work out how you could label all these documents against that taxonomy. and so we called Microsoft in and it was a local government user group, a little bit like, ah, what we have today and sort of community and stuff. And we said to Microsoft, hey, look, what we really need to be able to do is to take this taxonomy, these different levels, and actually be able to just choose from that list in some way. So if I choose this, then I get these choices and these choices. If I choose this, I got these choice, these choices. So we was given an engineer. The engineer sat us down. We did a workshop around what he was going to do and he then wrote it and he wrote this code and demoed it over the next six weeks. We had about three or four different meetings and he worked quite well. So we had this central list of groups and everything else in taxonomy. and then he showed how you could upload a document and select from this list. And that was cool as. All right, it was great, we can have it. So it was a case of great, when can we have this? Or actually, no, now I need to go and send it off to Microsoft and they work it out. Okay, cool. So now we roll on to the next release of SharePoint, which is 2010. And I am sitting in. Not Atlanta.

Damn.

currently Detroit. Ignite, Chicago. Close. I'm sitting in Chicago. And they are just releasing SharePoint 2010 and they introduced Manage Metadata, which was my code from this workshop. So I'm standing there surrounded by people as they demo Manage Metadata. I'm going to. I did that. I did that. That was me, I did that. And nobody's listening to it. I'm there on my own. I mean, it's ridiculous, but yes. So there was my code that we developed about 18 months earlier in terms of requirements and functionality and so Manage Metadata. So my claim to fame is Managed Metadata came from one of my first featured discussions with Microsoft all those years ago, I'm sure I wasn't the only person in the world looking for something like that. But that's what the outcome came. And it looked exactly like the guy who wrote was good fun. But that's what 2010 came. It became the first content management tool. Really seriously being able to do content management.

Yeah. That's also why information architecture was more important in that. Or thinking like an architect and information was getting more important than what you did previously with all, 2003 and 07 and all of that.

Yeah. And it's fairly obviously there's reasons behind it are obvious in that you had to set it up. So whereas before you could just say, hey, this library on this site in this location only needs to have these columns and you'd have to build each one up individually.

Yeah.

And so obviously when managed metadata came up, you had to suddenly sit down and go, hey, just a minute. What are we going to put in place in terms of managed metadata?

True, it's still a little bit like that. It's not only what are we going to put in place for managed metadata, but all of the other metadata as well that you can add to documents.

Absolutely.

Because you can't put everything in managed metadata.

no, especially then, I mean, you were limited to three columns or something, of managed metadata in a library. And of course they had to be in a content type. So it also meant that to make all that work, content types came on 2010. and so it all had to be done. So that architecture needs to be done. So that's 15 years ago. Okay. Do you think AI will take 15 years to be adopted within organizations? No, no. But even today, 15 years later, after 2010 is released, how many organizations do you go into that actually have a content lifecycle policy, Content architecture defined manage metadata?

Not many.

No, virtually, no.

And also not many have it because nobody tried to explain them. M. Why it's important.

No, it's true. And also, of course IT departments never really treated any Microsoft product as a application to be managed by the applications team. And those that did tended to have software engineers. So they just use SharePoint as a development platform. Nothing wrong with that by a long, long way. But it basically means that, you know, there are very few organizations that see their content architecture as important. I mean we get to teach more and more people. But yes, then it was an interesting game all the time. Those that did, did it well. so, yeah, also a big game.

Changer in 2010 was, the fact that you can personalize your forms when you have lists or document libraries and that you can play around with it and make it more attractive for users to fill it in or anything.

Yeah. Was that when the framework came out for pages or was that a later version? That was 2013. SharePoint framework. We had SharePoint Designer in 2010, didn't we?

We had SharePoint Designer in 2010 and we also had InfoPods. the SharePoint framework was later so that you can do more, but on the page design side with InfoPath and in that time a lot of Nintex integrations were included with it. Third party tools.

That is true too. That is true too, because I did a lot of them. Framework, yeah, yeah, I did the same. So. But automation came 2010, that was kind of one of the biggest platform growth.

Yes.

in that space.

And I still think that was big game changer. And at that point of time it was still dangerous. because I was, I did a lot of development in that time and SharePoint designer was called a lot of times SharePoint destroyer because end users could work with it or business users could work with it and they tried things and they, they screw things up like crazy a lot of times and sometimes you just couldn't redo it. The damage was done. So start from fresh, start again.

Yes, it's true. I mean you would sit there and use SharePoint Designer on a page and then the first thing you needed to do is to, you know, if you wanted to undo, something you couldn't just turn it off, but you couldn't do that with the features. Can you remember the SharePoint site features page? You would go in and enable certain features and then you try to turn them off. But there was stray functionality.

Publishing feature was one that is to.

Go or not to be.

SharePoint Publishing feature document sets another one.

Oh, God, I still hate those. Moraine loves them.

it depends for what they are being used. I don't, I do love them sometimes as well, but most of the time I stay away from them.

Yeah, I'm sure they're better than they used to be. So let's just recap.

They're not better.

They're not better. Okay. So basically what we asked Holly, to do was to try and map the functionality on a graph for the last 25 years. And we'll put this somewhere on our page or put a link to it so people can see it. So document management obviously is an 8 out of 109 out of 10 kind of level score. and that's the basic and that stayed fairly consistent. But in 2010 at the halfway stage we had collaboration and integration, and also some automation because obviously we had those things kind of come in. AI was interesting. M. I think she might be wrong but I'm sure there was some AI stuff around but nothing that was openly accessible. Just some of the things that they were doing in terms of search and stuff. but yes, so in 2010 we're all halfway there on the automation stuff. but obviously it's still about collaboration and better. Of course synchronization was here, there and then I was in Atlanta, so was you? No, no, it was Chicago still. It was still Chicago.

Atlanta was later.

Yeah, it was. And basically what happened was that Microsoft ran a session on synchronization and did one of those classic Microsoft things where they admitted they got it completely wrong. He says. So it was my job he said, to sort out sync. I can't remember who it was that did it, he says. And currently we have seven different synchronization engines spread out around various applications to our desktop environments. And they spend the next two years really clarifying sync. And that period of time between 2010 and 2013 and 2015 timeframe, they really did manage to start to. That was when they really started to coordinate their office based functionality. They even renamed it Moss, Microsoft Office something server, SharePoint server. but then basically they coordinated it to the desktop and that meant that they were forcing it into the user space. And I think that was one of the biggest growth areas at the time. But it is interesting looking at those figures and seeing that graph and we will let people see it because it's worth a look.

See yeah. What I also liked about from 2010 version, the better functionality of search. Search was getting more integrated and became more and more important which makes it easier for users to find their documents. And that made also a game changer for a lot of people.

It did. I mean I think it provided structure around search. Whereas there was one search window for 10 years and you put your document name in it and crossed every part of your body and hoped that you found what you were looking for. But search wasn't the key thing to find content until after 2010. so if we talk about the growth area by the time we were 10 years in, we're talking about search. I agree entirely. we're talking about automation being starting to really get a hold. We're Talking about better content and architecture management. and that's what 10 years of SharePoint brought.

The migration of 2007-2010 was still a database migration.

It was, yes, but everybody knew they were getting something special. So with 2010, people realized that a lot of things were kind of going to get rather cool. It also meant that you could do things like, document IDs, have better focus on the content. if you get the architecture right, your search becomes better. There was a rudimentary search or filter web part for doing certain things for certain documents.

Yes.

and if you do that with content type and metadata. One of my favorite exercises to do with users was get a piece of paper out, write down the first name of your father, then write down, with no spaces, the name of your first pet, and then add in your month and year and you've now created a unique identity. And then if you put that into a column, every column, whenever you need to find any of your documents, just search on that unusual word and you would find your content and they would really impress with that silly little exercise. But, because you had to wait 15 minutes or so before it worked. But, you know, it meant that they could. It was such an easy way to teach that time.

Waiting for it. It's not changed.

No, I know. I was thinking the same.

Not at all. It's even worse.

No, I was thinking the same. The other thing to think about is that it's this constant change and growth that actually is why SharePoint is still the tool it is today and it's still the de facto place. And yet even today at my company, I was sitting there talking about file shares and how they're still growing and, you know, trying, to kind of work those things in.

True.

Part of the fun. All right, so that was 2010. 2010 flew by, really. Because you were less focused on your content and more focused on your automation.

True.

With the start of, you know, workflows and, and that kind of stuff. so, yes. And then PowerPoint could be used in all kinds of stuff. so, yeah, it was interesting. 2010. So do you think we had more changes in the first years or more changes after 2010?

after 2010, there was a bigger change. Is it already 2013? They came up with the hybrid way of working.

Correct. Yes.

So which was huge because you could go online and you could go on prem, and you had a lot of more things where you could, you needed to think about, what would we do?

Yeah, but the first part of the problem was you couldn't search in both locations, so you could only search in one or the other. So you needed to work out what to do. But yes, the hybrid stuff started to come together. My site was in 2013, OneDrive wasn't called OneDrive, it's called My site at the time. that came and went. but yes, and we ended up with two things in parallel at that point. You ended up with SharePoint the on premise version and SharePoint the cloud version. And SharePoint the cloud version was way behind the one on premise version at the beginning.

It was, it was.

But that's also the progression and what I find about this. I was thinking about this when we were looking at it a couple of days ago or when I was looking at it a couple of days ago that it all kind of changed. But it wasn't business that was driving or Microsoft were actually driving the direction.

Yes.

because they realized that the processing power they needed to do some of the things that they had in mind was not going to come from an on premise server unless you ended up with exchange type numbers of servers, you know, 14, 15, 20 different SharePoint environments all linked together.

Yes. which was excellently fun to see.

How it was going from a technical perspective. Yes. But from an end user perspective, no.

For me it was kind of fun to see how it was going as a developer because SharePoint, framework was also released which was actually created for the online environment, but released on the on prem environment as well. So we had time to start experimenting with it. So that made it fun to do. But yes, for end users it was horrible. Sometimes as IT person we couldn't follow. So how can we expect businesses able to follow them?

No, but that's true. And again I think that's one of the fundamental changes as we sort of think around and get down to 25 years in to where we are now. The user experience is the key driver, for all of it, whether it's search or metadata or whatever, whatever, whatever. They now put more and more power into the user. I mean you could have, by the time you got 2010, 2013, you had the concept of the site owner. So we would put content architecture in and governance in. but that gave, that allowed you to have a site owner to be able to control it and manage it and have certain levels of permissions.

Yes. And that's also the big change for intranet because now you had somebody outside IT that was able to get to where you can give the Responsibility to.

And really screw it up for you. Sorry I said that.

I know we have. When you work in the space from SharePoint for that long, we all have seen end users or business people screwing an intranet up and removing something. Removing the start page. It happened.

Removing the start page. Yes, it did.

And you probably did it yourself once.

No, no, I can honestly say I didn't do that. After my episode with the, early screw up of title and name means you suddenly become more careful at that point it was when I realized how important the physical architecture of SharePoint was. So that made me realize that actually I need to understand what's happening behind the scenes here. That that title column is actually one column available to everything. so no, the architecture of SharePoint at that point and how it hangs together became very important to me.

Yes. something else that was very important for me at that time was internal naming conventions for columns and all of that. Because one of the changes you did was title to name. It was also screwing up a lot of other things. So if you make sure that they know it was a custom column, that is true, it was much easier, but still it's just a, label and people didn't knew the importance of it.

No, people still don't. Of course. Yeah, I want to do this on SharePoint, so I'm just going to go do it, you know. But you're gonna have problems in three weeks time. No, we'll be fine. And then two weeks time because something happened. you know, this screw. I mean there are so many ways of screwing SharePoint up nowadays. yeah, yeah.

So what else was a change in 2013 that we missed in 2013?

I think the, I think it's that even though there was a lot of new functionality that came out then with the workflows and the start of power flows or whatever they called them at that time. and the standard workflows that you get within SharePoint that started to be introduced in 2010. So that was fairly key. So a document approval, for example, was something that people screamed out for, publishing being able to actually have documents and have them drafted and major and minor versioning content types so that you could search on specific sets of content, or you could filter the web parts to only show certain types of content.

You just said another major change, major and minor versions. Did we had that in 2007?

Yeah, we did. Yeah. But not many people thought about it. But what you didn't know, I don't know you did or you didn't. I'm not going to go down that line because I can't remember. but I think in all those cases whatever Microsoft introduced, it still took two or three years for it to actually become mainstream. So that three year cycle of new development, by the time you got a. Microsoft had released it because they announced it, released the new version, the new stuff didn't appear for six months or nine months. and so you had all those kinds of things to deal with. And then of course what happens is by the time you then get them up to speed, you change it and they were very good at changing the freaking interface. So it was, it was really cool. Document library Settings. OK button at the top. OK button at the bottom. Okay button at the top. Okay button at the top and the bottom. settings button on the left, setting button on the right. Yeah, I mean their ability to

Removing or changing the names, it was terrible.

It was terrible. I don't know why SharePoint did it, don't know why Microsoft did it. I can only assume they really wanted you to be able to know you've moved from one version to another or they really did not know the effect of it. I don't know. I mean it's better now. Now changes are regular. Ah. But more subtle so you kind of get used to them.

So if we go to the next version, if we had, we talked about 2010 and 2013. The next version is 2016.

20, 16, yeah.

And that was the core use was document collaboration. You have live co authoring introduced in that version and that was a lifetime changer for a lot of people because they could see what other people were doing in their documents. They didn't need to check it out anymore or check it in anymore. It was just life which was great fun.

That's true. And it was one of the key things because they'd been m experimenting with it online first and then they brought it to the on premise version. But yes, that was a fundamental change for lots and lots of things. I mean most of it was network growth that allowed that stuff to be done plus the amount of computing power that you could throw at these things nowadays being online.

And another change they have done which screwed many heads and was confusing was two site types, the team sites and the communication sites.

Yes.

A lot of people still don't know when to use what.

But no, but I think without getting into specifics about different technologies and what they release and stuff because that's quite boring. But how SharePoint is being used within the countries in that level. So we started off by talking about the kind of functionality growth we have. Generally more and more people are doing things around content types because they understand the benefits of it now and you just say hey, you need to do this. So 10 years later they know they need to do it. Search of course is the way to get content to deal with it. One of the clients we've been working on together, they did everything with search. I mean I don't know how many refinement columns we put into them because they said look, everything should be searchable with refinements. 22, 23, something silly like that.

30 or something.

Yeah, it was a ridiculous number. But that's what they wanted and there's a more of an understanding. They listen to you and then they blow it out of proportion. But you know, and that I think is key.

It's same thing with collaboration became more and more important.

Yeah, that is true. But again just to give an example, we are still having to deliver the message today around what OneDrive is for and Ms. Teams is for because we suddenly said, oh, now I need to have access to his OneDrive. Well, I'm afraid too late, 90 days, it's already gone. But we had to go through all of the process to get there. But then we looked at it went, it's gone. but people don't understand about where that content is because Microsoft have made it so easy to just share it. You don't know where it's sitting. and SharePoint in some respects was easier when you had to go to a particular location. Nowadays nobody cares, nobody knows. I just search for it or find it or I look for the search link that was given to me.

True. also because, and that shift came also around the time of 2016 was that more and more people start to work on a tablet or even on a phone. So the platform needs to be available in the cloud. So the focus from on premise was we moving to the cloud. Cloud became the first thing at that point of time because the flexibility to work wherever you want, whenever you want.

No, I agree entirely. I think that was a key thing, kind of around the 2020s so five years ago or so, Covid of course also drove that quite a lot. But even before then people wanted to have mobile first, that kind of stuff. That is very, very true. and I think the other part of that equation, is that that was when SharePoint really started to become the development platform because now we can create a power app and get you that data. Especially in the early days, even I could understand how to do it and being a completely non devi kind of software person at all today, of course it's that much more complicated. but there's more power around. So yes, the idea of mobile access also brought in the whole concept of power apps and applications because the mobile phones would go nuts as well 10 years ago.

True. It was a nice thing that they start playing on it and that they were giving the ability to choose. If you want to stay on the on premise, fine. If you want to go with us to the cloud, even better.

Yeah, very, very true. And I guess finally we started you get to an end of this because we've been talking to 44 minutes on this already. But I think the next big thing that we kind of need to think about and put into play here is the fact that the type of content expanded exponentially. So videos, messaging, recordings, voice images and documents and all that collaboration expanded tremendously. and still is doing to be honest. So, you know, yammer or whatever it's called, Engage, you know, you don't care whether it's a yammer page or a SharePoint news page. Most of the time you kind of just bring it together. It's all content.

It is.

and of course you know, you, you then use the intelligence to make sure it gets delivered to the right people.

That's why I think our nice friend Holly did make great comments for the time period of 2016. SharePoint no longer the destination but the engine behind it.

Yes, I like that and I really.

Like that sentence, because that's what was changing. Is 2016 also not become the bigger breakthrough of teams, Microsoft Teams? or is it even later?

No, it's later. Certain teams was really a product. We never, it was never a SharePoint product.

it was just, it's separate products.

Yeah, I think, I think if we take that idea though, the big transformational themes, I think there's four of them listed over its lifetime. So the first one from destination to platform, the fact that it now drives teams, Viva and Power platform. So there's one of the biggest, bigger areas from static to dynamic. So documents are now living objects, co authored, AI tagged, retention controlled. Yes, sensitivity controlled, more easy to edit and, and, and put into play and all that kind of stuff.

But that retention controlled and sensitivity controlled came a lot later because.

Yeah, I'm not suggesting that, that this is in any order. It's just the way that it's transformed itself. and then from IT tool to business enabler.

Citizen developers, low code, no code pages.

With ease workflows, easy to do, to understand.

But every user can create a page.

Yes, and many of them do. True, but not enough. It's amazing that even though the capability is there, it still tends to be it that drives a lot of this stuff. It's not a end user friendly enough control for them to do it.

is it not end user friendly enough or is it. It wants to control what happening and.

It never wants to control anything. All right. It's always security and some kind of compliance officer that wants to control everything. From an IT perspective we would just throw it over the wall and say get on with it. Let's be honest. And many people do, but some people don't. So. Yeah, but that's the upside. You can choose the level of governance you need.

True.

And then the one that never ever got taken off from folders to metadata with syntax and purviews. Not syntax anymore, of course it's not. No true driving automation presence. So yeah. Will we ever get rid of folders? No, not at all.

But there is nothing wrong with folders.

Yeah, there is. There's everything wrong with folders.

No.

Why?

Sometimes it's Folders is the right way to go.

When? Give me two examples.

if you have a Microsoft Team site and you create a channel, Microsoft creates the channels itself, then that's the.

Right way to go. You would prefer that? No.

but I would say if you have a company event with a lot of pictures taken and you want to start them on SharePoint, you don't want to managed label them one by one.

Now you create a new library called pictures and dump them in there and let it sort itself out. The interface shows you the pictures you want or you can search on the.

Pictures and if you have two company events together, you just dump them all in the same library.

Yes. And then you use date and things to deal with it or you just use a separate library.

Some customers don't want that. Some customers want to have a folder.

From Easy Navigation on it, then that's because you're not teaching them right. But folders, ah, are a way of hiding content. You hide it behind a folder and if you can't find the folder, you can't find the content. We've still yet to define this because we heard some rumors about not being able to search behind certain layers of folders, which I don't entirely Believe, But I really want to check.

It's a combination of, the amount of data you have and how deep your folders are in your document library.

But they're not deep in the document library because the folder is just a tag. But anyway, that's another thing that we've been told by a number of people that's the case. Or I have been told. but yes, I'm not a big believer in folders. I much prefer metadata.

So do I.

But getting people to change is impossible. Most people, younger people, don't care. They just upload it and throw it in and then they just let search deal with it.

Yeah, I'm a believer of metadata as well. But sometimes I do understand why people create a folder and there's nothing wrong with it.

Yes, there is.

Yes, you find it depends on the situation and the use case. But even if you know, you can say don't create a folder in this library, but if you drag and drop a folder in it, the folder is.

There, that does not make it right.

No, but that doesn't also say you.

Can'T stop folders, so therefore it's right.

No, no, no, no. You need to teach your end users to use it correctly, but you can't really stop folders of being there.

You see, you take two things and completely contradict the other one. I teach my users, but there's no point teaching my users because they can do it anyway.

If your users are teach goods, they will not use it.

Right. So you shouldn't use folders and you just need a good change exercise.

Especially that.

There you go. But I mean, but users are obviously still familiar with folders. Actually what I find is young people aren't only as old buggers that have been using folders for 50 years are the only kinds of people that do. Plus, still people still have their file shares.

Yes.

So, yeah, I think that if the organization is willing to make the effort, then there's more value in metadata than folders because of tagging and searching and all that kind of stuff. but yes, what I always do is have the view and cut the folder out. So I create the view without the folder and then they create a folder and it just doesn't feel like it's there anyway. Yeah, but there you go. Anyway, so there you go. The transformational changes of SharePoint, which is quite a cool subject actually.

We forgot one thing.

What did we forget?

That's since COVID 2000, 2001, AI is becoming a big part also in SharePoint.

That is true.

And we still are curious to see how it will evolve, what AI will bring more to SharePoint and what it will give you more and help you with.

Yeah, I think so. I think that's probably going to be the next five year growth, the next five year change. I think it will integrate with so many different things, within the SharePoint space and I think it will also get super involved in the search side of things where you're asking it to tell you things without caring about where it's at. And that would then debate, and disable the folder issue altogether.

Yes. And also what I already noticed was page creation with AI.

This is not an AI conversation. We know that AI will get involved in this. This is a different subject altogether. But it is the next gener of SharePoint that is. And how that fits is a great question.

It will just help your users to get better in understanding everything.

But does it negate having a good content architecture?

No. You still need to think about it.

Of course you do. So you still have to get the fundamentals right. But AI would just sort of assist with getting stuff together. And I don't want to go down this conversation. We are getting close to an end. and if we start on this.

Game, then we will be here tomorrow morning.

We will. Plus we're also on the edge of a lot of the stuff we can't talk about from an MVP or what the stuff we do know in Microsoft. I mean there are some things coming out already. So the Frequently Asked questions web part,

Oh, is it there already?

Yeah, yeah. read something about it being released, somebody being using it. so, and where you're starting to use your library as a resource with your SharePoint agent and that kind of stuff. It is going to be a different kind of approach. so yes, there are fundamental changes coming on. Do we want to talk about them now? I think no, no, I think AI is not new enough. It's a little bit like hey, we've got managed metadata. Fine. And it's going to be a year or so before we really, it needs.

To involve, before we really understand it and before we really can say this is what it, a game changer for people. Yes, we are experimenting with it all the way, we experiment with AI quite a lot. also in SharePoint or I do and I still try to understand it.

No, I think I do worry that it's going to. The, the biggest issue is going to be finding the number one use that it's going to be for that it will do lots and lots of little things that you can use for specific needs. We have to work out how you generalize. So within Excel, for example, using AI in Excel you say hey, create me these results and it then works out what it needs to do with the formulas and where the data structure and everything else within an Excel spreadsheet. Within SharePoint. I'm not entirely certain where it's going to go and how you would say hey, I need to have all of the HR policies listed here associated with, you know, leave, management and maternity leave and the ability people take off and then it should be able to find the stuff and create a page. I think we're a long way from that. but I think that's likely to be where it goes. Create me a page that shows me this, this, this and this. Yeah, so I think there's some fun to be had there in time.

Yes. And to close off something we maybe need to think about next time is how governance grow in all of those years.

Yeah, we already know. and I'm doing a session in a couple of weeks time somewhere. I think it's at Bletchley. doing the, the one where we think about how sensitivity labels are really have to be a key thing to make sure your AI content does not get abused and that your compliance is dear to. Unless you do sensitivity labels you may as well try and turn AI off because you need to be able to tell it what it cannot use in a model about a particular subject. So that I think is a governance area that needs to be done and it's a different way of doing governance.

Diving in that one at the moment.

It'S a good one to get into. but as we spoke about the other day, it's about documenting and really documenting what you need, what your expected outcomes are. You can't experiment with this stuff, it's not possible.

So if you want to experiment with it then you need to have a 90 day development server with not with your company data that you can test things. But then you are working at a completely different environment.

But it's a little bit like a generative prompt at the moment. You're not sure what the output's going to be and where it's going to go and that's the issue that you got to try and get over with your governance. So I mean for example one of the things that we do a lot of is translation because we're a multi language company. But once you tag a content as confidential to the point where you don't want to cut and paste, your translation stops.

True.

So, and if you think about that's going to be on your pages, it's going to be on your emails, it's going to be on your. You've got to work out the balance and cost between protection and functionality, and in this case whether somebody actually understands something that you've sent out because it can't be translated into their language anymore. And if you don't document that and discuss those issues, you're never going to be able to sort of put this platform down.

Yes.

So on that note, on the list of all the things that you still have to talk about that I think in itself defines the level of complexity within SharePoint and the growth from that symbol document library where you can literally just say, hey guys, look, upload a document, click on it, search on it, then you've got your really bold, strong content management stuff. That underlying content is still a driver for wherever you go with AI. And so you still need to think about that architecture in that direction and what you actually want to get out of it.

True.

We'll be in a job forever.

I think so.

Bye everybody.

Bye.

Sam.