History of SharePoint ECM Through Shirts

I moved a while back and was amazed how many free shirts I still have kicking around. I thought I’d pick the most relevant ones and do a quick history of SharePoint ECM through clothing.

Note: If you want to do an animation like this, I recommend smiling. While no expression is easier to duplicate, there’s less chance that you’ll look like the psychotic killer in a Criminal Minds episode.

1998 – 2001 (NCompass Labs t-shirt and leather jacket)
NCompass Labs was located in Vancouver, Canada. NCompass Resolution was built to be a platform for creating websites with content management features and it would go on to become Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS). MCMS was the basis of today’s SharePoint publishing sites functionality.

2001 (e-biz hoodie, MCMS 2001 polo, Microsoft Portal Airlift windbreaker)
SharePoint Portal Server 2001 and MCMS 2001 were released. At this point, SharePoint was an application designed to build Intranets. MCMS was built as a development platform for web content management. The fact that both could be used to build Intranets caused confusion—some people liked to say that SharePoint was for Intranets and MCMS was for public sites, but that wasn’t accurate. MCMS was moved to the newly created E-Business Servers division and SharePoint was in the Office Servers division.

Aside: The “EBZ” hoodie was given out because the team that left Redmond building 1 before we moved in were so messy that the space “looked like a frat house.”

2002 (E-Business Servers Hawaiian speaker shirt, MCMS 2002 t-shirt)
MCMS 2002 was released primarily to add support for .NET developers. The marketplace confusion about the two content management products from Microsoft continued. The E-Business Servers division embarked on the Jupiter project which was a vision for an integrated suite of business products including BizTalk and MCMS.

2003 (TechEd 2003 Speaker shirt)
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 was released. SPS added key features and scalability. SPS also kicks off the SharePoint vision to be both a platform and an application.

2004 – 2007 Metalogix Booth Staff polo and Colligo share shirt
The E-Business group is dissolved (because of their taste in shirts?) and the MCMS team becomes part of the SharePoint team.

From Microsoft: “Based on extensive customer feedback, we have integrated the Web content management capabilities of CMS 2002 into the new Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007”

A key aspect of this timeframe is that the SharePoint partner ecosystem grows dramatically. Because of this, I threw in a couple of partner shirts. More ECM features are added to SharePoint.

Aside: I left out the speaker shirt from TechEd New Zealand. As native South Africans, my brother would never forgive me if I published a photo of me wearing the silver fern. But to be fair, I had a fantastic time, met some great people, and hope to go again.

2007 – 2009 SharePoint Conference Speaker shirt
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) was released and SharePoint gains the impressive title as the fastest product to grow to 1B (in yearly revenue ) in Microsoft history. The market clearly demonstrates that it wants one solution that is both a platform and an application for building websites. Also, SharePoint gains significant mindshare as a solution for public internet sites. At the end of the decade, SharePoint 2010 Server and SharePoint Foundation are in public Beta—both receiving favourable reviews.