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Evolution of SharePoint

By Brian Wilson

It all started in the Dot Com boom days, from the mid-1990s to the late 1990s. Organizations were starting to realize the potential of the Web, and use of Internet sites was exploding. Organizations were starting to use internal websites to communicate and share information with employees.

Microsoft picked up on this trend early in the 1990s and delivered a number of products to support businesses, both on the Web and internally. Version 3.0 of Microsoft Site Server (first released in 1996) was released in 1998, which provided a number of features to support websites, such as indexing and search, content management, product management, order processing, site personalization, and, believe it or not, an Ad Server!

From a tooling perspective, Microsoft provided support for intermediate to advanced developers in Visual Studio and Visual Interdev. To support power users and end users, Microsoft FrontPage was purchased from Vermeer Technologies, Inc., to enable users to create and edit web pages on a server configured with Office Server Extensions, and later on servers using FrontPage Server Extensions.

images VTI was the acronym of Vermeer Technologies, Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft in 1996, along with the product known today as FrontPage. The name of /_vti_/ in SharePoint evolved from this acquisition.

In 1998, Microsoft was in the process ...

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