SharePoint Building

Microsoft are celebrating a new milestone for SharePoint:

Today, at Microsoft’s 2007 Financial Analyst Meeting, the company reported that its Microsoft^® Office SharePoint^® Server business generated revenue of more than $800 million in fiscal year 2007, due to strong demand for the enterprise- ready, integrated server capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. This represents a growth rate of more than 35 percent over fiscal year 2006.  

The SharePoint team blog also does some reminiscing:

With these great results, it’s time for a little nostalgia and some looking ahead. I have personally been working on and off the SharePoint business since 1998 – anyone remember Tahoe? When we decided to start development on SharePoint Portal Server 2001, it was a big step forward for Microsoft. We were making a big bet that collaboration, portals, content management and enterprise search would become mainstream and gain the same kind of broad acceptance that personal productivity tools such as Microsoft Office had experienced.

It looks very much like another Version 3 Microsoft product is becoming mainstream.

The interesting statistic from those on offer is this one:

“The majority of SharePoint deployments in the survey base of 300 U.S. organizations are currently enterprise-wide (61 percent), with 28 percent of the current departmental deployments expected to become enterprise-wide within the next 12 months,” according to IDC. “This is particularly the case for large organizations, where 51 percent plan to extend SharePoint to an enterprise-wide audience.”

Most deployments are enterprise-wide, but even for those that aren’t many are expected to become enterprise-wide soon. Many departmental IT projects do not have a chance of becoming enterprise services because they aren’t capable of making that transition because of capability, but more often because of flexibility. Other enterprise projects fail to make an impact on the departments because there is no pull from the organisation who is expected to use the tool. Being able to start from either end and succeed is a difficult thing to do and shows that the product is flexible, but also that people like to use it.

Having a collaborative toolset that people like to use is very powerful indeed.

Having a collaborative toolset that is flexible enough to use at the corporate or the departmental level is even more powerful.

Having a collaborative toolset that is flexible enough to change from departmental to enterprise-wide is even more powerful.

Build some momentum and you are probably unstoppable.