The History of SharePoint

A really nice article posted up by the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog:

As we are just two weeks away from disclosing SharePoint 2010 at the SharePoint Conference starting October 19^th, I wanted to write three posts to provide context on the upcoming release. This first post will cover the history of SharePoint. I hope it will provide some useful perspective behind our vision and what we have learned as well as a few fun anecdotes. The second post will cover the engineering process for SharePoint 2010 - how we design and develop SharePoint in the Office team, what new approaches we have taken during the 2010 development cycle and my take on a few frequent questions I hear from customers and partners. The third post will coincide with the opening of SharePoint Conference and cover the major feature investments. After that, our team will star blogging in depth about the new SharePoint capabilities. For folks who cannot wait, we have highlighted a few of the new features on the SharePoint 2010 Preview Site as commented on several Office 2010 client capabilities including a few points of SharePoint integration on the Office Engineering Blog.

Before we jump in to this post, I want to thank everyone who has been with us on the journey so far and is supporting us in the release of SharePoint 2010 and feedback for releases beyond. While I will talk about the efforts that evolved into SharePoint, its origin dates to around March 1998 when we first started planning the projects that led to SharePoint. Since the first beta of the first release, we have been extremely fortunate to have your support and hear your feedback. It has been extremely rewarding to see all things you are doing with SharePoint. We have posters of many of your sites on the walls of Building 16 on the Microsoft Redmond Campus and these are a source of great motivation and pride for our team to take things to the next level. We always appreciated your ideas and feedback friendly or otherwise about where the product should go or how we could help you better. We think SharePoint 2010 will be another big step forward but we know there is more to be done and are thankful you care enough to keep pushing us. Finally, we want to thank the Microsoft teams around the world who has worked so hard to build and support the product with special thanks to a few dozen people who were with us from the very beginning in 1998. We are very fortunate to have a great team, customers and partners and that is what keeps us fired up to come to work every day.

to read more go to:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/10/05/sharepoint-history.aspx