More Than Code: A Thank You to the SharePoint Community

Microsoft recently released a short film called More Than Code, produced in honor of SharePoint’s 25th birthday. If you haven’t watched it yet, I’d encourage you to take a few minutes and do so. The video is embedded down below. It’s a thoughtful piece that captures something real about this community — the people, not just the product.

Watching it brought up a lot of feelings I’m not sure I’m qualified to put into words. Gratitude, mostly.

As many of you who know me understand, I’ve been passionate about collaboration technology since the late 1990s. Long before SharePoint had a name, I was fascinated by the idea that technology could help people work together better, across teams, across buildings, across time zones. I was even accepted into a doctoral program where I had planned to study the impacts of collaboration technology (with a huge focus on the burgeoning social collaboration space) on how teams worked together. That passion eventually led me to this community, and it’s one of the best things that ever happened to me professionally.

Over the years, I had the privilege of helping launch SharePoint Saturday events across the western United States. I helped lead the creation of events in the San Francisco East Bay, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Sacramento, Bend, and Utah, and helped organize the annual event on Microsoft campus in Redmond. Eight years helping to produce SPS Redmond. None of that was my just my doing, of course. I was one of several passionate community players who showed up early, moved some chairs, and helped spread the word about the event. And I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people who cared just as much. That’s the thing about this community: it runs on generosity.

The technology itself — and I say this with full affection — has never been perfect. SharePoint has frustrated all of us at one time or another. But it has quietly powered the daily communication and collaboration needs of organizations around the world for a quarter century. That’s not a small thing. I caught the spark while leading the deployment of an early version to an organization of 2,000 people. I saw firsthand how it enabled people to quickly build out sites and solutions to help them organize their data. That was 21 years ago. And here we are today, with millions of people building solutions on this platform every day. They trust it. And they’ve trusted the community that grew up around it to help them make sense of it.

What I’m not lost on is the irony of it all. A community built around collaboration technology turned out to be… deeply collaborative. The speakers who gave their weekends to stand in front of a room. The sponsors who kept the lights on so events could stay free. The organizers in city after city who just wanted to help their neighbors learn something useful. That spirit is what More Than Code is really about.

So thank you. To everyone who ever attended an event, shared a session slide, answered a forum question, or just showed up. You made something worth celebrating.

And something that I thought about as soon as my interview was done — one of my all-time favorite memories of the SharePoint community was in 2014 or 2015. We were at the closing session of SharePoint Saturday Redmond, and I was on the stage reading off ticket numbers for the final raffle, and Jeff Teper had been kind enough to stick around all afternoon…and was literally running up and down the aisles, handing out the prizes as the numbers were called. Jeff has always gone above and beyond for the community, and that point was not lost on us then, nor is it now. Thanks, Jeff!

Here’s the full film:

 

And here are excerpts from my interview with the Microsoft team: