SharePoint Development - Past, Present and Future

With the recent release of SharePoint 2016, and with details of the latest development framework (the SharePoint Framework) for SharePoint becoming available, I thought it would be useful to produce a series of blog posts looking at SharePoint development over the years, and how it is likely to change in the future, based on trends from past releases and the current focus on cloud based solutions from Microsoft. The series will consist of 6 articles, published weekly:

• Part 0 - SharePoint Development - Past, Present and Future (this post)
• Part 1 - SharePoint Origins (including 2001 and 2003 releases)
• Part 2 - MOSS 2007
• Part 3 - SharePoint 2010
• Part 4 - SharePoint 2013
• Part 5 - SharePoint 2016
• Part 6 - The Future SharePoint Development

This series will be focused primarily on on-premise SharePoint development. While Office 365/SharePoint Online are growing rapidly and are influencing the development of the SharePoint platform greatly, the majority of large organisations are still using on-premise, and are (rightly) wary of having all their data in a third party data centre, even if that third party is Microsoft. I'll point out trends in Office 365 that I think will affect future SharePoint development, but it isn't the main focus for these articles.

I'll be drawing heavily on my own experiences of developing for SharePoint. I first started developed solutions for SharePoint back in 2006, when as a recent graduate I was part of a large team building integration products with SharePoint 2003 (a hideous project). I then spent over 3 years working full time on SharePoint solutions (MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010), at which point I took a break to spend several years lost in rewriting large .NET legacy applications. Last year, I started working with SharePoint once more. In this new role, I am currently part of a small team working on a phased SharePoint migration (2010 to 2013) that will be completed in the new year (January 2017). Over all this time, I've worked on a wide variety of SharePoint solutions (intranets, various organisational platforms, eCommerce sites, HR applications and currently a Virtual Learning Environment).

So, lets start by looking at the origins of the SharePoint platform.