This article was originally written by Concept- EU, and translated from German. This is part 1 of a 3-part series of articles.
Long ago, in the year 2001, Microsoft launched SharePoint Team Services (STS). Just before that, SharePoint Portal Server 2001 (SPS 2001) had been released and was the center of attention. STS was not part of its scope, and few understood the platform’s spirit and purpose. Moreover, the product was not actively promoted by Microsoft, and at the time a sensible connection to SPS only existed on paper. As a component of the Microsoft Office XP family, STS arrived with a free license for FrontPage 2002.
From a technical point of view, STS was firmly connected to the FrontPage Server extension. The groundbreaking innovation was the possibility to create pages with STS for the intranet with ease, which was a tool for less complicated teamwork and transfer of information to the users.
However, SPS and STS showed big differences in their technical architecture and the way they were developed. So knowledge of digital dashboard architecture and web parts was needed to build on SPS, while STS required FrontPage’s RPC (Remote Procedure Protocols) and skills in CAML (Collaborative Markup Languages).
The innovative product stayed below the customer’s radar because, one there was no promotion, and two, the connection to the rest of the system landscape was complicated because of its technical architecture. A negative attitude towards STS developed in short period of time.
SPS 2001, on the other hand, offered an environment in which ad hoc teams could meet, work together, and separate again. In some ways the point of view was different as well: the basic idea was to publish and discover information, not to create it.
Microsoft drew positive and negative conclusions from experiences with Exchange Server 2000, SPS 2001 and STS led in 2003 to the first SharePoint platform that now (compared to the standard at that time) enabled real collaboration.