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Happy Birthday to 25 year SharePoint! The boys reminisce and share war stories. They end with an amazing smoky dram.
Creators and Guests
Host
What is Office 365 Distilled?
This podcast is presented by Marijn and Steve; two experienced Microsoft 365 and SharePoint consultants. In each podcast you will get a smile or two with a chunk of interesting and practical help in Microsoft 365. Then you get introduced you to what we hope is a Whisky you have not tasted before.
Hey. Hey.
Speaker 2:Happy
Speaker 1:birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear share. SharePoint online. SharePoint.
Speaker 1:What? SharePoint. SharePoint online. No. No.
Speaker 1:SharePoint.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Twenty five years. Yes. Amazing. That's twenty five years of my life, actually.
Speaker 1:I was there when it was born.
Speaker 2:Project Tahoe back in the day. Okay.
Speaker 1:Jesus. I was in Germany.
Speaker 2:Oh, the worst place. Amazing.
Speaker 1:I wonder how many people have built their career.
Speaker 2:Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh, I I know. I know.
Speaker 2:I know. Know.
Speaker 1:You also wondered about it.
Speaker 2:No. Basically. Basically, I was listening to... Oh, what's the shit? What's her name?
Speaker 2:Rebecca from The Nordics somewhere.
Speaker 1:I know I fed you whiskey so far tonight, but I didn't realize it killed that many brain cells.
Speaker 2:Oops. Oops. Oops. So we we might have have... We might.
Speaker 2:Yes. We might have had a little pre celebration.
Speaker 1:We might have had. Yes, the birthday celebration. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Rebecca. Rebecca. Yeah, Rebecca.
Speaker 1:Rebecca. What about Rebecca?
Speaker 2:Well, she has a podcast about knowledge management and she had Adam Harmetz on. And he was also talking about twenty five years of SharePoint. And at one point he says, if you look it up on LinkedIn, there's 3,000,000 people that have LinkedIn set as a skill in their profile.
Speaker 1:3,000,000 people.
Speaker 2:That's only the people that market as their profile. Yes.
Speaker 1:I don't even know whether I do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I was in the gym and I sent myself a note on WhatsApp saying, oh, I need to look up how many SharePoint MVPs we actually have.
Speaker 1:In Belgium, there's three of us.
Speaker 2:Yes. But I forgot to do this, so I didn't do my homework.
Speaker 1:Preparation is bad.
Speaker 2:Yes. But now I still want to know how many SharePoint MVPs do we have in the world? I don't know. Don't know because
Speaker 1:many of them move away, of course. So they become M365s, MVPs, they become MST, MST. They go with the flow and the most fashionable thing. Copilot. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So here's a question then. So is SharePoint still cool?
Speaker 2:I think SharePoint is that I think super cool. Cooler than Copilot? Yes. Base... So basically, the the the most...
Speaker 2:The data that Copilot grounds most on is SharePoint basically, of course. Yeah. Because where else would you ground your data?
Speaker 1:So SharePoint might be cool, but actually it is just the foundation for everything. Is. SharePoint and three sixty five would not work.
Speaker 2:Exactly. It powers everything. It powers Teams. It powers OneDrive. And now we got 7,000,000,000 people using SharePoint because it's also powering consumer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Microsoft Live. Crazy. It is. But now
Speaker 2:I think I think it's definitely more relevant than it ever was. Well, maybe maybe that's a weird statement. But if you look at SharePoint, what it does today is two things. It's the Internet and it's the document management. And Content management.
Speaker 2:Oh, content. Okay. Content management. So the Internet thing, it's been buzzing for the last number of years. I've got so many Internet projects that I'm doing.
Speaker 2:So that's definitely taking off. All the recent developments that were in in there, like the flexible sections and stuff like that. It's so powerful. Well, on the document management side, now you've
Speaker 1:Content management side.
Speaker 2:Content management.
Speaker 1:Knowledge management.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, it's part of content.
Speaker 1:Can't think what you think is a priority here at all, but let's talk about But knowledge management and concept
Speaker 2:basically, all the AI stuff is that cool. But what really amazed me is so you got quick actions. Yes. That you can now do. And now you can also create a new column with quick action buttons in
Speaker 1:it. Correct.
Speaker 2:So that is so cool, and now you can do all these beautiful things with a nice user interface for your end customers instead of them having to go into details and modify a metadata because the invoice got
Speaker 1:Do I
Speaker 2:need to
Speaker 1:get you a damp towel? Maybe. Maybe. It wasn't whisky you spilt there then. That's okay.
Speaker 2:It is cool
Speaker 1:today, but it was also cool twenty five years ago.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. I mean, you've been along for the ride. I joined the circus in 2006 was when I started working.
Speaker 1:So you upgraded to 2007?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I started working with the 2003 version and, yeah, very quickly went to 2007.
Speaker 1:We should also point out at this point that Kevin, yes, you are fucking old, mate. The fact... Do you not see his message?
Speaker 2:No. I
Speaker 1:did. Yeah. Because we... On Fusion Talk, we were talking about when we were getting involved and Anuk was saying, yeah, when I was at college doing SharePoint
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Saw
Speaker 1:makes me feel old. But, yes, you are old, Kev. There's nothing we can do about it. But I mean, this is a man saying that, you know, team services and Tahoe, I was looking at beta versions of this software.
Speaker 2:But I mean, I have to say for me as well, in school, I learned SharePoint. There were two lessons on SharePoint, one about user interface and one about development, how to do a... How to create a hello world web part...
Speaker 1:Did you not listen then when it came to the development stuff?
Speaker 2:I did. I did. I... No. No.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. I've... I actually graduated with knowledge of Java, c sharp, Java, all these...
Speaker 2:No. No. I've I've actually graduated.
Speaker 1:I knew what it was called.
Speaker 2:No, no, no. I graduated on it. I did projects on that. I did exams, all the works. Okay.
Speaker 2:And I remember nothing.
Speaker 1:Well, when it first came out on its first birthday, I suppose, it was really about, hey, can access files through a web page. Yeah. I mean, that was what it did. I mean it was I just need to go to this URL and basically open this web page and get it out because web was the thing,
Speaker 2:you It's the easiest way to grab some files together and to share them with other people?
Speaker 1:The interesting philosophy is that nothing has really changed in terms of its product. Some in terms
Speaker 2:of the user interface pages still Yeah, haven't
Speaker 1:that's true, yes. But the idea of moving with the times has been SharePoint secret. Yeah. So if you can hear the squeaking, for some reason the stool that I'm sitting on today really is having a bit of So a the reason that it was of value at the time was because web pages were starting to be, you know, built and websites was the way to go. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so SharePoint came out the way moving forward. There's a great story and I've told it before about Steve Dalby. So Bill Gates was the man in charge at Microsoft at the time and Steve Dalby was responsible for product development and all that kind of stuff. He was the vice chairman whatever before he became the main man. He was also the sales guy and every quarter Microsoft had a big get together and all the engineers came out and they gave a status of what the products were like and demo and they talked about where it was going.
Speaker 1:Now I heard this story from the seventh MCSA in the world, alright?
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Who actually knew Steve. So, know, he's... In fact, Clay, I know you're not listening to this buddy, but thank you very much for the start you gave me. But I remember going to Clay one day, went, 'Hey, I went to see Bill Gates last week. I was invited into Brussels and I didn't know went and as part of his crew, said we all had to kind of be searched and everything else.
Speaker 1:It was that time that Bill Gates would get an egg thrown at him every time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Clay looked at me and went, yeah, I was in Seattle last week and I had dinner with him at his place. Oh fuck. But he told me the story and basically the engineers would go on the platform, they would run the code and they would talk about where they were with the products and they were good. At the end of the day Steve Balmer said guys rock in really really good we've got some solid products here. He says but they have one question and that is that about 90% of you came up on here you opened a website and you then launched your code from a website and I've never seen that application.
Speaker 1:What is it? And there was silence in the room and eventually somebody said well actually Steve what happened was that we were kind of all a bit fed up of you know, where we were storing this stuff from. We needed a better story so we got over coffee. Charlie sat there and went, know, we could store this stuff in SQL database. So he kind of worked on that and Julie was going, yeah, but what if we give it a nice web front end and we do that?
Speaker 1:And then Simon got in with a bit of JavaScript and yeah we kind of had this product. And apparently the story goes that Steve Baumer looked at everybody and went, okay 30,000,000. So the production guys go up, says the budget is 30,000,000. This needs to be turned into a product level device and within two years they had the first release ready to go. In those days before AI would write the code for you.
Speaker 1:So yeah so that's a kind of birth of SharePoint as I knew it, all right. It could all be bullshit but it was close enough to the real people to be somewhere I'm guessing in the truth in that it wasn't a product that somebody said hey let's design this thing where it's a website but it's storing all your content. It was actually from a bunch of developers that needed a tool and so they basically put SharePoint together. Well, it wasn't SharePoint at that point but it came out as team services, the way to creatively share content through a web page. It was pretty cool and Clay actually had a really, really early division.
Speaker 1:It came free with your service software Mhmm. And and yes, I was in the middle of a lecture theatre on a US army base. Which one? Can't remember, but it's kind of irrelevant.
Speaker 2:It wasn't Ramstein?
Speaker 1:No, no, no. That was the airbase.
Speaker 2:It
Speaker 1:was... Now you're gonna have to make me... It doesn't really matter.
Speaker 2:Doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:And he was basically pulling it up and looking at it and telling everybody what it was. And taught the first SharePoint training course to the US Army in Europe about six weeks later. Okay. So it was pretty cool. God, it was basic.
Speaker 1:Really was basic.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:Five day training course, server based, and you basically took the engineers how to install it and how to set it up and how to do stuff.
Speaker 2:I remember that that was quite a hassle when we had to install it ourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah,
Speaker 2:yeah. Because you had to install Windows Servers, the SQL Server database, the application, the front end.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I set up IIS and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:Oh, man.
Speaker 1:There was a few bugs in the early versions. A few just a few risks.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you know how you branded it?
Speaker 2:Oh god.
Speaker 1:If you wanted to customize SharePoint, there was a folder a folder structure and it had all the images in from the site. So you basically then had to go and swap out all those images with whatever icons and stuff you wanted to do and that was how you actually branded the corporate That's
Speaker 2:nice, I mean I like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so when we did that exercise you can guarantee out of the 16 people on the training course, one of them would completely fuck up that upload and so you were still there at night reloading all the virtual machines to try and get them back to the point where they could carry on with the course the following day. Those were the days. But yeah, it was Heidelberg. I was around Heidelberg. But that was SharePoint's birth date back.
Speaker 1:And then it changed a little.
Speaker 2:It kind of took off.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It did.
Speaker 2:I remember. So back when I started, so I finished school, I went to a large IT company and basically we were with five analyst project managers. And basically within the first week the guy running the SharePoint team said we actually could use a few more junior analyst project managers. And because I already dealt with SharePoint in school I said, yeah, sure. I liked it.
Speaker 2:It's fun. It's good. Yeah. And basically, twenty years later, I'm
Speaker 1:still doing SharePoint. Only twenty? Yeah. Twenty years.
Speaker 2:2006 to 2026.
Speaker 1:Wow. It should be your birthday next year. This year. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Twenty years for SharePoint.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wow. Crazy times.
Speaker 1:It was crazy times.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I still remember because I kind of did... I gave lots of training back then, but I was also doing lots of pre sales. And I remember pre sales was so easy back then because everybody wanted SharePoint. They just didn't know what it was.
Speaker 2:But they wanted it. Mean, everybody, every company that is a decent company needs to have back then SharePoint. Ten years later, it was an iPad. Everybody needed an iPad, but back then it was...
Speaker 1:And the really awkward ones that wanted SharePoint running on their iPad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was a challenge.
Speaker 1:A challenge, yeah. It went through at moments, I mean, so SharePoint was first released and then they wanted to be able to synchronise it down to laptops and you could groove you could connect it in but there was a file that was sitting on your machine and if you deleted that file you could never ever get to the library again. It just completely blew the server. Yeah. The files went and everything else.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, we were teaching people how to make sure they did not lose a file, you know. It was far from from secure. It was pretty, pretty amazing.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. Of course.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But develops into what it is now, which
Speaker 2:is
Speaker 1:absolutely amazing. Some of the things that it can It
Speaker 2:is crazy because it powers so much other things. As we said, it does OneDrive, it powers your teams, all kinds of services like whiteboard and everything just connect to it. It uses the sharing capability to share all those things out. Loop works on there. We got SharePoint embedded running.
Speaker 1:And this this thing called agents. Yeah. That also run on there as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yep.
Speaker 1:So much. So much. Though not so good as it used to be now, they've got agents in there doing their stuff.
Speaker 2:I really need to be more involved. Yeah, need to be more agentic. Yes, basically. Yes, because I keep hearing so many cool stories of people doing all kinds of cool stuff with AI. And so I told you before, every time I try something with AI, it just horribly goes wrong.
Speaker 2:Aches. But in in Tallinn, there was a session from a lady from Estonia, totally blanking on her name. But she had an amazing story about how she uses AI to do basically. So she runs a one person company, but basically all her agents do like 10x or 100x, all the stuff that she needs to do. Yep.
Speaker 2:So she does like courses and online videos, but she's got a media producer that an agent. She's got a script writer that's an agent. She's got a this. She's got a that. She's got, like, 20 or 30 different agents that she works with, and these are her virtual coworkers.
Speaker 1:All running on SharePoint?
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. Absolutely not on SharePoint.
Speaker 2:And some of them were on Cloud because that's better for this. Some of them were on whatever because it's better for this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. No. That's true. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It is it is true. It's gonna be an interesting interesting moment. Moment.
Speaker 2:Because she said, basically, chatty pity always tries to be nice. If you ask it something, oh, that's a very cool idea. How cool that you think of this. And pop pop pop pop pop. And she goes like, yeah, but sometimes I don't want that.
Speaker 2:I just need, like, honest, proper answers. And then Claude or whatever is just better at doing that.
Speaker 1:Yep. No. I agree entirely. So you got to choose the right one for the job.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:So I think I looked at some numbers as well just recently. The current numbers are somewhere between two hundred and three hundred thousand agents and AI models around the world. Yeah. But that's nothing to do with SharePoint. SharePoint is just a good store for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:And basically we're storing all our knowledge on SharePoint. So why not use an agent to get all that knowledge and surface it?
Speaker 1:No. I agree entirely. Mhmm. So SharePoint. So your best SharePoint story for the last twenty years then?
Speaker 1:Best SharePoint fuck up for the last twenty years.
Speaker 2:Oh, I I did one six weeks ago.
Speaker 1:Six weeks the one where the branded sites were changed, was it?
Speaker 2:No. No. Basically, I did, let's say, to my knowledge, I did two major fuck ups in the last twenty years. One of them was about six or seven years ago, right before I got an MVP. I was actually almost crying in the car because it was such a horrible project and it was such a horrible thing.
Speaker 2:And I was practically crying, and then I opened up my email and I got the, oh, welcome to the MVP club email. And I was like, oh, but I feel so down right now. I'm not worthy of this blah blah blah. And the other fuck up I did was six weeks ago.
Speaker 1:So what was the fuck up?
Speaker 2:The fuck up was on SharePoint. Basically a little... How do I describe that? It's a difficult thing to describe. It wasn't really InfoPod, it wasn't PowerApps, was something in between to store files, but to surface them in a very specific way with lots of filters and lots of weird specific things.
Speaker 2:It was very, very,
Speaker 1:very So a layer product.
Speaker 2:XSLT kind of weird shit. And I didn't understand the requirements well enough because basically they wanted the same thing as they had before. So you
Speaker 1:thought anyway I'll just copy
Speaker 2:No, no, no, no, no. I came up with a whole new system of doing it and basically they just wanted whatever they had already.
Speaker 1:Okay. So you over engineered something for fun?
Speaker 2:No, I tried to make it easier because it was over engineered.
Speaker 1:So it was really just a poor delivery, not really a fuck up?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then, yeah, so in January I got this requirement coming in from a customer and the customer says, well, we've got 2,000 procedures in the document library. And what we want to do is we want to give them a review date.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So I said, sure. Set up a nice little workflow where you can say, oh, review date should be in one year, two year, three years, and I can do that. But that's a manual process for all the documents. So I said, what What about the 2,000 documents that we already have? Well, all we could do is we could grab the last modified date and then just add three years.
Speaker 2:Cool. So I tried to do that, but something went horribly wrong and it took the day of that day plus three years. So nineteen twenty documents all had a review date on the 01/06/2029. Oops. Okay.
Speaker 2:Did you
Speaker 1:want to undo that? Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it it was funny because I tried it on a folder and it worked, and I tried it on another folder and it worked, and then I tried on the whole library and it just f ed up. I still blame Power Automate for this, but anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. A good workman always blames his tools.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So then I was thinking like, that that's no problem because we've got to restore this library function where I can just restore the whole library back to the day before I did all those horrible changes. So I said, you know what? I can fix this. So I did the restore this library, and it was basically the first time I used the restored library functionality.
Speaker 1:But so it was a learning experience.
Speaker 2:It was a learning experience because what I thought it would do is it would move all the documents back to the January 5.
Speaker 1:Their version, whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But what it actually does is it creates a new version. That is the version that is before the January 6.
Speaker 1:What gives it the date?
Speaker 2:But the modified date is the day when you do that. So it was the nineteenth. So 1920 documents are now modified on the nineteenth. So not only was the review date wrong, now the modified date was also wrong. So what do you do then?
Speaker 2:Run, put a hat on and go,
Speaker 1:who's finished and walk out?
Speaker 2:I took my hat off. I went to the lady and I said, miss, I'm terribly sorry, but I made it worse. And she a little cross and I was very disappointed in myself. But then we took the pragmatic approach and we just can we... We can't fix it because they didn't take backups.
Speaker 2:So we couldn't restore a backup. So we took the pragmatic approach and we said, you know what? Leave the modified date and we'll just run the workflow again, but we'll take three years plus the created date. Because, basically, that's gonna be fine. So run that workflow, and now everything's fine.
Speaker 2:So Good.
Speaker 1:That's to get our JFree card.
Speaker 2:Whoo. That was a big whoopsy.
Speaker 1:SharePoint 2003. Yes. I was in London and I just won a big political argument to build the intranet on SharePoint. Alright. In the days when it was really about the content, not about the look and feel.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But so we had two choices. We could either do Microsoft content server which would have been able to build web pages and everything else or it was SharePoint. And so it was a great conversation. Like you and I are sitting in this room now on a chair, me and...
Speaker 1:Oh, you know, this guy's name is forever, this really nice guy. He was the IT manager, I was a contractor and the IT director manager at the time, we were playing tennis sitting there, no, no, no, need to do SharePoint because it'll do this. No, no, no, we need to do a content server because it'll do this. No, no, no. Was just going from side to side to side.
Speaker 1:She went, know, stop, all right, I'm going to get somebody in to make the call for us. So, brought the company in to listen to the arguments. So, we went to SharePoint. So, we installed SharePoint in 2003. And so I started putting content on it and start building it and I used to get very frustrated at things like contacts lists and task lists.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because the contact list basically put the person's name in, right, but it put it in the title column. So the title was Steve Dalby and then you could fill out all the other stuff which is fine. Mean I can fix this. That needs to be called name, right.
Speaker 1:So late one night about five or 06:00 at night, I sat there and went okay I'll rename that to name. Just on the list.
Speaker 2:Sounds like a good idea.
Speaker 1:It is, yes. So the following morning I landed in and the IT manager was in there going 'hey there's something wrong with this'. Says name the document library title now says name and what this was on a list I was on a contacts list yeah actually every column that used to be called title is now called name Jesus what And I went okay, this is this is my bad. Yeah. I was trying to make the list a bit user friendly, but I'll go and change it back.
Speaker 1:No, I've already tried. What do you mean you've already tried? Yeah, when you try and rename it, it says no, you can't use the word title because it's a reserved name. So it's not that it looked whether it existed, it was just in a list of words you couldn't change. So I basically, yeah, every currently called title was now called name.
Speaker 1:Part of the fun. But he even tried raising tickets with Microsoft and talking to the engineers too. Yeah. Couldn't do it. So we rapidly upgraded to 2007, which in those days meant you had to take everything offline for three weeks or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a database,
Speaker 1:database rebad and everything else. SharePoint did the upgrade many, many years ago.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, so that was my biggest faux pas. Oh, oh, oh. It was good. Yeah. I got some good claim to fame though.
Speaker 2:Oh, tell me.
Speaker 1:So there's this product on SharePoint called managed metadata.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:I happen to know the guy that was part of the design team that built that.
Speaker 2:Nice. Okay. Oh, it's yours Okay. So
Speaker 1:the story behind managed metadata, and I honestly don't know how far Microsoft had gone down that line, but I was working for a government organisation in The UK and we wanted to do taxonomy. So, we wanted to set a taxonomy up for our organisation. And if you think about a local authority, they have nurses' homes, old people's homes, they have, you know, health centres, sports centres, councils, anything else. So when you look at their taxonomy, if you look at the simple thing like calendar, they've got a calendar for a reception calendar, old people's food calendar. So the taxonomy was huge six and a half thousand line items in that taxonomy.
Speaker 1:Okay. So we basically wanted to be able implement it and Microsoft said, well that's easy we can do this field choice field. We can do a lookup field. Yeah. Okay, fine but that's not going to work.
Speaker 1:They went no, no, it will because we do this look and they built a lookup field. I went yeah, but what happens when I've got 6,000 items in there? How do I search one? Oh, 6,000 items. Yeah, this is taxonomy.
Speaker 1:Local government is going to need taxonomy. I had no idea. I said, well, let's get around the table and work out how to do it. So, there was me and three other people from other local councils with a developer from Microsoft sitting in a room in Victoria in London and we explained what we needed. I said look, this is what we actually need.
Speaker 1:We need to be able to sort of have a couple of columns with the sub catalogue so we can sort of work out what the category is. You need to be able to link to the parent.
Speaker 2:Different levels, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. Leave it with me. And so two weeks later, we had another meeting. He went, look, this is what I've done. So I've took your taxonomy, I have it sitting here in this database and then this column you can go and choose the item from the database and it will list it and it will take it from there and look it's the same item and then you can search and view and you can basically categorise all your information.
Speaker 1:Nice. And we went, brilliant, superb. So when can we have that in please? You know, when can we have it? He went, well no, because what I now need to do is I need to go over to Seattle and talk to the SharePoint team and explain it and then if they take it on board then we'll So use that was SharePoint 2007, 2030, it was a year in.
Speaker 1:So we just waited, it never ever turned up. So I went to Ignite, alright. I went to Ignite, Yes, and it was the launch of SharePoint 2010.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And SharePoint 2010 and the guy that used to do all the demonstrations all the demonstrations I was doing a demo and he said and what I want to tell you about is this managed metadata and I'm sitting in the middle of this crowd of 25,000 people and all of a sudden my fucking design popped up on the screen and he said yes, so what we've got is look you can go here and you can decide the metadata goes down seven layers and all that kind of stuff and I'm sitting in the crowd going I fucking worked on that. I was kind of proud as a peacock.
Speaker 2:Oh of course.
Speaker 1:But so yeah, so managed metadata is in several generations on but yeah the concept was built in a Microsoft meeting room in Victoria London assuming that that was the first because you never know what's outside of the world. Yes there was three of us from local council that needed to put in 6.5000line taxonomy. Nice. And you couldn't import, had to put it in manually so even when twenty ten was in, had to put them in manually.
Speaker 2:Wow! Is
Speaker 1:amazing. So we came down to 300 items. We actually said look of those 6,000 items, how many do we actually need? But, yeah, so we put in managed metadata in 2010. Came I love
Speaker 2:how those constraints actually drive business processes. Well, we don't really need 6,000 if we need to manually add them. We'll do 300. That's fine. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. It was, it was pretty cool. I love that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. And constantly forget because it was such a long freaking time ago.
Speaker 2:I should do that. I should say it to my customers as well. Well, could create 200 different themes for all the things that you need to do, but you'll need to create them manually. Oh, but you know what? 20 will be just fine.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:That was And I have no idea who that guy was. It was to this day, but it was fun going through that process and my first ever application design work.
Speaker 2:It was a little Indian guy called Satya No,
Speaker 1:it wasn't. Alright. So it's birthday party time. Yes. So what present would you buy SharePoint?
Speaker 1:We're gonna have stacks of presents. So you're buying SharePoint for present. Why... What do you buy and what would you buy and why? So...
Speaker 1:Let's go loosey, we can go nuts here.
Speaker 2:I know, I know, I know but that's the problem. There's no constraints so I don't have any frames so...
Speaker 1:I would buy it a label printer.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:I had to mention this upstairs I thought I'd get in quick before you stole it. Yeah. So yeah a label printer so that it can put sticky labels against every document for and we call it metadata. Yeah exactly. Yeah it needs a printer for metadata.
Speaker 1:Just like
Speaker 2:a sticker on every box. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.
Speaker 2:That's that's brilliant. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Does it need any clothes?
Speaker 2:Does it need any clothes? Well, the emperor wears no clothes. So
Speaker 1:Oh, that is true. What about a flat jacket?
Speaker 2:There's secrets unless you want to hide something in an audience. So do you need a flashlight to...
Speaker 1:Oh, a torch. Or
Speaker 2:a torch, yeah, to scope out your audience.
Speaker 1:A torch so that you can highlight the best search results. Illuminate. Illuminate the search results.
Speaker 2:Noise, noise, noise. Yes. But it needs to have a whisky for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which brand?
Speaker 2:I would go with a Deanston.
Speaker 1:Oh, good name. Yeah. Why? That's a good question.
Speaker 2:Why? Because I think Deanston is always a good birthday present. Because it's just quality wise so good and just everyone likes it, basically.
Speaker 1:The instance for SharePoint.
Speaker 2:Or should it be a Rye? Something that goes a little against the strain, has a little extra oomph.
Speaker 1:Is SharePoint still that different to everything else though? So when SharePoint first came out 15 ago, it had a reputation of being a different way of doing something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because back then you also had Documentum.
Speaker 1:Yes, that was true.
Speaker 2:And the other big ones, what was that?
Speaker 1:There was a few to be Riverside,
Speaker 2:but ECM OpenText, ECM
Speaker 1:something Yeah, like
Speaker 2:And basically what they did was you threw everything into one big pile and you label it so that you can find it again. But SharePoint had this container system called sites. And basically that just made search security so much easier and so much narrower, and it actually gave simple people, the peasants, power to control who has access to what.
Speaker 1:Even though they didn't understand it. Yes.
Speaker 2:And they still don't. No.
Speaker 1:I still find that really part of really amazing, actually. I mean, if you ask them to use PowerPoint, Word and Excel, they're all rock and rolling.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's weird because for new people, we also expect them to know Word, Excel, PowerPoint because we grow up with these. These are so normal to us, like putting on pants and a shirt. It's just so normal.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Some people don't and can't.
Speaker 2:I know because when I deliver my SharePoint trainings, security is always a big part. Yeah, that's what goes wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot of things. No. Agree entirely. And we've done some basic stuff courses, workshops at some events simply because people don't get it and don't understand.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They just upload a document because there's a button that says upload, you know. And I have a... I've been doing some work with some of the team around SharePoint just recently and it turns out that I am a bit of a unique thing. So
Speaker 2:yeah... I... I could have told you that 10
Speaker 1:within the organisation, we're trying to get Co Pilot out for the sales team. I mean, the one thing that Co Pilot needs to be labelled up with is the sales team and it's doing great stuff with their email and everything else but now they go look we really want to be able to do it on our documents as
Speaker 2:well.
Speaker 1:But they're all on the drive or drive or whatever they actually had. And so, we're kind of trying to sit there trying to kind of work this thing out. But part of the other work is that somebody's recording a bunch of videos around architecture and they want to actually build these pages. So two things happened today, the first one is that I was late for a meeting at 10:00, Nick was in the meeting along with the sales time and basically we're trying to work out the data structure for moving all this stuff across so we can use Copilot, But they couldn't cope with it so I was stuck in another meeting and couldn't get out of it so they cancelled the meeting fifteen minutes in. They said am I so crucial to this?
Speaker 1:No, but it kind of would be helpful because nobody has the depth of knowledge
Speaker 2:in any way shape or form.
Speaker 1:And then so I then had an impromptu meeting on how we might move this forward. And then, the other side of the SharePoint stuff is people just don't quite get it. They expect to turn it on and it be there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I mean, that's the same as we expect from Outlook and Word and Excel and PowerPoint. We turn it up, we create a new file and we can just type it in and it just works.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's true. So yeah, that was that and then designing some pages for people and trying to so this guy is a high end developer, analyst, data manager and he couldn't quite get the hang of pages. It just couldn't get what needed to be done because it's completely alien to them. And all they need to do is create a page, put a title on it, throw a video in the middle, enable comments, put a bit of text in it, label it so that I can pre filter it on the homepage and away you go. I said, it's okay, I've got the video recorded now from our meeting, I should be able to work the rest out.
Speaker 1:Don't hesitate. But you kind of assume this is not rocket science, but it is obviously still different enough that people don't get it.
Speaker 2:See, I've got the same thing with Power BI, where I go like this is just the dashboarding thing, so how hard can it be? But I also have the same thing with Power Automate. Oh, citizen development.
Speaker 1:How hard can it be? Yeah. But what they don't tell you is it's citizen from Upper Colombo, the star at 4,000 millennia away. Yeah. So citizens in a different planet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So basically, I've I've got the same thing, like, time and time and time over again. Like how hard could this be?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I once did a major fuck up where I submitted a session for a conference around Power Pivot in Excel. And I didn't know anything about it, but that...
Speaker 1:It seemed like a good idea. I'll build it if I need And
Speaker 2:the session was chosen, so I had to learn it. And, of course, when do you create a session? Two days before you go to the actual conference and we
Speaker 1:have to deliver it.
Speaker 2:So two days upfront, I open a PowerPivot and I quickly understand that I really don't understand what it is, why it's there, what it does, how it works, how I can use it. So basically, and this was Power Pivot two actually. So the the next generation. And basically, so what I did was I just had some Microsoft... It wasn't Microsoft Learn back in the day, but it was the the tech community or So I just copied all that stuff into a PowerPoint.
Speaker 2:The demos that they gave on the pages, I used those demos in my demo. And then of course, well, all kind of worked out. I bullshitted my way through. But of course, in the front, there were like five guys like, oh, but how is this different than Power Pivot One? And oh, can it now do this?
Speaker 2:And can it now do that? And of course, I had no idea about that.
Speaker 1:Let me park that and come back to that in a moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, yeah, that was pretty horrible. So I'm not doing that anymore. But there's so whenever I deliver a training to just circle back into SharePoint, whenever I deliver a training, for example, like how to build an Internet, my first question is, why are you here? Are you here because you're now on file share?
Speaker 2:You want to go to SharePoint or has somebody else build it? And has this now been pushed to you because that person left the company and you now have to do this? So where are you in your journey? And lots of times the answer is somebody else set it up, they left the company and I now need to manage it and I've got no idea how it works. And I tried something and I broke it and I need to learn how it works.
Speaker 1:I don't get to play around with SharePoint as much as I used to do because obviously playing around with it means you get to learn it. Yeah. And I don't. I'm picking it up because nobody else in the organization covers this stuff.
Speaker 2:If only you had a SharePoint MVP as a PM in your company.
Speaker 1:I'm a SharePoint MVP and I get everything done, but you just have to kind of go learn and look and look and it then shout at people when you go, listen, this is still the way it used to be, isn't it? And I find that most of it is still architecturally the way it works, and So that's really
Speaker 2:basically, the basics haven't changed in twenty years.
Speaker 1:No, think that's right.
Speaker 2:Document libraries with metadata and views and pages, content
Speaker 1:types, LinkedIn style columns.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. So those things haven't changed. Also, the types of columns, text choice, lookup, manage metadata haven't changed at all.
Speaker 1:No, I agree.
Speaker 2:There's maybe one or two that came extra, like the image one or the location one, which I don't really see a lot of value in.
Speaker 1:But... No, but they're for specific cases.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. But I mean, basically, if you learned SharePoint in 2007 or 2010, and you're now need to do something in SharePoint,
Speaker 1:can... There's a way.
Speaker 2:You can handle it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:User interface changed just a little, but not that much. So it's Talking
Speaker 1:about birthdays. Yeah. It was mine recently. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:And I managed to get my kitchen finished upstairs. So we went diddling around down here in the studio kitchen. And my first little dinner party with yourself indeed. And of course that warranted a little bit of a birthday whiskey or two.
Speaker 2:It did or if only there were two. I can remember a few more
Speaker 1:but yes. Oh there was definitely a few more.
Speaker 2:Vaguely, vaguely
Speaker 1:remember. Anybody that comes here and sits upstairs on my breakfast bar within one meter away there are 200 bottles of various kinds and so yes it instantly turns into a whisky tasting. Oh, are you doing Norfolk by the way? No. The Norfolk conference in May?
Speaker 1:No? I haven't heard about it. Because they're basically doing a whisky tasting there. Oh, So Dudley Dudley Dudley... Can't remember his name.
Speaker 1:Sorry. It could come back to me. Okay. But, yeah, so they were at Vienna over the weekend. And yeah we're there for their power thing.
Speaker 1:It's on May bank holiday. I mean I really hope they know what they're doing because it's the busiest bank holiday weekend. Some husbands saying hey I'm on Saturday I'm going to go to a SharePoint Day conference. Their wives are going to go no we're going to the seaside for the weekend with the kids. So I've no idea, they know what they're doing, think they're working on holiday.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Anuk and I are doing... Oh I think that's the AI changing AI from chaos to managed services or something along Okay, nice. So we worked on that over the weekend. Interesting. But my birthday and I decided that I would break a rule because I don't normally at all drink Ardbeg, but my guests do.
Speaker 1:Yes. And so...
Speaker 2:At least one of your guests do.
Speaker 1:I know. Yeah. And I managed to find a bottle called Spectacular, a phenolic phenomenon, because it was for the Phialyla release, one of the special bottles in two thousand and something and I can't read it and I can't remember. But it was rather spectacular so we thought we would share it with everybody. It's an Ardbeg spectacular and I'm assuming that you're just going to sit on that chair on your arse looking at me while I now pour it.
Speaker 2:Of course. No, no.
Speaker 1:Too late now. You can't change your mind. Tell everybody all about it.
Speaker 2:It was spectacular. Yep. I remember coming over, going upstairs to your kitchen area and seeing that bottle there and oh, it immediately drew my attention. Because these special art bags, they can either be amazing or they can be horrible. And so, of course, I was very, very intrigued.
Speaker 1:I have no tasting notes here because we were so busy talking earlier. I never thought about it. So No. People are getting this rare.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No notes for the the for the for the show. No notes for the tasting. No notes at all. Ad libbing.
Speaker 1:So it is an ardbeg. I don't drink ardbeg. I don't normally like ardbeg. I find it really rough smoky. I know you don't agree.
Speaker 1:There's just the
Speaker 2:way I say it. I actually... So we all get so many emails on a day. Today, I got one email that made me very happy because the Arctic Committee has decided that they're gonna release their their 10 year old, their default 10 year old as a cask strength.
Speaker 1:That will be... Wait. I tell you, you regret buying one of those.
Speaker 2:No. I won't. I won't. So anyway, this one, on the nose, typically hardback.
Speaker 1:It's a solid, beautiful golden honey coloured. It's It is. Yes. And it feels like it's got some depth to the colour as well. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Nice and oily thick layer of oil on top of that. I love that. Yes.
Speaker 1:And it's really got quite a sweet nose.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's a typical Arabic nose. It can't be a Lagavulin.
Speaker 1:It can't
Speaker 2:be a Laphroaig. It can't be a Bunahab and it can't be a Kilhorman.
Speaker 1:It's because they're all spelt wrong.
Speaker 2:No, but it can't be any of the other ones. It is a typical Arabic nose.
Speaker 1:Okay. I believe you. It's not a bad nose. Don't get me wrong. I mean, I I find it quite rosy and
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And honey and orangey.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. Yeah. But it's it's it's a little... It's... It is a little sweet, but it's it's a typical heart big nose.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So... Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's give it a go.
Speaker 2:So, of course, typical hard bake is gonna be heavily peated. It's gonna taste like an ashtray.
Speaker 1:Oh, I remember this from the day we tasted it
Speaker 2:with my birthday.
Speaker 1:There's something in there, but the finish is not as good as I thought it would be.
Speaker 2:The pepper comes very gentle But on the it is not... It's not the ashtray that you're used to on an ardbeg normally. A 10 year old or udal or something tastes like barbecue that you put in your mouth. This is way more refined.
Speaker 1:It is very... It is a refined whiskey. Yeah. But there's just something that flashes in on on the palate as you swallow. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:That really makes you... Well, makes me go, wow. What is that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I saw it on your face just lit up like a Christmas tree.
Speaker 1:Dum dum. I I don't know what it is, but you got you got the nose, which is beautiful, and you got the palate. But as you swallow it on the back of your tongue, you kinda get this lighthearted fruit that kind of zips in and then disappears, and then you swallow it and you get the finish. And it's light. It's it's
Speaker 2:It is. It's not heavy.
Speaker 1:No. It's very, very nice indeed. I mean, is a good drink. I've not touched it since we opened it, to be honest. I've not been around.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We opened it and we had quite a taste.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We did get stuck into it. So
Speaker 2:let me see what I can find. Oh, yes. It was the wine cask, the port wine.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Yes. And classic ex bourbon, smoky beet with devilish sweet. That's a flabbergasting flavor. They do their marketing very well. I have to say.
Speaker 1:Well, they do make it look like a circus tent.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Port wine cask, classic egg whip bourbon, big mouthfeel, bizarre and complex. Smoky pear crumble, cooling menthol twist.
Speaker 1:That might be what I can taste.
Speaker 2:Incense candles, perfumed lavender, and antique leather.
Speaker 1:It is a... An interestingly complex drink, but it's not got a lot of depth to it. It's not got the depth as a Deanston's, for example. But it has got a lot more of the fragrance around it than you would expect in a smoky whisky. It's quite a nice balance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I disagree on the Deanston part, but I do agree on the well balanced part because normally when you have a heavily pitted whisky, it can be like very ashtray, like the Laphroaig, the arbic ten year old. But then you also have a Lego Volund 16, which is Amazing. Super well balanced. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This one
Speaker 2:has that as well. As the balance, it has the typical arbic flavor, but so well balanced.
Speaker 1:But I... The balance is there, but I don't find it complex. So it doesn't have a depth to it. I mean, it it doesn't have a... Although it looks very oily in the glass, it doesn't have an oily mouthfeel.
Speaker 1:True. It doesn't it doesn't hang around on the palate like a Deanston's does, which is what I was kind of getting at.
Speaker 2:No. You get that typical that smokiness that lingers. Yep. Peppery spiciness So
Speaker 1:here's that a question for you then. You've got this Ardbeg and you've got a Ladig Sinclair side by side. All right, this is all smoke and go. But you've got Sinclair which has got that classy elegance around that smoke. I mean this is the beauty of different whiskies of course isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So that's from that perspective. I don't know which one I'd prefer, they're both different and I'd enjoy each of them for what they are. True. But there's a... This is not like a pair of heavy boots which is what I normally end up with within an arbbeg.
Speaker 1:I'm going okay yeah, you know it's there. Yeah. But this really has got a level of elegance into it, but not the elegance of a Ledigue, for example.
Speaker 2:No. So it's not the elegance.
Speaker 1:Person hasn't got the roughness of a Lefraugue.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So like a woollen has more mouthfeel, slightly more balanced, more... I don't want to call it bank for the buck, but it kind of is because you feel it's a better experience. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But all the same, this is a really beautiful drink.
Speaker 2:It is a beautiful
Speaker 1:It's very
Speaker 2:beautiful Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yes. If you can find one.
Speaker 2:Would I buy a bottle myself? You know, I'm a I'm a cheapskate.
Speaker 1:Cheapskate.
Speaker 2:So would I buy a bottle myself? Probably not. I would rather buy the Ugdal or the Corivrecken maybe, or maybe even the default 10 year old because I like that heavy ashtray, barbecue,
Speaker 1:dirty... Why would you want to eat a barbecue stone or lick an ashtray?
Speaker 2:I just love that.
Speaker 1:Now, well, I'm glad I bought this because I really quite enjoy it. It's a beautiful drink,
Speaker 2:But It
Speaker 1:it doesn't need that complexity. The finish is still there. I'm actually going to say so it's it's got a nice long, long finish longer
Speaker 2:than the Still, the smokiness is still there. Agreed.
Speaker 1:There you go. So, fifty seven minutes into Happy Birthday SharePoint, it was quite a conversation. Yeah. It's amazing, we thought we'd have some fun with presents and stuff, but that really wasn't where we went with this. It was about how much of a history we've shared with the product.
Speaker 2:It's true. I am now almost 44 years old and I've been twenty years with SharePoint.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We won't go into my age.
Speaker 2:Let's not.
Speaker 1:No. But I've I've grown up with SharePoint from when it was a wee baby. Yeah. Yeah. Without any regrets in the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's been all of my professional career.
Speaker 1:Oh, and I've I've put it in some very strange places. And SharePoint.
Speaker 2:Yep. So...
Speaker 1:Lovely. So Yes. Strangest country you've installed SharePoint? Furthest away. Let's go with furthest away.
Speaker 1:Were they in Europe or outside?
Speaker 2:I had a few customers in The US. I had a few multinational customers. We did a Scopco where we did a bunch of sites to a bunch of... You went to India and to Shanghai. Shanghai for a number of these things.
Speaker 2:Well, actually You're right. I talked about SharePoint in a bunch of different countries on all the SharePoint Saturdays because it's not just SharePoint the product and SharePoint the platform, but it's also SharePoint the community.
Speaker 1:That's right. And the
Speaker 2:community has been a part of my life for, let's say sixteen years.
Speaker 1:It
Speaker 2:allowed me to travel all over the world, talk about stuff that I like to talk about SharePoint, have crazy adventures, meet so many people, wonderful people.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, So if we think about SharePoint as a product or platform, the community is still the thing I like. It's one of the things I like most.
Speaker 1:No. That is true. And then I was also just thinking about the SharePoint failures Mhmm. Like the virtual reality SharePoint.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, was that cold? Oh my god. Tried to find it the day.
Speaker 2:Spaces? Yes. This room where you can put like things in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I tried to find it the other day. I'm not sure where I was. I think Yannick and I were looking at SharePoint.
Speaker 2:No, look, got Spaces and you click on Spaces and
Speaker 1:it went, this product is not supported anymore.
Speaker 2:Oh, they kicked it out. No. Because she went, what's that?
Speaker 1:I went, no, it's this kind of three-dimensional virtual world in SharePoint. She went, no.
Speaker 2:That was horrible. Yeah. I know.
Speaker 1:It wasn't horrible. If you picked off, it would have been brilliant.
Speaker 2:If if only there was a business case for it.
Speaker 1:It's the same with everything.
Speaker 2:I know. I... It... I... It's it's like the Kindle web part.
Speaker 1:That's true. Yes.
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 1:gonna put a
Speaker 2:Kindle I in the
Speaker 1:get that. I did get that. But it's fine.
Speaker 2:It is what it is. So, yeah, it is what it is. Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And what I like is that the team is not frightened to actually try this stuff and make it work. Yeah. Know? Exactly. So it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Alright. Look. I think it's time to say goodbye and we really hope you've enjoyed sharing SharePoint at twenty five with us and some of our stories. And thankfully, they won't be repeated and there's only 400 people that will listen to this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So it's all part of fun.
Speaker 1:So, folks, we hope you enjoyed it, and we wish you all the best of the best until episode one eighty two, which is next. Only 18 to go to 200. Is going
Speaker 2:to be
Speaker 1:one birthday. One very big birthday. Okay. Alright,
Speaker 2:guys. Catch you later. Ciao for now. Bye bye.