Exploring the SharePoint 1.0 Wave: SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2001

SharePoint as we know it today had its roots in two distinct products developed by two different teams at Microsoft. These products overlapped in many areas, but during the development phases, they were seen as completely different products and were expected to have different names upon release. It was only as the release date approached that Microsoft decided to give each the name SharePoint, even though they were different in many ways.

The first of these two products became SharePoint Team Services and was seen as a team collaboration product with limited document management functionality. This product was released as an add-on to the FrontPage media, which is how many administrators stumbled upon it eventually. Although unique in approach, it wasn’t very scalable and was limited in functionality. The letters STS still can be found in today’s product line, such as in the STSADM tool.

The second product developed by Microsoft eventually became SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2001 and was seen as an extension to public folder functionality in Microsoft Exchange Server. The storage engine for SPS 2001 was the Microsoft Exchange jet engine database, which was completely different than the SQL Server based back-end of SharePoint Team Services.

Although innovative and providing some interesting and powerful features, these two versions of SharePoint did not see too much use in most organizations, aside for the occasional team site put together by scattered departments and an occasional portal.