SharePoint turns 25 this year. That alone should surprise people.

If you spend enough time on the internet, you would think SharePoint died sometime around 2007. Or 2010. Or 2013. Or the moment Teams showed up. And yet here we are, still opening document libraries every single day.

My journey with SharePoint began in 2009. I was job hunting and landed a consulting role as a SharePoint developer at the World Bank in Washington, DC. Here’s the part people always laugh at. I knew absolutely nothing about SharePoint and said so during the interview.

Their response was simple. Neither do we. Your job is to learn it, make sense of it, and teach it to our users.

So off I went in a suit and tie, trying to figure out what I had just signed up for. I started with WSS, moved through MOSS 2007, then 2010, 2013, 2016, and eventually SharePoint Online. Along the way I learned SharePoint Designer, InfoPath, and got very comfortable with PowerShell. I edited master pages, learned how to traverse the DOM, injected jQuery for custom formatting, and later watched all of that evolve into SPFx.

But what stuck with me most was never the clever customization. It was the out of the box features and how powerful they were when implemented well. It was good governance and attention to information architecture, and little did I know back how important that would still be many years later.

Over the years, I was told more than once that SharePoint was going to die. I had managers tell me to focus on other tools because SharePoint was not marketable and would not last. I ignored them. I trusted my gut and stuck with it.

I am very glad I did.

Years later, after staying committed to the platform and to helping users actually take advantage of what SharePoint can do, I became a Microsoft MVP in 2025 for SharePoint. What a ride it has been. And somehow, it still feels like I am just getting started.

I have now been working with SharePoint for over 16 years. I have watched it get rewritten, renamed, redesigned, and publicly doubted more times than I can count. I have also watched every so called SharePoint killer quietly fade away while SharePoint kept showing up to work.

That tells you something.

SharePoint survived not because it was flashy, but because it solved boring, unglamorous problems every organization has. Files. Versions. Permissions. Search. Structure. Compliance. The things no one gets excited about until they break.

Modern SharePoint looks nothing like the version most people love to hate. It is the backbone behind Teams files. It is where Copilot looks for context. It is where retention policies actually land. It is where most organizations store the knowledge they pretend lives somewhere else.

You can ignore SharePoint all you want. Your Microsoft 365 tenant can’t.

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This post is part of my 25 days of SharePoint series, created to celebrate SharePoint’s 25th anniversary and lead up to the SharePoint at 25 digital event on March 2.

Each post reflects on what actually made SharePoint last 25 years, the wins, the mistakes, and the lessons learned from building, breaking, and rebuilding it in real organizations.

You can find all posts in this series here.

If there’s a topic you think I should cover next, a SharePoint mistake you keep seeing, or a question no one ever answers straight, leave a comment. This series is shaped by real experiences, not marketing slides.