Fresh off completing my 25 Days of SharePoint series, I come to bring you a special episode of Behind the Tenant, recorded this past Friday during Microsoft Community Days Knoxville, where both Richard Harbridge and I presented and then stole a few minutes between sessions to hit record. No slides, no studio setup, no overproduced “content,” just two people who have been living in this platform long enough to have emotional reactions to the phrase “library settings.” You can watch the full episode here, and if you missed or want to rewatch the official SharePoint at 25 digital celebration, you can find it here https://aka.ms/spat25.

We both stumbled into SharePoint in different ways, which is basically the most SharePoint origin story possible. Richard chose it over Lotus because building internal sites felt like the future, and I applied for a SharePoint developer role having never used it and got told I would figure it out. From power user to admin to architect, through farm upgrades and cloud migrations, the pattern has been consistent, the platform keeps changing and the fundamentals keep staying the same, even when the UI decides to move the cheese again just to keep us humble.

We hit the classics, including folders versus metadata, which somehow is still treated like a personality trait in 2026. If you want my actual take in writing, it is in Day 4: SharePoint folders were never the problem, and the punchline is simple, folders are not evil, weak structure and unclear ownership are. The same theme shows up when people complain about search, because most of the time it is not “broken,” it is just reflecting your mess back at you, which is why search is the real SharePoint homepage is still a hill I will happily die on.

We also laughed about what we do not miss, like check in and check out confusion, documents living at version 0.1 because someone uploaded a file and vanished, Groove sync trauma, and the general terror of doing anything server-side and hoping it comes back online. If you have not thought about version history in a while, it is worth remembering that it is quietly doing the heavy lifting every day, which is exactly why SharePoint version history is the quiet backbone of collaboration is one of the most practical features in the platform, even if nobody claps for it.

From there, we talked about the real inflection points, like when SharePoint Designer workflows made automation feel like magic without writing code, when 2007 changed the game compared to 2003, and when Power Platform arrived and raised expectations across the board. Now AI is the new layer, but it does not fix bad structure, it exposes it faster, and that becomes painfully obvious the moment you start asking Copilot questions and it confidently serves you the wrong answer sourced from the wrong file in the wrong site that nobody owns anymore. Copilot is still early, but it is already shifting day-to-day work in ways that actually matter, especially when you can pull decisions back out of recorded Teams meetings and stop playing detective for basic context, which is also why the “SharePoint versus Teams” debate still misses the point, because they are just different surfaces on the same content problem.

SharePoint survived because it kept solving boring, necessary problems at scale, identity, permissions, compliance, lifecycle, integration, while flashier platforms came and went. If you have ever defended SharePoint in a meeting, rebuilt a broken permission model late at night, validated a migration over a weekend, or cleaned up a solution that was too clever for its own good, you are part of this 25-year story, and you probably have the scars to prove it. Watch the episode, then tell your story, because the next 25 years will not be shaped by features alone, it will be shaped by whether you build intentionally or keep letting chaos become your information architecture.