<p>SharePoint has always been one of the best examples of "shadow IT": unofficial, unsupported technology that users and managers bring into the office to help them get their job done. One of the reasons for the original success of the PC was that it was priced just under the sign off level of the typical middle manager who could buy it on expenses to avoid waiting for the IT team for everything; iPads and cloud services like Dropbox are just the latest incarnation.</p><p>With SharePoint, you could put a server under your desk and share documents with the rest of your team rather than mailing fifteen versions of every document back and forth (and always having the wrong one yourself). You could use Web Parts to put together web pages that worked like mini applications, embedding weather forecasts and slideshows, Exchange calendars and birthday reminders, or viewers for records and charts from SQL Server databases. And you could do that years before the idea of web mashups came along.</p><p>For years Microsoft hardly had to market SharePoint. Which was perhaps just as well, because the combination of document management and custom app building (and now business social networking) seems to baffle businesses when they look at it as a product. SharePoint makes the most sense when you see it as a toolbox for solving business problems that need more than one person involved but don't fit neatly into the kind of rigid workflow that makes a line-of-business application. Users who had problems that SharePoint could fix just got hold of a Windows Server, installed the free SharePoint services (various called MOSS and SharePoint Foundation in different releases) and rolled their own solutions.</p><p>Now Everyone's A Developer. Welcome To BYODev. Sign up for CITEworld's InCITE newsletter -- delivered weekly.</p><p><a href="http://www.citeworld.com/development/21164/sharepoint-2013-offers-fine-balance-between-official-and-shadow-development">Keep reading...</a></p>