<p>Once upon a time, a company introduced a product that was meant to revolutionize collaboration by making it easier for teams to work together. Instead of emailing files back and forth or fighting to make revisions to the same file on a shared drive somewhere, this product would give small teams a managed repository for files, complete with features like check-in/check-out, comments, and versioning.</p><p>The company was Microsoft and the product was SharePoint Team Services. The company already had a slightly different product, SharePoint Portal Server, which was designed for intranets, but Team Services was an add-on to Office that allowed small groups to set up individual team sites.</p><p>Over the years, the SharePoint product line went through many revisions and brand changes -- most notably, many IT departments realized that they'd better have a centralized SharePoint server to manage the proliferation of team sites -- and Microsoft kept adding features that weren't directly related to collaboration, like enterprise search.</p><p>Jive CEO: Email Use Will Drop 50% In Next Five YearsSign up for CITEworld's InCITE newsletter -- delivered weekly.</p><p><a href="http://www.citeworld.com/social/21352/how-did-sharepoint-become-product-everybody-loves-bash">Keep reading...</a></p>