Microsoft Teams Insider Microsoft's Jeff Teper - SharePoint at 25, Past, Present, and AI Future
Mar 3, 2026
Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 Collaborative Apps and Platforms, reflects on 25 years of SharePoint and its rise from intranets to a billion-user cloud platform. He recounts the origin story, the tough cloud transition, OneDrive’s roots, and how AI and reasoning models are reshaping metadata, site design, and agent-driven scenarios.
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How Two Projects Became SharePoint
- SharePoint started by merging two separate Microsoft projects into one customizable intranet and collaboration platform.
- Jeff Teper describes Site Server and Office Server Extensions combining into SharePoint portal and team, leading to rapid community adoption after version two.
Three Eras Let SharePoint Scale To The Cloud
- SharePoint survived three major eras by adapting rather than restarting, moving from server to multi-tenant SaaS at massive scale.
- Jeff cites Bill Gates announcing SharePoint Online in 2008 and the engineering slog to reach billions of requests per second and exabytes of data.
OneDrive Was Once The Turned Off MySite
- OneDrive evolved from an early SharePoint feature called MySite that IT initially disabled.
- Jeff explains how competition like Dropbox forced IT to revisit MySite, rebrand it as OneDrive, and migrate over a billion accounts onto SharePoint.