25 Years of SharePoint — A Journey We’ve Shared

When we include the time with NGAGE’s predecessor company (OI Software) – it’s been 18 years we’ve been working with SharePoint. And it continues to define so much of what we are and where we’re going…

Chapter 1 – The Social Collaboration Platform

That initial 4-year period with OI was exclusively about SharePoint as a collaboration platform. We developed a suite of ‘social’ apps under the NGAGE banner. These aimed to encourage and reward people (badging/gamification/reputation systems) for using SharePoint to share their knowledge and knowhow: to behave as ‘engaged employees’.

It was so cool that Microsoft was poised to buy it… but…they built Kudos instead. And, so, ultimately, it didn’t work commercially.

However, encouraged by an early customer, we recycled the data that fed these apps and created a new product we called ‘NGAGE Intelligence’: an analytics tool that reported on users choosing to create, modify, share and like SharePoint content. And, with some additional investment, that did work commercially.  That byproduct became the hero product. And NGAGE Intelligence, Inc. was born.

Chapter 2 –The Legal Intranet Platform

Our pivot from SharePoint social apps to SharePoint analytics was radical. And it only worked by us quickly embracing SharePoint as an Intranet platform. We learned that the leading SharePoint stakeholders in most organizations are Internal Communications and Knowledge Management teams. They don’t care so much about, for example, who’s uploading documents. But they do care deeply about exactly who is and isn’t consuming the Intranet content they’ve created.

And we got very good at that. With some sophisticated processing of SharePoint Server IIS logs we were able to provide everything they could want to know about how users were navigating their SharePoint intranet. And we overlayed that with our ability (born out of our OI experience) to track interactions with custom and third-party web parts. Which was high value-add. If not essential. We were flying.

In late 2013 we happened to win our first big law firm client. By the end of 2014 we’d won 4 more. We love all our customers. But legal has been our strategic focus ever since. Why? Because Law Firm SharePoint Intranets are different. How? By serving as the single ‘pane of glass’ for globally distributed knowledge workers to access knowledge and applications that are fundamental to their personal and collective productivity.

In other words, they are uniquely ‘close to the needle’. They really do matter.

And their content and functionality is delivered through sophisticated custom and third-party elements. For example, in the early days (on premises) these would often be Handshake (now Aderant) Web Parts. And we got good at providing deep insights into how users were interacting with them.

We still have several clients running SharePoint Server-based intranets with Handshake web parts. But most are now SharePoint Online-based with SPFx or Infodash web parts providing that functionality. And reporting on these is definitely one of NGAGE’s ‘super powers’.

Chapter 3 – The Guided Search Platform

One of the core objectives of Law Firm KM teams is to deliver a great, continuously improving Intranet Search experience across the firm. And that means more than good metadata and tagging practices. Guided Search is a superior experience that provides result source previews and refiners that increase the speed and accuracy of discovery.  We’ve now worked with several law firms to help them improve the performance of their Guided Search function. For example, by driving down the number of ‘no click’ searches and improving the ranking of optimal search results for highly used terms. Our templated process for this is now very mature.

Chapter 4 – The Digital Workplace Platform

Our definition of modern digital workplace comprises MS Teams, a bunch of AI tools and a SharePoint Intranet. They are inherently integrated. After all, MS Teams is built on SharePoint. And you can’t create a team in MS Teams without creating a SharePoint Site. And where are your AI Tools surfaced? In MS Teams and the Intranet of course. Which is why NGAGE is no longer just about SharePoint. Our analytics can elevate the performance of the entire digital workplace with strong offerings for MS Teams and AI tools.

You can debate the relative importance of these three elements. And there’s no doubt that people live in Teams more than SharePoint. And AI tools are where the action is. But it’s the SharePoint Intranet that knits it all together. And where these tools intersect with the culture of the organization.

Chapter 5 – The AI-Powered Platform

For quite some time, we’ve been reporting on how people interact with AI Tools that are surfaced in SharePoint Intranets.

But on its 25th Birthday, the level of SharePoint’s AI integration has been raised to a completely new level. AI is now not just surfaced in SharePoint. It’s now inside SharePoint too. And it will soon be redefining how intranets evolve.

Now, Copilot will always understand your SharePoint content. And, spanning site, page, list and library creation, it will help you create more compelling and engaging intranet content. And NGAGE will be there to help you steer these interventions and, as ever, help you be measurably more successful.

So, Happy Birthday SharePoint. And Many More Happy Returns _.