The evolution of Microsoft 365
The journey ofMicrosoft's productivity suite started in the '80s when it was first introduced by Bill Gates as Microsoft Office, with three applications: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Since then, Office applications have captured the corporate world and home users alike. Anyone who has ever used a PC has had some experience with Microsoft Office at some point. It is hard to imagine a world without Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. These applications have transformed the world since the day they were launched.
While one team in Microsoft was busy improving the already popular office suite of applications, another team was busy shaping an enterprise-scale collaboration and content-management platform called SharePoint.This platform offered online document storage and enabled collaboration between teams. In addition, and since its days of inception, SharePoint was built to be a highly extensible and customizable platform that allows developers and non-developers alike to extend its capabilities by building business solutions on top of it. SharePoint was initially released as a standalone application for installation on a server (there are several companies that still use it on-premises)before becoming available on the cloud as SharePoint Online and as a member of the Microsoft 365 family.
Advancements in SharePoint have given birth to other technologies and tools that have now evolved into fully-featured products in themselves. The following are just some of those products:
OneDrive for Business: Older versions of SharePoint included a service called My Sites. My Sites were personal sites for every SharePoint user, a place where they could store their personal files. My Sites have now been replaced by OneDrive for Business.
Microsoft Teams: Teams has beenthroughseveral pit stops before becoming Microsoft 365's default communication tool. In 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype, a free piece of software that enables you to make VOIP calls and host video conferencing. After the acquisition of Skype, Microsoft replaced thebusinesscommunication tool namedLyncwith a corporate version of Skype, called Skype for Business. Skype forBusinesshas now been deprecated and replaced by Microsoft Teams.
Power Automate: SharePoint as a platform had a workflow solution referred to as SharePoint workflows. The workflows were designed using a free tool called SharePoint Designer. Although SharePoint workflows were powerful, managing them was hard because of the lack of a visual tool. SharePoint workflows got deprecated with the advent of Power Automate, which had a nice web-based visual designer that was so easy to use that even non-developers could build workflow solutions themselves.
Power Apps: Microsoft Infopath was a popular tool for designing, editing, and distributing electronic forms. Infopath forms could be connected to a variety of data sources and often used along with SharePoint to extend the capabilities of SharePoint list forms. Infopath has been deprecated and replaced with a web-based forms designer known as Power Apps. Again, with this move, Microsoft has tried to make designing forms easier for non-developers.
Power BI: In 2006, Microsoft acquired ProClarity and launched Performance Point as a BI solution. It was discontinued in 2009 and paved the way for Power BI.
Over the years, Microsoft has made other strategic acquisitions, such as Yammer and Mover, to consolidate its Microsoft 365 offering. They were soon joined by other online services, such asStream, Planner, Sway, To do, and so on.
Hopefully, that provides you with some context on howMicrosoft 365 evolved. The next section explains why Microsoft 365 is right for any organization.