The first time I saw SharePoint, I didn’t realise it was something I’d still be dealing with decades later. In fact, I didn’t really realise I’d seen it at all.
At the time I was an MCSD & Microsoft Certified Trainer working for a company called Xpertise. I was teaching VB.NET, C#, SQL Server, ASP.NET — that sort of thing. “Proper” development. I also taught a lot of Lotus Notes, which says more about the era than it does about me. It was just everywhere. You couldn’t escape it.
One day I was hanging around with one of my mentors, David Aiken. This was back when Microsoft shipped the MSDN Library to you. Physically. Boxes of CDs. Not a download. Not even DVDs at first. You didn’t install software so much as commit to it. David showed me something called Digital Dashboard.
I remember nodding. I probably said “hmmm, interesting”. I left the room not knowing what I just saw!
That was SharePoint, trying to introduce itself. I didn’t take the hint.
Join Microsoft on 2nd March for ‘SharePoint at 25’ SharePoint at 25 – Microsoft Adoption
The Years I Mostly Ignored It
I more or less skipped SharePoint Portal Server 2001. Whether that was arrogance, ignorance, or instinctive self-preservation, I’m still not sure. I carried on teaching ASP.NET and enterprise development and let SharePoint get on with whatever it thought it was doing.
Then one day….. (this will sound familiar to anyone working for Xpertise at the time) I was told I’d be running a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 workshop.
Why me?
Because I was “good at ASP.NET”.
That was it. That apparently the qualification needed.
The official Microsoft course material was… thin. A paragraph explaining what SharePoint was meant to be, then straight into an exercise to build a web part. No context. No explanation of why. Just “here’s a farm, off you go”.
I stayed one page ahead of the attendees. Sometimes not even that. It was very much the blind leading the blind, but with confidence. Which, to be fair, was how a lot of early SharePoint adoption worked.
Freelancing, Panic, and the Point Where It Finally Clicked
Not long after that, myself and two others left Xpertise. We formed an umbrella company so we could keep delivering Microsoft training as freelancers. That worked surprisingly well. Demand picked up. SharePoint demand especially.
Eventually one of my business partners and I came across a US based company called Mindsharp. They’d written their own SharePoint Developer and Administration courses, which already put them several steps ahead of the official material.
During a five-day Developer Summit led by Todd Bleeker, I learned how to build a web part.
A Hello World web part.
Which felt like progress at the time.
We built Site Definitions. Unghosted sites using FrontPage. Everything technically worked. And yet I still remember thinking I was missing something fundamental.
At one point I finally put my hand up and said something along the lines of:
“I’m fine doing the exercises. But… what actually is SharePoint?”
That was the moment it clicked. Not as a product. As a platform. A slightly awkward one. Sitting between IT control and business freedom, trying to keep both sides happy and never quite succeeding.
We asked if Mindsharp wanted us to teach their courses in the UK. They said yes. And almost without noticing, our freelance umbrella turned into a dedicated and successful SharePoint training company.
From then on, SharePoint was just… daily life.
Books, Family, and the Start of Lightning Tools
I spent years teaching SharePoint. All over the UK & internationally. I co-authored books on the Business Data Catalog and later Business Connectivity Services. Wrote chapters for other book authors such as The SharePoint Administrators Companion.
Around this time we also did what many small SharePoint businesses end up doing: we roped in family. My sister, Zoe Watson, joined us selling SharePoint training. Thrown straight into it, learning the language fast, and very quickly becoming part of that world. Like many people pulled into SharePoint, she never really escaped! and she’s still in the industry today with 365Tribe.
In 2006, I started forming a new company with Nick Swan. It didn’t really have a name at first. But it did have a product.
BDC Meta Man.
It helped people build External Content Types so SharePoint could talk to systems like SQL and Oracle. SharePoint could already do it, technically. You just had to really want to.
That product became BCS Meta Man. Then came permissions tools. Content aggregation. Data viewers. Each one built for the same reason: because people kept hitting the same walls.
Lightning Tools wasn’t created to replace SharePoint. It existed because SharePoint kept leaving gaps, and customers kept asking the same questions.
SharePoint as a Lifestyle Choice
Somewhere along the way, SharePoint stopped being just a job.
My business partner Nick Swan started the first SharePoint User Group in the UK. Later I helped form SharePoint Saturday UK with Tony Pounder & Mark Macrae and I ended up speaking at SharePoint events all over the world.
I even met my wife, Sara, at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in Washington DC in 2009. Which probably isn’t what Microsoft had in mind when they invested in community events, but it worked out well for me.
There was The SharePoint Pod Show with Rob Foster, Nick Swan, and Myself. There were SharePints. SharePoint by day, SharePint by night. There was even a SharePoint Runners Club, which remains the strangest branding decision of that era.
It was a proper community. Slightly obsessive. Extremely crazy (especially at SPC’s in Vegas). But very real.
A Platform That Never Sat Still
While all this was going on, Microsoft kept changing how you were supposed to extend SharePoint.
First WSPs.
Then SharePoint Add-Ins (we don’t really talk about those).
Then SPFx.
Every time we got close to something feature-rich, the ground shifted and we had to start again. It sometimes felt like trying to build long-term products on moving sand.
We watched InfoPath arrive and slowly head towards deprecation.
FrontPage become SharePoint Designer, and then disappeared.
The Fab 40 templates briefly give everyone a laugh.
Un-Ghosted pages existed — which I’m still convinced directly contributed to SharePoint Designer being quietly retired.
And yet SharePoint kept going.
So did we.
The Longest MVP Journey on Record
Somewhere along the way, in 2007, I was nominated for my first SharePoint MVP award. And then I moved countries. Which apparently caused enough confusion that Microsoft didn’t quite know what to do with me.
I was nominated again.
And again.
And again…..
Years passed.
By the time the award finally came through in 2018,I celebrated, but deep down knowing SharePoint was like… “Alright then. You’re still here.”
25 Years Later
March 2nd 2026, SharePoint turns 25.
Lightning Tools is closing in on 20.
We’re still here. Still focused entirely on SharePoint. Still solving the same underlying problems, just at a much bigger scale, with much bigger consequences now that AI is involved.
Copilot didn’t create new issues. It just shone a very bright light on the old ones.
Suddenly permissions matter more. Structure matters more. Governance matters more. All the things people used to wave away as “we’ll sort it later” are now very much a today problem.
SharePoint has grown up.
So have we.
And despite the rebrands, the shifting dev models, the tools that came and went, it’s still the backbone of how organisations actually work.
Which probably explains why I’m still here too.
So here we are – SharePoint is 25
SharePoint is 25.
Lightning Tools is nudging 20.
And somehow, neither of us has been deprecated.
That feels like an achievement.
In 25 years, SharePoint has been many things. A portal. A document store. An intranet. A collaboration platform. An ecosystem. And now a platform with AI Agents that expose every questionable decision you’ve ever made about permissions.
Lightning Tools exists because that reality never changed. Because no matter how clever the next feature looks on a slide, organisations still need help making SharePoint usable, governable, and trustworthy at scale.
I didn’t plan a 25-year relationship with SharePoint. I barely understood it when I first met it. But over time — through training rooms, late-night deployments, broken dev models, conferences, podcasts, products, friendships, family, and meeting my wife, it became part of my professional DNA.
Happy 25th birthday, SharePoint.
You’ve been frustrating, unpredictable, magical… and absolutely worth sticking with.
Cheers to everyone in the SharePoint community who have become close friends!
Join Microsoft on 2nd March for ‘SharePoint at 25’ SharePoint at 25 – Microsoft Adoption
