(A Very Serious Ceremony)
SharePoint is 25.
Which feels impossible, because surely 2001 was only… five years ago?
To celebrate a quarter-century of intranets, document chaos, governance debates, and the occasional “why can’t I access this folder” mystery, we’re hosting The WebVine Awards. A lovingly biased, slightly nostalgic, very real-world tribute to the features that quietly (and sometimes loudly) shaped how organisations work.
And yes: we’ve been working with SharePoint long enough to remember when some of these were “the new shiny thing”. WebVine’s been delivering on Microsoft platforms since 2010, which means we’ve lived through a few eras, a few migrations, and more than a few architectural decisions that made sense at the time.
Award 1: The “Held It All Together” Lifetime Achievement Award
Nominees:
- Document Libraries
- Version History
- Permissions / Inheritance
- Lists
Winner: Document Libraries
No matter what era we’re in, classic, modern, Teams‑first, Copilot‑everywhere, everything still comes back to the same question:
Where does the content live, and how do we manage it properly?
Document libraries are the engine room.
They’re not glamorous, but they’re foundational.
Document libraries became the default home base for organisational content: documents, records, policies, templates, working files, and long‑lived knowledge.
Over time, they quietly picked up responsibility for permissions, versioning, retention, metadata, and ownership. All the unsexy things that keep work from falling apart.
As Copilot and agents increasingly rely on SharePoint content as a trusted knowledge source, libraries matter even more. Not because they’re exciting, but because they’re one of the few places where structure, access, and context come together in a way both humans and AI can work with.
In other words: libraries didn’t just store work. They shaped how work gets governed and reused.
Award 2: Best Glow-Up Award
(From “Corporate Beige” to “Actually Nice”)
Nominees:
- Modern Pages
- Communication Sites
- Modern web parts
- Brand-aligned intranet patterns
Winner: Modern Pages
Modern pages unlocked real intranet design. Not just “prettier pages”, but content that’s easier to scan, easier to navigate, and easier to keep current.
Once pages became readable and flexible, intranets could finally be designed around how people look for information. Think clear headings, fewer dead ends, and content grouped around tasks instead of organisational charts.
If you’ve ever watched people struggle to find a form buried three clicks deep, you know how much this matters.
It’s also why modern SharePoint design became such a big part of how we build and advise. People don’t engage with spaces that feel cluttered, confusing, or outdated. No matter how powerful the platform underneath.
Award 3: The Plot Twist Award
(Nobody Saw This Coming)
Nominees:
- SharePoint as the content layer for Microsoft 365
- SharePoint quietly living inside Teams
- SharePoint’s “knowledge platform” era
- Copilot + agents using SharePoint content as fuel
Winner: Copilot + agents using SharePoint content as fuel
Here’s the real twist: SharePoint didn’t just survive 25 years.
It quietly positioned itself as the place organisational knowledge lives. And now it’s central to how Copilot and agent experiences work.
Instead of trying to be the flashiest tool in the stack, SharePoint became the dependable layer underneath everything else. The place where content could be structured, permissioned, curated, and kept (mostly) trustworthy.
That matters more now than ever. Copilot doesn’t invent knowledge. It surfaces what’s already there, respecting the access, structure, and signals SharePoint provides. Which means SharePoint’s long‑standing strengths (and weaknesses) are suddenly much more visible.
This isn’t about SharePoint becoming magical overnight. It’s about the reality that AI shines a very bright light on whatever content foundations you already have, good or bad.
Award 4: The “Made Our Lives Easier” Award
Nominees:
- Co-authoring (goodbye “FINAL_final_v7_REALLYFINAL.docx”)
- Sharing links / modern sharing
- Modern page editing
- Recycle Bin + restore (the quiet hero)
Winner: Co-authoring
It removed an entire category of workplace pain.
Email tennis. Version chaos. The fear of overwriting someone’s work. Gone.
Co‑authoring changed collaboration from taking turns to working together. Once files lived in SharePoint or OneDrive, multiple people could edit at the same time, see changes as they happened, and stop treating email as a document management system.
It’s one of those shifts that feels obvious now. Until you remember the years of attachments, renamed files, and polite arguments about which version was “the real one”. And then you realise: we really did live like that.
Award 5: The Funniest Feature Award
(Affectionately Unhinged)
Nominees:
- “Check-in / Check-out”
- Unique permissions
- “This page is in edit mode somewhere”
- My Site “personalisation” era
Winner: Unique Permissions
Nobody means to create a permission labyrinth.
And yet here we all are. Flashlight in hand, whispering “why can’t Karen see the policy?”
Unique permissions gave organisations precision control over sensitive content, which is genuinely useful when it’s applied deliberately.
But they also made it very easy to create invisible complexity. Over time, layers of broken inheritance and one-off access decisions quietly erode trust: people stop knowing what’s reliable, who can see what, and where the “official” version lives.
In an AI-shaped world, that mess doesn’t stay hidden for long. Over‑permissioned content isn’t just annoying anymore. It’s how the wrong information ends up confidently surfaced.
Powerful? Yes. Harmless? Absolutely not.
Award 6: The “We Loved You… But You’ve Aged” Award
Nominees:
- Subsites
- Classic publishing sites
- Custom master pages
- Heavy customisations that made upgrades… character building
Winner: Subsites
Subsites were the architecture pattern for years, and plenty of us got very good at making them work.
Subsites made it easy to spin up structure quickly. One site, lots of areas, job done.
But at scale, they often turned into a maze: tangled navigation, unclear ownership, permission quirks, and the eternal question “who is actually responsible for this content?”
Modern intranet thinking tends to favour clearer, flatter structures that reflect how people find information, not how org charts are drawn.
If you’ve ever migrated a subsite‑heavy environment, you know exactly why this award exists.
Award 7: The “Good Riddance” Award
Nominees:
- SharePoint Designer 2013
- SharePoint 2010 workflows
- InfoPath Forms Services
- Workflow Manager dependency era
Winner: SharePoint Designer 2013
SharePoint Designer empowered power users to automate processes without waiting for developers. A genuinely big deal when it arrived.
The downside?
Workflows that only one person understood, brittle dependencies, and solutions that aged badly. As environments modernise, these legacy patterns become harder to maintain, harder to migrate, and harder to explain to the next person who inherits them.
Thank you for your service. Please stop living in production.
Award 8: The “Most Iconic Interface Moment” Award
Nominees:
- The SharePoint 2010 Ribbon
- Site Actions
- Classic list settings pages
Winner: The SharePoint 2010 Ribbon
You either loved it or feared it, but everyone remembers it.
A whole era of “look how much you can do!” followed closely by “why are there 400 buttons?”
It surfaced enormous capability in one place, which thrilled power users and slightly terrified everyone else.
It marked an era where SharePoint fully embraced being a platform, not just an intranet.
Lots of buttons. Lots of options. Lots of ways to accidentally do something permanent.
Award 9: The “Most Likely to Start a Fight in a Project Meeting” Award
Nominees:
- Folders vs Metadata
- Permissions debates
- Governance
- Navigation by org chart vs task
Winner: Folders vs Metadata
It’s the SharePoint equivalent of pineapple on pizza.
This debate forced organisations to confront a hard truth: findability is a design decision, not a setting you turn on.
The reality has always been that pure “folders only” or “metadata only” approaches rarely survive contact with real people. The best solutions tend to blend structure with behaviour. And now, with AI in the mix, that balance matters even more. If content is scattered, duplicated, or inconsistently described, both humans and AI struggle to make sense of it.
Award 10: The “Shook Us” Innovation Award
Nominees:
- Copilot shaping content experiences
- SharePoint as an AI‑ready knowledge layer
- Content quality directly affecting AI output
- Community‑driven acceleration
Winner: SharePoint’s AI + Copilot + agent direction
For many this was a “hold on… this changes everything” moment.
It reframed SharePoint from where we store things to how knowledge gets used. Content quality, structure, ownership, and governance now directly influence AI outcomes. Not just human ones.
AI didn’t make governance optional. It made it visible.
Happy 25th birthday, SharePoint.
You’ve been many things over the years: a portal, a file server replacement, a publishing engine, a workflow playground, and occasionally a source of mild emotional distress.
But the best part? You keep evolving.
Right now, you’re stepping into a new era where great information management doesn’t just help people find knowledge… it helps AI use it.
And to everyone who has ever said, “It’s in SharePoint somewhere” - this one’s for you.
If your SharePoint has a bit of history (read: subsites, legacy workflows, and permissions folklore), you’re not alone. Modernising it doesn’t have to be painful. But it does benefit from a plan.
Sources
- Microsoft Adoption – Microsoft 365 knowledge management
https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-knowledge-management/ - Microsoft Learn – Get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot with SharePoint Advanced Management
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/get-ready-copilot-sharepoint-advanced-management - Microsoft Learn – Add SharePoint as a knowledge source in Copilot Studio
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot-studio/knowledge-add-sharepoint - Microsoft Support – Document collaboration and co‑authoring in Microsoft 365
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/document-collaboration-and-co-authoring-ee1509b4-1f6e-401e-b04a-782d26f564a4 - Thrive – Microsoft 365’s real‑time co‑authoring and collaboration
https://thrivenextgen.com/collaboration-microsoft-365s-co-authoring/ - Springer Nature – The impact of modern AI in metadata management
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44230-025-00106-5 - Gartner – State of Metadata Management: Aggressively pursue metadata to enable AI
https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/5735883