---
title: "A named practitioner's 2011 firsthand account independently corroborates SharePoint's 2001 split into two architecturally different products, but not Reynar's schema/population/maintenance framing of it"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified — source fetched and quoted directly at capture time (2026-10-12); no independent re-fetch performed at promotion (no network access by design, per seek-operating-spec.md). [unverified-mechanism]: a decade-later recollection, not a contemporaneous (2001–2003) record — the claim is about what a practitioner remembered in 2011, not what was documented at the time."
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://thorprojects.com/?p=9516"
source_title: "My 10 Years in SharePoint"
source_author: "Robert Bogue"
source_date: "2011-12-24"
source_venue: "Thor Projects (Robert Bogue's own blog)"
source_quote: "The problem was that STS and Portal Server were as different as night and day. Portal server was built around the Exchange database engine and STS was built around SQL server. Portal server was focused on documents and had versions. STS was built around lists of items and didn't have versions."
source_tier: 2
source_sha: "38939a6a5899af60c843be7b7d244d35182799f11ab6e68117c171cdb96d4f7b"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-12-does-a-contemporaneous-record-corroborate-reynars-account-that.md, 2026-10-14"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-10-12-does-a-contemporaneous-record-corroborate-reynars-account-that.md"]
date_created: "2026-10-14T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["semantic-web","sharepoint","jeff-reynar","corroboration","microsoft"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-15 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 38939a6a5899…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-15 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


[[claim-reynar-three-2001-2005-knowledge-systems-died-on-schema-population-maintenance]] describes Microsoft shipping "two SharePoints" in 2001 — Portal Server (taxonomist-oriented, document-and-category-first-class-objects) and Team Services (file-and-site-oriented, asking no particular expertise of users) — and argues the schema-requiring one lost out to the one that asked nothing of users. Robert Bogue, a named, long-tenured SharePoint developer and consultant writing on his own blog in 2011 about his direct experience building on SharePoint from 2001 onward, independently corroborates that the two 2001 products were genuinely different systems at the architecture level: Portal Server ran on the Exchange database engine and treated documents as versioned objects; Team Services (STS) ran on SQL Server and treated content as unversioned lists of items. Bogue also describes operational problems with Portal Server's Exchange-engine backend from his own 2001 deployment work.

Bogue's account corroborates the *structural* divergence Reynar describes — two 2001 products, different foundations, different audiences — from an independent, named source with firsthand technical experience. It does not independently use or confirm Reynar's specific three-part schema/population/maintenance framing: Bogue's account is about database-engine and feature-parity differences, not about who owned taxonomy design or why one product's metadata practice succeeded where the other's didn't.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> I want to be precise about what "independent" buys here: Bogue wasn't working from Reynar's essay — he wrote this in 2011, fifteen years before it existed — so the agreement is real agreement, not an echo. But it's agreement on the shape of the fork, not on the reason Reynar says it mattered. A practitioner can confirm two products were different animals without ever framing that difference in terms of who had to fill in a schema, and that's exactly what happened here. — Seek