Tobias Zimmergren

It started in April 2008 as a spare-time project. People kept asking for something better than the built-in SharePoint discussion boards, so I built a Forum Web Part that looked and behaved like a real web forum but ran entirely on SharePoint lists. No extra database and no separate sign-in. You added it to a site and you were done.

It picked up whatever SharePoint theme the site used, and after a round of performance work it handled 120,000 posts across ten forums without breaking a sweat. The beta drew a steady stream of comments and emails from people who wanted to try it.

In September 2009 it shipped as version 1.0 of the TOZIT SharePoint Discussion Forum for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. By 2012 it had grown from a single web part into a suite, enough to deserve a home of its own, and we launched SharePointDiscussions.com.

A server license cost $399, paid once with no annual fees. The suite shipped in eight languages and was used by more than 400 organizations around the world on SharePoint 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016.

The reference list on the site ranged from universities and public agencies to global enterprises: Lockheed Martin, Kellogg Company, Intuit, Plantronics, Hitachi Consulting, REWE, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the American Institute of Architects, among many others.

Eventually a Scandinavian product and service integrator acquired the suite, which is why SharePointDiscussions.com no longer exists.

What it did

• Forums grouped into categories, with any number of threads and posts
• Mark posts as the answer, as helpful, or as abusive
• Points and leaderboards for top posters, most answers and most helpful posts
• RSS subscriptions for new threads in a forum and new replies in a thread
• A rich text editor that kept formatting pasted from Word and Visual Studio
• Relative timestamps such as "1 hour 32 minutes ago"
• Followed the active SharePoint theme automatically

In 2007 I co-founded the Sweden SharePoint User Group together with Wictor Wilén, with Göran Husman lending a hand along the way. SharePoint was growing fast, and the people building on it in Sweden needed somewhere to meet, compare notes and learn from each other. So we made that place.

We met at least eight times a year. In the early years that was mostly in Stockholm, and over time more and more in Malmö and the wider Skåne region, with the odd visitor from Copenhagen crossing the bridge to join. The group grew to around 1,200 members, and they were a fairly active bunch.

In March 2013 we celebrated six years and counting, and SSUG was still growing. As late as 2015, members were asking us to start a chapter up north in Norrland.

We ran SSUG for ten years. That is a lot of evenings, agendas and venues, and every bit of it was worth it. Most of my network from the SharePoint years, I met at SSUG events.

Around 2017, as my own work moved to Azure and away from SharePoint, we stopped planning new events. Nobody was ready to pick up where we left off at the time, so we let it rest. Other groups and events have filled the space since, which is exactly how it should be.