Who’s Who in the SharePoint and Office 365 World at Microsoft HQ

Joel Oleson

9 years ago

There’s been some serious shuffling that has gone on since we were last looking at the who’s who of the SharePoint world at Microsoft. Over the years many have gotten familiar with Jeff Teper as our one neck to choke in the SharePoint world. Jeff Teper moved on back in June of this past year with little fanfare in the SharePoint community. In fact I was reading Mary Jo Foley’s article about the structure at MS since the move and it wasn’t even tweeted or shared on facebook. So it’s possible that this is not widely known. When I was at the Office 365 event in San Diego a few weeks ago, I was talking with Bill Baer and Sonya about some of the restructuring and I was blown away with the changes. It shows a united world with serious focus on Office 365 and on OneDrive.

I didn’t get a chance to salute to Jeff, so I wanted to start with his send off and while Satya Nadella isn’t directly involved in SharePoint/OneDrive, you must know who he is and plan to hear him speak at Ignite. Surprises me that there are still some folks out there who don’t yet recognize his name, so this is another chance.

This list is mostly to help you understand who is out there fighting for you. Go up and thank them sometime. If you’re going to Ignite or SPTechcon or other major SharePoint or Office 365 summits, say hi.

Microsoft reorgs its Office business to focus on four new investment areas

(Note: This isn’t designed to be everyone. There are tons of people and entire groups I’m missing, this is just a handful of the visible ones.)

SharePoint and Office 365 People you should know:

Jeff Teper – previously the Corporate VP of SharePoint since 1999 (headed up the original PKM team and launched Tahoe the V1… SharePoint Portal Server 2001!). We sometimes called him the Father or Grandfather of SharePoint. Some may say the godfather, but that role is taken, wink, wink. Jeff Teper is now head of corporate strategy to work in areas such as acquisitions and development reporting directly to the CFO of MS. (Photo from LinkedIn)

– Led SharePoint from inception to the leader in portals, collaboration, and content management with $2B+ in annual revenues, 150M+ users, and an ecosystem of 700K+ developers
– Managed 1000+ person, globally distributed engineering team
– Led successful $1B+ acquisitions of FAST, the leader in enterprise search, and Yammer, the leader in enterprise social networking
– Led Corporate Strategy team supporting new Microsoft CEO and CFO on cloud and mobile-first strategies and acquisitions

Satya Nadella – Microsoft CEO, Hired by Jeff Teper! “Teper said he was the one who hired Nadella to work at Microsoft. Nadella had been working at Sun Microsystems Inc., and Teper’s team was looking for someone to help persuade developers to move from Sun’s server operating system to Windows NT, he said.” He will be at Ignite and keynoting the event. Satya Nadella leads Microsoft’s transformation to a productivity and platform company in the cloud-first, mobile-first world. Prior to becoming CEO, he held leadership roles in both enterprise and consumer businesses across the company. (Photo MS Ignite)

Chris Jones, Corporate Vice President, OneDrive and SharePoint, Microsoft

Chris Jones joined Microsoft in 1991 and currently leads the engineering team for OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and SharePoint Servers. Prior to his current role, he led the engineering for Outlook.com, OneDrive, Microsoft account, and Messenger; and he served for several years as Vice President in both program management and engineering in the Windows Division.

Dave Campbell – Chief Technology Officer, Cloud & Enterprise, Microsoft

Dave Campbell helps formulate, implement and communicate Microsoft’s cloud strategy. Over the last five years he has focused on the Azure platform and Microsoft’s Big Data strategy

(Photo from LinkedIn)

Julia White – General Manager : Microsoft Office Division, Technical Marketing. Responsibilities include Office 365, Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Developer and IT Pro audience marketing.

(Photo from Facebook Ignite ad)

(Photo from LinkedIn)