When Kai Gong, AvePoint Chairman and Co-CEO incorporated AvePoint, Inc. in New Jersey on July 24, 2001, he didn’t know there was a product that went by the name of “SharePoint”. The name “AvePoint”, in fact, came from Kai’s driving trips in New York City. Near Times Square, several avenues merge together; thus AvePoint, where all roads come together, was the concept that drove our company’s name.
While Kai first started AvePoint to develop a Microsoft Exchange backup solution, his focus quickly turned to SharePoint when Microsoft officially released SharePoint 2001, which happened to use the same Web Storage System based data repository as Exchange. In October 2002, AvePoint officially released DocAve 1.0, the industry’s first document-level backup and restore solution for SharePoint 2001. Soon after, AvePoint released DocAve 1.5 in April 2003 to back up workspaces, history versions, webparts, and dashboards. Our attention to recovery Service Level Agreements (SLA) and full-fidelity recovery is what first brought the mention of “item-level, full-fidelity restore” to the SharePoint industry.
In June 2003, timed to coincide with Microsoft TechEd 2003 in Dallas, Texas – my first time attending a TechEd show representing AvePoint’s marketing and sales – we released DocAve 2.0 and Migrator 1.5 to support the new release of SharePoint 2003. Our Migrator 2.0 product, released in March 2004, was the only solution in the industry that could migrate customers’ contents from SharePoint 2001’s Web Storage System based data store to SharePoint 2003’s new SQL storage. It was this product that truly drew the attention of Microsoft SharePoint’s product team, and we haven’t looked back since.
We continued to set the standard for SharePoint infrastructure management solutions by proving ourselves as an ISV with the most technical depth and longest history serving the global SharePoint community with products including, but certainly not limited to:
· TrashBin 1.0, released in September 2005, which provided the industry’s first real-time Recycle Bin solution for SharePoint 2003
· DocAve Archiver and Auditor, released in March 2006, as the first SharePoint archiving and auditing solutions
· DocAve Platform Backup, released in November 2007, as the first SharePoint platform level, beyond just SQL servers, backup solution for SharePoint 2007
As I reflect on AvePoint’s last 10 years as a 100 percent SharePoint ISV, I fervently believe that we are truly the poster child of SharePoint success. Born as a company in 2001, named AvePoint when SharePoint is still called project Tahoe, we have become a global company with more than 1,000 employees across 19 offices in 10 countries, serving over 8,000 customers in more than 63 countries. With all of our original founders and entrepreneurs still hard at work, AvePoint has blossomed into the largest global SharePoint ISV by focusing on developing an integrated management platform for SharePoint governance.
Today, commemorating our 10 years with Microsoft SharePoint, we at AvePoint are honored to be part of the SharePoint history, proud to serve the ever-growing global SharePoint community, and remain infinitely thrilled to see the exciting future of this enterprise collaboration and application platform we all have grown to love and embrace. May our joint future be prosperous and bright!
TJ
