Back from vacation, and it’s been lovely with a couple of weeks of. On in beautiful Italy, a couple of days in Copenhagen and a trip to southern Sweden, all together that makes it actually quite good to be back. And since we will have a very exiting and interesting autumn with the SharePoint Conference in October as the guiding star, I’m actually happy to be back.

Two weeks ago Joel Oleson wrote an excellent post about “SharePoint is Now core enterprise infrastructure“. This post is about the same topic and is a translation of a chronicle I wrote in Swedish for zipper.se.

During the summer, the Technical Preview of next SharePoint version, SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 was released to TAP (Technology Adoption Program) members and MVP:s.

In October during the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas a public beta will be available, but there is already a lot of buzz going on and a huge interest in what it will contain.

On the other hand, I often talk to customers that are quite sceptic and somewhat tired of the hole thing. This is often since they believe that it’s first now, after the SP2 (released during the spring) they have got stable environment. -”When we now finally have a stable environment and are finished with our migration, it’s time to start all over again.”

There are three interesting things about such a comment. The first thing is that SharePoint 2010 will not be released until the first half of 2010 (hopefully beginning of Q2), this means that if you have a very large environment you are probably not one of those early adopters and might not do any upgrade until the first Service Pack and that will probably be in 2011 (my own speculations).

So from that point of view you don’t have to stress and can just follow the info being released on what will be shipped with the next version.

However it is very likely that what you see will make you want to upgrade and that fast, because it will be very easy to build new business cases around the new features it contains. In Addition to that, a migration or upgrade will cause much less pain this time then when we moved from Version 2 to version 3.

The third and maybe the most interesting from a SharePoint product point of view is that an upgrade to SharePoint 2010 is taken for granted and seen as mandatory in such a comment. Collaboration platforms, whether it is SharePoint or not is now something that is taken for granted in the same way as the operating system, emails and Office applications.

There are Gartner reports that show that companies often upgrade their Office application to each new version but when it comes to operating systems they tend to more often skip one version. There are of course many different reasons for that, one is that a client migration is a more complex task then upgrading the Office Application. But if an upgrade to SharePoint 2010 is taken for granted, doesn’t that mean that collaboration platforms and in particular SharePoint is a part of the common IT infrastructure?

I very much agree with Joel Oleson that it is! But that also means that SharePoint should be seen, and managed as a part of the common IT infrastructure. If you have departments/groups that handle, policies, roadmaps and other stakeholder groups and forums to manage you client, well, then it’s time to start build your organization to support the latest kid in the family.