As announced by @ArpanShah via twitter yesterday SharePoint 2010 will be available in RTM "in April" (no date yet) and the launch will be the 12^th of May.

I'm assuming this means that customers will be able to start using SharePoint 2010 in production sometime in April, but I suspect not everyone will have access to it until the 12^th May. I will speak to my local team and update this post early next week.

10 weeks time!

I have lots of customers that have held off of putting Beta 2 into Production because there is no support for upgrading to RTM. There is an RC available, but this is under NDA and only available to select customers and service integrators which does support an upgrade to RTM. In my situation in Perth, most are holding out until RTM, and now with the 12^th May "launch" we can start planning these roll outs.

It's very exciting to be able to finally start pushing forward with SharePoint 2010 knowing that it will be with us in less than 10 weeks time!

What's new?

You have to remember sometimes that not everyone has spent hours playing with Beta 2 or attended SPC09 or SharePoint Saturdays. It is our job as the SharePoint community to continue to educate customers of what is new in SharePoint 2010. I started the SharePointDevWiki.com 2010 space with this in mind, where I've listed what's new, what's changed etc. in 2010.

There is also plenty of content available elsewhere to get started.

Get playing

Ok, so RTM isn't out but Microsoft have done a great job with their demo VM. There's a good set of information on how to get this running in most virtualised technology platforms here. There will be official content packs coming soon to add extra functionality to this demo VM and show off more of the new bits!

Get Training

Most organisations will have training budgets that they'll be planning for…it's time to start finding what training is available that is relevant to you and getting some budget allocated to be on these when they come out! The SharePoint 2010 Ignite training has successfully toured around the World now, and now it's time to start looking at the final release RTM courses that will become available after May which focus more on deeper areas such as Design and End User, whereas at the moment it's been Administration and Development.

SharePointDevWiki.com -> SharePoint 2010

It is also exciting from the perspective that I can now start heavily planning upgrading SharePointDevWiki.com to SharePoint 2010 as I was reluctant with Beta 2.

I have nearly finished my full migration scripts from Atlassian Confluence to SharePoint 2010 wikis which maintains all the spaces, wiki pages (+ versions, comments), blog posts, authors edits, tags etc I am looking to commercialise this tool if anyone is interested in migrating their wikis to their Enterprise platform.