I often get asked the question, “How do I as a SharePoint 2007 professional start getting expertise in SharePoint 2010? My organization is not planning to move to SharePoint 2010 because its customers still plan to be on SharePoint 2007 for some time .”

Many SharePoint professionals are in this boat, as are many organizations. The wide success of SharePoint 2007 is one of the biggest impediments to organizations’ and professionals’ migration to SharePoint 2010. So, I will answer your question from those two perspectives: the organization’s and the professional’s.
 

As an organization

We have a SharePoint 2007 infrastructure, which we are planning on upgrading to 2010 with all reasonable haste. We have to test our own customizations as well as some 3rd party tools. All considered, we plan to be on 2010 before the year is out. We will use this for our portal, customer-facing extranet, and public web site. This will let our internal people gain experience with SharePoint 2010 long before we have a customer requirement.

However, most of our customers will be on 2007 for several years. So we will be maintaining a development infrastructure compatible with SharePoint 2007. Among other things, it means not using many of the new .Net Framework 4.0 capabilities and not using the SharePoint 2010 tools in Visual Studio 2010. I will be training our developers to write code that runs on SharePoint 2007 but can still take advantage of SharePoint 2010 if available. I’m speaking on this topic at the SharePoint Evolution Conference this April.

As a SharePoint 2007 professional

Start small. Watch SharePoint 2010 web casts, read blog posts, and attend user group and SharePoint Saturday meetings. The goal is get some familiarity with SharePoint 2010 with minimal time, cost, and infrastructure investments.

Once you’re ready to go hands on, don’t do it alone. Convince your organization that it needs to provision a SharePoint 2010 sandbox. Make things simple: go standalone topology. Tell the decision makers that you and some other colleagues will pick an existing application or piece of functionality and try to create it on SharePoint 2010. You will write about your experience and share with other interested members of your organization. You get SharePoint 2010 experience without personal outlay of funds. The organization gets a group of member gaining steadily increasing expertise in the next version of the platform without a formal outlay of training budget.

You should start today, but you don’t need to become a SharePoint 2010 expert today. Rather, you should focus on gaining incremental 2010 experience over the next 12 – 18 months.