I had to put in a short blurb about one of the greatest achievements a product can make.  Today here at Teched Africa I was talking to a guy who is the account specialist at Microsoft for Namibia.  In our conversations he talked about the evolution of SharePoint and how in the past it took a while to explain SharePoint Server and why it was important in an organization.

Now, he tells me it is simply infrastructure.  As mail servers, authentications servers, so is collaboration.  Next might be OCS as pure infrastructure rather than add ons.  Just as the LAN phone became a utility so is SharePoint as core IT infrastructure.

It’s awesome to see this day.  I have memories of it’s infancy, and I do agree with my Namibian friend.  I do believe we have passed the hump where not only collaboration and workgroup storage solutions are mainstream, but SharePoint as a collaboration infrastructure has become a staple, a utility, a commodity, a core set of infrastructure that is expected by the business.  Sure there are many who would say that deployments aren’t yet that mature.  If our Namibia friends are finding this so in Zimbabwe and more and it’s confirmed in Chile and Argentina (based on conversations a few months ago), then I’m sticking my neck out and saying, yep.  It’s not simply saturation with Core CALS or simply signed enterprise agreements, but developed countries and districts across the globe are seeing SharePoint as core infrastructure.