Helping out SharePoint on iPad and other tablets

I just came across a couple of aritcles on CMSWire about problems with SharePoint on mobile devices.  I wasn’t really aware that SharePoint had trouble on mobile devices, but apparently there is some love-loss between Sharepoint and the newer tablets.  Apparently SharePoint takes advantage of an attribute (contentEditable) that is not available in the iPad’s Safari browser.  This limits the ability of an iPad user from participating in full SharePoint experience.

Two applications – Mobile Entree and SharePlus Office Mobile Client – aim to help overcome some of these limitations in taking SharePoint mobile. Mobile Entree 2.3 was just released and includes new features to allow SharePoint to work on the iPad (and Motorla Xoom).   Barb Mosher wrote a brief review of the new Mobile Entree on April 1.  Developers can use Mobile Entree to create one mobile interface to SharePoint that can run on a variety of smartphones and tablets.

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Chris Wright wrote about SharePlus, which allows you to browse SharePoint content, take it offline and sync it back up.  The application does not present SharePoint’s interface on the iPad, but replaces content access features through its interface. So with SharePlus you still don’t get the full SharePoint experience, but at least you can do some content management on your mobile device.

Now I’m not sure what the fuss is all about.  I just tested accessing a SharePoint site on my iPhone and it seemed to work fine through the browser.  Of course there was no integration with the iPhone features, but that’s what I’d expect with a browser based application.