Mark Kashman (@mkashman) presented on mobile and SharePoint. Like everyone else, Microsoft sees the mobile revolution with 1 billion devices, 82% of the online population using social and 50% being on the road to the cloud. When they think of SharePoint mobile they think of it in three different ways. That includes mobile browser, native apps, and the access to Microsoft Office apps via the Office Hub. So yes, mobile is important
Tablet
They will offer a clean user experience that supports touch. It will also offer a nicer interface geared towards the form factor.
Phone
The phone browser experience will finally look decent out of the box and will resize for the format. They showed multiple views of what it looks like. Notice in the image below that the forms fit the screen and that the content looks like it was meant for a smartphone app. The web app version supports any smart phone with an app. That means that Android is supported here despite the ongoing animosity between Google and Microsoft.
Demo: Mark couldn’t get network access because we all are killing the wireless. 😉
Snapshots of SharePoint from a smartphone browser
Newsfeed App
The newsfeed app is now available on the Windows 8 phone and in Windows 8 laptop / desktop. Mark showed the Windows 8 app first. It helps you keep up with all the happening in your social network on SharePoint and it supports hyperlinks, @mentions and hashtags (#). You can view, post, reply, and see the entire conversation formatted nicely. It even supports the device camera.
Snapshot of the Window 8 app
The Windows phone supports
- a me pivot
- filters on your feed
- Read and liking of posts
- You can even quickly jump to SkyDrive Pro.
- The demo showed a variety of posts, following, access to my site, etc. It’s pretty full featured and compares well to other competitors functionality.
Snapshot of Windows Phone Newsfeed app
iOS
SharePoint will support native iOS apps for both phone and iPad. The tablet has a view geared towards the extra screen space. Mark noted that he’s repeating himself but he wants to show that the iOS app is as full featured as the other Windows 8 and Windows phone apps.
Newsfeed App for iPad
Documents in the iPad are “interesting” You can follow documents and view them but you can’t edit them. They are working on a SkyDrive application.
Office Hub
This has been in the market for a while for the Windows Phones. Yes, they know other devices exist but Windows phones proved easier and therefore get to be first. Office hub gives you access to SkyDrive Pro. Since this is also Office mobile apps, you can edit them, filter spreadsheet views, save back to SharePoint, etc.
OneNote is now it’s own application. They see a lot of people using OneNote so they decided to break it out to speed up the development cycles.
Android
They have plans but for now, just use the Chrome browser for both mobile browsing and the SharePoint Newsfeed. Mark was finally able to get the wireless to work and the Android phone was in a normal vs a smartphone view.
On Premise vs Online
The native apps are free so there’s no difference in cost. You should be able to point to any SharePoint installation regardless of whether it’s on premise or online.
