Yesterday, CMSWire.com published an article written by my colleague, Rich Wood. In the article, The SharePoint Mobility Forecast: Outlook Cloudy, Rich discusses the topic of SharePoint and mobility, and the difficulty of achieving a fully accessible SharePoint environment.
To kick things off, Rich so aptly puts it:
Whether it’s a favorite son or a red-headed stepchild, the conversation about SharePoint and mobility is one that has to be addressed in nearly every CIO’s roadmap before too long.
He goes on to say that the real question at hand is whether Microsoft ever intends to tackle mobility in a way that’ll truly fulfill enterprise users.
What is Microsoft’s strategy for making SharePoint mobile? What drives that strategy? How can enterprise customers take advantage of, augment or get around that strategy as needed to make SharePoint available on-the-go?
To answer these questions, we need to take a deeper look at how the product has evolved, how demand and the marketplace have evolved, and the forces behind Microsoft’s own roadmap. Forces that might have less to do with SharePoint than one might imagine.
Since the product’s origin, its strengths and most common uses have been document collaboration and intranet scenarios. Rich points out that, thanks to responsive design, the intranet workload is something that a modern day SharePoint implementation does quite well. And because most intranets are predominately web content, the same UI customizations that allow SharePoint-based public websites so responsive can be utilized with your corporate intranet.
Ok, so what about document collaboration, or even newer, emerging workloads such as social business? This is where it gets a little tricky, and the answers lie beyond the actual product itself, with the marketplace:
At times in its lifespan, SharePoint has been the victim of poor timing — and yet despite this, has thrived and even achieved a certain degree of ubiquity in its core workloads. SharePoint 2010 hit the market just as the iPad began to explode. I was working for Microsoft at the time, and I remember discussions among Softies about what users could possibly see in a device that couldn’t create content. The answer, as it turned out, was that a device that remarkably simplified content consumption didn’t need to do content creation.
Even so, the ribbon interface of SharePoint 2010 and its clumsy translation to an iPad didn’t hurt SharePoint adoption any more than it hurt iPad adoption. Both products exploded in the enterprise in roughly the same time frame. SharePoint 2010 brought interactivity into an intranet world that had previously been the realm of static HTML content — the “Web 2.0” (remember that term?) of the enterprise. The iPad led the way in forcing the BYOD conversation.
The popularity of both products led for continued calls to make SharePoint tablet-friendly. Commentators wondered aloud when Microsoft would “monetize the iPad” because, after all, failing to put Office on iPads was leaving untold billions on the table. Microsoft even seemed to recognize this, albeit in baby steps, including iPad screenshots in official sales and roadmap presentations; it may have been the first time ever that Microsoft accorded this honor to a product made by an erstwhile competitor. This has gone largely unnoticed by mainstream commentators but in reality it’s no small matter.
Now, of course, there are SharePoint 2013 mobile apps native to iOS for the SharePoint social feed and SkyDrive. But what’s next on the mobility front? As Rich states, it’s all about the Android:
The Google-produced mobile operating system is now the leader in mobile market share and looks to be entrenched in the pole position for at least the next two years, according to analysts. While Microsoft has begun providing mobile apps for its own Windows Phone and the more popular iOS in near synchronicity, the absence of any such apps for America’s most popular phone OS (though Droid is notably well behind iPad in the tablet market) is the one thing nobody talks about.
So how can SharePoint be entirely BYOD-ready if it doesn’t provide native apps for more than half of the nation’s smartphones? The answer lies in document collaboration – and more specifically, Office.
Together with Windows, Office is one of Microsoft’s two biggest cash cows, and while there might be money to be made in the short term by licensing Office on a platform like Android, that app would necessarily be of limited functionality. Erosion of the brand becomes a major concern. The weight behind Windows Phone, the Surface and PC innovation becomes substantially less.
This is why true document collaboration in SharePoint isn’t there for any device yet, even the ones Microsoft itself produces and sells — because the services behind document collaboration are mostly Office services, not SharePoint ones and moving that feature-rich thick client into a little mobile app has massive negative implications in the long run.
A better idea is to move those services to the cloud, making a subset of the services available through apps. What does this all boil down to? If you want to go mobile (beyond web publishing of intranet pages), go to the cloud… Office 365, specifically.
To read the article in its entirety – including the bit about Yoda – check out the full post over at CMSWire.com. You can also read Rich’s previous article, (R)Evolution: The Past, Present and Future of the Social Enterprise.
