Over the past few months, we’ve seen a real surge in the uptake of SharePoint by organizations. And there has been one particular use case that I have engaged with several customers recently, which I felt might be of interest to the greater SharePoint community. The use case that I’d like to discuss revolves around how to effectively utilize SharePoint offline in a remote “mobile office” environment.
You may have deployed SharePoint and had a complaint from a mobile user, by default the experience isn’t great. A legacy design decision was made for SharePoint 2010’s that creates a poor default mobile smart phone experience. In my mind if they would have kept the capability for mobile as an alternative and left the default experience alone things would be much better. Instead, by default, an iPad or iPhone, Windows Phone 7, Android, and even Blackberry… yes essentially all your rich mobile phones have a degraded user experience. SharePoint 2010 inherited the mobile interface that was built in SharePoint 2007, and it was improved slightly for publishing sites in SharePoint 2010, and a whole SDK was built for mobile. Was it a waste?
The wave of mobile is upon us, and with SharePoint mobile access enabling users to access the files they need on-the-go, business never has to stop moving. That is, until the need for a signature authorization arises.
