Many seem to think that simply upgrading, or simply deploying a recent version of SharePoint will take them closer to a good experience for mobile users. The days of Mobile are here. There are now more Mobile Devices and Tablets than desktops and laptops. As well, the productivity that could be happening is getting blocked by poor user interfaces, and clunky firewall and lack of cohesive single sign on.

I recently wrote that “Mobile is transformational, yet most don’t know what to do,” here are 10 specific areas where you can focus your technical and strategic direction around mobile.

MS Productivity

10 Ways to Improve Mobile Access for SharePoint

1. Unblock it – SharePoint Mobile Use Blocked – many intranets simply have no access to mobile devices. Many only allow “VPN only” connections. Surprising how insecure that can expose a network to the outside world. A single port open to SharePoint via a reverse proxy can reduce the surface of a network a ton more than having all of their users actually logging into their networks from home, exposing the home machine to the work network.

2. Disable that horrid “Text only” mobile UI – many have not fixed the default poor experience in SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 where the default is to throw mobile users at an ugly text interface of SharePoint, or worse a screen that says not supported. I shared some steps for turning off mobile with the desktop mode being “good enough” in 2007/2010.

3. Simple Login – Many Mac and Firefox users have given up on SharePoint due to never ending Multi Prompt Authentication. They’ve been ignored and sent to the corner. Mobile access needs testing and support. Many have not tested authentication beyond Internet Explorer and NTLM. They assume users will have a decent experience, reality is Firefox doesn’t support NTLM by default. It’s a poor experience and can cause multiple prompts. There is configuration that can be setup for Windows FireFox and components that can be added to Firefox for Mac.

4. Make sure Apps work – Lots of users trying to use mobile apps simply fail to authenticate. Even the Microsoft designed ones might not work, they work for Office 365, but maybe not for your configuration. There are a lot of reasons why these may not work from the infrastructure to development UI is something the end users can’t address themselves. As well, the third party product vendors may be able to support your configuration if they know how it’s setup. They need your feedback on your infrastructure and auth setup.

5. Plan and Communicate the Strategy – With Mobile simply being ignored, users are on their own to solve problems that are require infrastructure or development changes. At the same time enterprises use lack of adoption and use by mobile devices as the reason they plan to do nothing about it. A catch 22.

7. Support Touch – Smart phones these days have a touch interface. Most Intranets have not been designed for touch interface. It is about time with many new laptops, tablets, and of course nearly all smart phones these days being touch. A drop down menu with on mouse over built into the interface may simply fail after the first touch. There are a lot of menus that support touch. Check out the free JQuery Mobile navigation components.

8. Leverage Best Practices for mobile and tablets with Responsive Web Design: Users today have a poor user experience, but they don’t have to. The default experience in SharePoint 2007 and 2010 for mobile is weak, it gets better when you turn off the mobile browsing experience, but even with the best default browsing experience in SharePoint 2013 it’s pinch and zoom with challenges around resolution. It requires a pinch and zoom experience and a lot of moving around to click on menus that are challenging. Recommendation here is to make your pages responsive. Responsive Web Design has changed the way web interfaces should be designed. It’s been more than 2 years since Kyle made the first SharePoint 2010 Responsive site template, and more than a year since the Codeplex solution at http://responsivesharepoint.codeplex.com was published for SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010. There are hundreds of responsive blog web templates on WordPress. Now there are dozens of SharePoint sites created and published with Responsive Web Design HTML5 CSS3 leveraging media queries to build good looking experiences from small to extra large resolution sizes.

9. Authentication is too complex and a Mess – 15 character password with symbols, case, cryptic, that’s changing every 15 days or worse… No wonder people write it down. I agree. There are so many crazy interesting ways to do authentication these days that getting a good experience for users on a mobile device is NOT a consideration. 2 Factor auth doesn’t work so well on most apps, and mobile web UI. Think about mobile when you build your solution. Maybe users should have the option of a text for the second factor when it’s on a new device.

10. Mobile Apps Strategy & Support – Consider Enterprise Mobility Management solutions and Mobile Device Management strategies to prevent data leakage. Now that Microsoft has released a bunch of new apps for things for taking a file offline and sharing (SkyDrive Pro) or viewing and editing Office docs (Office Mobile) and following people, documents, and activities (Newsfeed) it’s important for users to know what’s ok, and have a strategy for when to use what and if they can call support for their mobile issues. Many third parties have support for encrypted containers, secondary passwords and other techniques to ensure secure behavior that reduces the risk of mobile usage.

Check out Joel’s blog ‘SharePoint Joel‘ for more insightfull content. For more expert advice on mobile check on Michal Sobotkiewicz ESCP13 conference presentation on ‘SharePoint: The Perfect Backbone of Your Mobile Business Applications‘. Download Now>>