You may have deployed SharePoint and had a complaint from a
mobile user, by default the experience isn’
t great, SharePoint For Mobile that is.
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? Well
not according to all of mobile apps out there. It’s been low
hanging fruit for making the experience better with apps.
Unfortunately as key as the mobile revolution has been to Intranet
and web based applications, Microsoft didn’t take the opportunity
to focus on building interfaces for the rich mobile phones and
instead made investments to slightly improve the legacy phone
experience. Yes, I’m being a bit harsh, but this is more as a
warning that you should pay attention. 99% of SharePoint
environments should make this simple change to your web.config
files to make the mobile experience rich. We recently launched the
sharingthepoint.org site and quickly realized we forgot to turn off
the default mobile redirect. This code snippet below makes it a
rich browsing experience for your iphone, ipad, wp7, blackberry,
etc…
Add the XML code snippet to your web.config file on each web
front end.
<browserCaps>
<result type=”System.Web.Mobile.MobileCapabilities,
System.Web.Mobile, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a”/>
<filter>isMobileDevice=false</filter>
</browserCaps>
Here’s more information for developers that want to see what
other options they have once they sniff the mobile client:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.mobile.mobilecapabilities.aspx
> Interesting that Scott Hanselman provided some assistance
to people trying to make their sites more mobile friendly. He
discusses adding icons for adding it to your phone, and a bunch of
other stuff. Here’s a line to add to the meta tags that will
support the auto zoom. Very cool! Really like this snippet.
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=670, initial-scale=0.45,
minimum-scale=0.45″/>
Here is a chart of my analytics. Thanks G dudes. This is a
breakdown of the mobile operating systems. Look at the loyalty.
Surprised? What I was explaining above is that it apparently was
tough to anticipate the dominance of smart phones. These metrics
drill in on traffic over the last year. Those old phone operating
systems that the default SharePoint experience was designed for are
really a no show here. Just take a look at the numbers.
