SharePoint In The Mobile 1 - Inbuilt Options

Keeping your information in SharePoint is generally a good idea. Security, flexibility, version control, workflows and flows all help to build a strong platform for collaboration.

The kalmstrom.com team are getting more and more requests from people who want to use SharePoint from their mobile phone or tablet, or from the computer when they are offline. They still want the same functionality, but less complexity and more touch ability and usability.

There are various options, more or less advanced and suitable for different needs. When we develop custom SharePoint solutions, we of course discuss the alternatives with the customer and find the best one together.

Here I will instead write a few posts about the options as I see them, and I will begin with the possibilities given by SharePoint itself.

• The SharePoint App is available for Windows Phone, Android and iOS. It is confusing that the app sometimes switches over to the regular computer desktop web pages, but this app is evolving fast when Microsoft keeps adding features to it. Therefore it is getting more and more powerful.
• The SharePoint Mobile Experience looks very clean, but so far the features are rather limited. SharePoint, especially SharePoint Online, detects when you browse a site using a mobile browser. You can also test this feature by putting an /m after the URL of your site, such as http://kdemo.sharepoint.com/m
• SharePoint Forms display a cleaner user interface when you open a form in a mobile browser. However, that user interface does not load any web part modifications that you have done to the forms page. You can test this forms behavior by appending mobile=1 to the form URL. (You can also prevent a mobile browser from seeing the mobile form user interface by appending mobile=0 to the URL.)
• SharePoint Mobile View Settings lets you decide how the view should be displayed in a mobile browser, such as how many items should be shown and if the view should be the default mobile view or prevented from showing in a mobile browser. I would recommend only using a few columns and items for a mobile view.

There are many more options, and several of them include using other apps and features supplied by Microsoft. That is what we will look at in the next blog post about SharePoint in the mobile.

By Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions