SharePoint 2010 – WSS 2010

In the wake of our coverage of last month's SharePoint Conference sessions, this is the fifth in a series of posts documenting the keynotes and sessions I attended at the Microsoft "Airlift" event for Office 2010.  This four-day event took place in Seattle during the first week of June, was open to participants in Microsoft's Technical Adoption Program (TAP), and in essence took the form of a mini-SharePoint Conference.

There were a number of exciting revelations of new features and functionality in SharePoint and Office 2010 apps which were made known during the Airlift event, and mobile was certainly no exception.  Chris Yu and Grace Fu presented a session highlighting the enhancements in bringing SharePoint and Office apps to your mobile device, and provided a robust live demonstration on a mobile device.

It was announced that access to SharePoint sites will be available not just from Windows Mobile, but that with the 2010 release there will be broad mobile browser support.  Highlights of the demo, which consisted of Grace performing tasks on her smartphone while its screen was projected on the display in the room for the audience to follow along, included:

• SharePoint alerts will be configurable such that they can be delivered via SMS (note: SMS functionality will require a third-party provider)
• Using the Excel Mobile Viewer, easy location and opening of a spreadsheet
• Simple filtering options available for displaying the contents of libraries
• Mobile shortcut commands allow for easy navigation, as demonstrated within an Excel spreadsheet
• Recommendation with the Word Mobile Viewer is to click Image View for sharper visibility
• Searching within a Word doc presents all results as clickable go-to links
• PowerPoint Mobile View includes a thumbnail view; outline view is recommended for text-heavy slides, and slide view for image-heavy slides. Slide view includes a zoom feature
• Searching within a PowerPoint presentation also surfaces clickable results
• People search surfaces full profiles, including social activities
• Select Web Parts are supported out-of-the-box (2 on WSS, 7 on MOSS)
• Picture libraries are supported, including thumbnail view and the ability to upload a photo
• Calendar mobile view shows details without the standard calendar UI
• Microblogging / status updates not only show up on your profile page, but also as status notes on Communicator
• Appending ?mobile=1 to any SharePoint page will render the mobile view of that page in a non-mobile browser
• There is mobile adapter code which developers can insert into the Render() class which will enable Web Parts which are not supported out-of-the-box

It was explained that the type of mobile device being used is detected at login and, based on the device, certain features will be enabled or disabled based on the capabilities of the device in question.

Tags: Mobile SharePoint