SharePoint 2010 and Windows Phone 7 Applications

SharePoint on your mobile.  SharePoint on your mobile.  SharePoint on your mobile.

No, the first paragraph of this post is not an error.  I want to highlight this.  Why would you ask?  Well, in my experience this wonderful “semi built-in” capability of SharePoint is so often overlooked.  What do we need to do to get customers excited about it?  How do we sell it better?

Well for starters, I believe there needs to be much bigger uptake within the community (specifically South Africa) around creating prepackaged style sheets for mobile views and so forth.  In my world, a better overall understanding of said component will culminate in more chatter and excitement which inevitable transfers to our clients.

So where to from here?

Enter SharePoint 2010 and Windows Phone 7

I caught an article by Jan Tielens on a “retweet” from a friend @Veronique and was amazed at how pretty the content is displayed.  With previous versions of SharePoint on the phone kind of posts, I always thought it was nice, but not practical.  This article demonstrates not only a wonderful solution, but something I honestly believe would add an immense amount of value to clients.  Let’s hope it’s fairly simple to deploy.

SharePoint on Windows Phone 7

The screenshot above illustrates how announcements are displayed and accessed via the mobile phone.  This makes me SO excited as you can obviously extend this to any list within SharePoint.  Then, “oh don’t get me started as there are unlimited possibilities” imagine the power of creating an SharePoint External List and allowing users to access that via their phone.

Boom!!! Line of business data on your mobile phone while utilizing SharePoint’s permissions / audit trails et al.  Mobile development is not our core competence right now, but after viewing what is possible I will certainly start being more vocal about the possibilities to our clients.

You can read Jan’s full article here – http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2010/03/17/my-first-windows-phone-7-app-getting-sharepoint-content.aspx

About these ads