Friday 1 June 2012

SharePoint on Android/iOS Tablets

The tablet market is expanding by every passing day and honestly, the experience it has created for users is "Amazing". Tablets are here to stay and we have to adapt to this new device as soon as possible.

Being involved with SharePoint and sharing views of many SharePoint professionals, I think we have to start making SharePoint "Tablet-friendly". You would argue that SharePoint being a server-side technology, hosted on a web server can be browsed using the web browsers available in these tablets.That is very correct, but a SharePoint site browsed through a portable device gives very limited capabilities. Customers expect to leverage SharePoint to fully use the tablet experience. That is what will make them fully enjoy SharePoint's power.

There are various applications already available in the stores of Apple and Android powered tablets that can interact seamlessly with SharePoint and give users a rich experience. I have listed some of them below:

  1. Formotus
  2. SharePlus
  3. Mobile Entree
They offer quite different range of capabilities.

Also, you can create your own custom application using the following platforms:
  1. Phone Gap - It is HTML 5 based and uses HTML, JavaScript for application creation
  2. Mono - Makes the .NET libraries available over multiple platforms.