Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part I: Overview

In this series of blog posts, I want to give you an overview on the most notable new features for support of mobile devices in SharePoint 2013.

Other blog posts in this series:

• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part I: Overview
• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part II: Device channels and the SharePoint page model
• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part III: Push Notifications
• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part IV: Location
• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part V: Custom Applications

Contemporary View

SharePoint 2013 now offers an optimized mobile browser experience. In addition to the “classic view” known from the previous version (which renders in HTML, CHTML, WML, …), there now is the so called “contemporary view” which renders in HTML5.

It is a lightweight view for users to navigate and access document libraries, lists, wikis, and Web Parts.

With this new view, Microsoft is supporting the majority of the current smartphones sold:

• Android 4.0 or higher (that is about 10.9% of the current active Android devices, see Android Developers Dashboards, Android smartphones have a 36.4% market share according to current sales statistics from Gartner)
• iPhone with iOS 4.0 or higher (about 90% of all iPhones, iPhones have market share of about 16.9% [Gartner])
• Windows Phone 7.5 or higher (about 2.7 million sold devices in Q1/12, 2.6% market share [Gartner])

This is how it looks like:

Source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161351(v=office.15)

Device Channels

With the help of the new “device channels”, you can now render a single published SharePoint site in multiple designs to accommodate different device targets.

This is a huge improvement in regards of UI customization for mobile devices.

See my post Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part II: Device Channels for more detail.

Push Notifications

A push notification service on a SharePoint site can be enabled to send device updates such as a tile or toast notification to a Windows Phone device.

Notifications can include events that occur in the site, such as when a user adds an item to a list or updates an item.

This does not replace alerts (e-mail notifications), it is an additional feature.

Note: This is Windows Phone only. There are no push notifications for iOS devices at the moment. Maybe some developer out there want’s to grab Apple’s “Local and Push Notification Programming Guide” and implemente an iOS version?

See my post Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part III: Push Notifications for more detail.

Location

SharePoint Server 2013 supports a new geolocation field type that can be used for mobile application development.

You can now make lists “location-aware” and display latitude and longitude coordinates through Bing Maps. An entry is typically seen as a pushpin on the map view. Although there are several ways to use this geolocation field, one key scenario is for mobile application development.

See my post Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part IV: Location for more detail.

BI

Certain devices are now able to view business intelligence content such as PerformancePoint Web Parts, Excel Services reports, and SQL Reporting Services reports.

SharePoint Server 2013 enables a user to view certain kinds of dashboard content. This includes PerformancePoint reports and scorecards, and Excel Services reports in iOS 5.0 Safari browsers on iPad devices. For more information about how to use this feature, see Viewing reports and scorecards on Apple iPad devices in the SharePoint Server 2010 Library.

Office Web Apps

You can view Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents in mobile browsers with additional functionality in SharePoint Server 2013.

Custom Applications

SharePoint 2013 now provides better tools if you want to create custom mobile applications. There is a series of how-to articles in the MSDN library dedicated to this topic.

Windows Phone

Microsoft provides Windows Phone SharePoint 2013 application templates for Visual Studio.

iOS, Android and the REST

For all the other systems SharePoint 2013 provides just the right API set for you:

• ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript) object model architecture
• REST endpoints in SharePoint 2013

See my post Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part V: Custom Applications for more detail.

Other blog posts in this series:

• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part I: Overview
• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part II: Device channels and the SharePoint page model
• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part III: Push Notifications
• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part IV: Location
• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part V: Custom Applications

Source:

• Technet: Overview of mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 Preview