iPhone opens up enterprise SharePoint sites

One big and so far unsung enterprise attraction for the iPhone may be that it can fully access SharePoint sites.

At least, that’s according to a couple of West Coast consultants who’ve been testing the iPhone on some SharePoint portals.

UPDATE: These portals were Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0), not repeat not the most recent Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007).

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is one of the fastest growing Microsoft enterprise applications, a document management system recast for online collaboration and, increasingly, social networking. It’s a way to get a lot more real work done, than is possible with just Exchange-based email.

Mobile access to SharePoint is possible, but it calls for some backend development work and users are limited in what they see, what they can access, and what they can do. Any readers who are actually are working with SharePoint and Windows Mobile devices, please chime in! I’m tracking down some additional SharePoint developers and have a request into Microsoft to clarify what’s possible today.

Some CIO’s see SharePoint access for iPhone as a key enterprise requirement. Smartphone-class handhelds are becoming more pervasive, more capable, and run over emerging fast 3G networks. Those capabilities are a key to exploiting SharePoint anywhere, anytime as it becomes a main arena for online collaborative work by mobile workers.

For consultant Steve Bell, the iPhone seems to give you everything you need now for full SharePoint access, at least in the sites he’s tested. Bell was founder and CEO of Silicon Valley Networking Lab(SVNL acquired by HP/Agilent in 2000), which for seven years was the exclusive certification center for the Wi-Fi Alliance. Today, he's a business planning consultant and coach to startups. He creates SharePoint sites for his clients so they can collaborate online. A long-time mobile device user, his own blog tracks software, mobile computing and network infrastructure issues.

Recently, Bell was at venture funding conference hosted at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley facility, where almost by chance, he found that his iPhone’s Safari Web browser could fully access one of the SharePoint sites he was developing for a client. “I got the [SharePoint] challenge screen, entered my login ID and password, and the entire site rendered beautifully,” he says. “I opened Excel spreadsheets, edited Word documents, sent messages to other [SharePoint] team members.”

Using his own SharePoint site to illustrate, Bell posted a blog entry about the subject on June 11.

Shortly afterwards, at the recent NXTcomm tech show in Las Vegas, Bell tried to access a SharePoint site while at the Microsoft booth, using a just-released Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone, running the Opera Web browser, and wasn’t able even to get to the challenge screen. He did get the screen with the standard mobile version of Internet Explorer but couldn’t get beyond that screen.

NW’s main Microsoft reporter is my colleague John Fontana, who’s been looking into this on his own. His conclusion is: it’s not elegant, and takes a lot of components, but you can access SharePoint from a mobile device today. One issue, he says, is the need to customize busy, complex SharePoint sites so they’re simpler for mobile users to work with on handhelds.

Based on what I can glean from the relevant Microsoft Developer Network Web site, mobile users can simply append “m/” as the last folder on the SharePoint URL they’re accessing. What happens is they are redirected to a mobile home page. From there, they can navigate to a view page where they can read or write to a SharePoint list “as long as the list has a mobile view.” The framework for mobile view and form rendering uses different controls, based on ASP.Net mobility controls apparently, than native SharePoint pages.

Essentially, via m/, mobile users get a subset of SharePoint functionality. Notably, they can not access the central administration panel, which is very important for SharePoint users, according to one of Bell’s friends, Scott Futryk.

Futryk is CEO and co-founder of Anywhere Anytime Communications, a Cupertino, California consultancy focusing on enterprise online collaboration, and SharePoint is a key element in that work. He doesn’t use an iPhone. Bell emailed Futryk about his discovery.

Futryk found Bell’s claims so unbelievable, that he went to his nearby AT&T story on Monday to play with an iPhone for the first time and see if he could access his own SharePoint sites. His conclusion: “SIMPLY AWESOME” (his emphasis). “I’m very aware of the /m functionality in SharePoint,” Futryk says. “It’s basically a stripped-down experience.”

Working with the iPhone for 30 minutes in the store was an eye-opening experience. “There is no way a single photo can does justice to the absolutely amazing experience of seeing the SharePoint site render flawlessly,” he says. “I had created a test Word doc and used my fingers [on the iPhone touchscreen] to ‘zoom in’ and BAM it opened the document, which had several different size text items and several sizes and several colors.”

He confirmed that he could navigate, access, and use the SharePoint Administration panel. “Everything worked and, again, flawlessly,” he says. Futryck says the /m rendered version of a typical SharePoint home page gives a bare bones text set of links, whereas accessing the same page from IE on a PC shows a fully rendered Web page. That same fully rendered Web page is what he saw with Safari on the iPhone.

After last year’s announcement of the first iPhone, Apple announced a number of enhancements designed to make the iPhone more attractive and deployable for enterprise users. One of the changes, announced in March, was Apple’s decision to license Microsoft ActiveSync, which lets the iPhone synchronize Exchange email, contacts, and calendaring.

In Bell’s view, mobile access to SharePoint has a big, and immediate impact for enterprise users: they can do far more real work online than they can do with just access to Microsoft Exchange email, scheduling, and contacts.