Real, Usable Access to SharePoint from Mobile Phones

Windows Phone 7 to support SharePoint natively

Apparently Microsoft Windows Phone 7 is going to support SharePoint natively. In other words, no more hokey web interface access to a product that is already a bit of a pain to navigate.

If you’re like many people, your company uses SharePoint to organize data and projects. We do the same at our consulting firm. Instead of using a local NAS to store our internal and client documentation, we just create sites inside SharePoint and use that.

“Why?” you ask?

There are some really great things about having a fast, large local NAS on your network. This includes the ability to quickly access large files and, assuming you have a NAS with RAID-1 or RAID-5, a lot of redundancy. NAS devices are also very easy to backup.

But using a NAS to store information for projects quickly turns into a chore, especially if you are dealing with anything more than a simple “store the product docs in a folder” type of situation.

To begin with, a product like SharePoint lets you create multiple types of documentation, including wikis, document storage, revision-controlled document storage, calendars, contact listings, and so on. In other words, you aren’t constrained to what Microsoft Office has to give you.

All that being said, it can be a real pain to use SharePoint from anything than a desktop PC. For one thing, if you bring SharePoint up on a small screen, especially the screen on my smart phones, then you’re in for a world of hurt.

Unless of course you have an app on your smart phone designed specifically to work within the confines of your phones screen real-estate, and offers [hopefully] easy navigation.

So, to the readers out there, are you going to use SharePoint from your phone?

Oh, and I’m curious how this will work with hosted services like Microsoft BPOS..

• Microsoft
• Microsoft
• SharePoint
• Windows Phone 7
• WP7