Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

3.2 Mobile Access 55

Chapter 3

3.2 Mobile Access

“Peripatetic” is a word we use to describe the fact that most users these days

wander around, rather being tied to an office desk. But as they wander, they

Figure 3.11

Viewing an

RSS feed.

Figure 3.12

Outlook 2007 as

an RSS reader.

56 3.2 Mobile Access

still need access to information using whatever device they have at hand.

More and more people have intelligent handheld devices these days, such as

SmartPhones and personal data assistants, which are generally small with

limited viewing real estate.

Any smart device that can run a browser can access a SharePoint site, but

can you envisage what a full-blown site would look like on a small device?

Can you imagine trying to interact with it? Your thumb would become quite

tired within the space of a few minutes from scrolling around, and frustra-

tion would set in very quickly!

SharePoint attempts to connect people with information, but it also rec-

ognizes the capabilities and constraints of mobile devices. It therefore provides

features that allow appropriate information to be delivered to mobile devices in

the form of device-friendly pages. How is this done? SharePoint utilizes mobile

controls from ASP.NET 2.0 (in the System.Web.UI.MobileControls

namespace) to render HTML that is suitable for mobile devices. Most sites

have mobile support, but there are some exceptions—for example, there is no

mobile support for a wiki site. There are mobile home pages that are specific

for the type of site we are dealing with. The home pages are physically located

in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web server extensions\

12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\MOBILE, where you will find aspx pages such

as mbllists.aspx (team site) and bloghome.aspx (blog). Users could just navi-

gate directly to these homepages from their mobile devices, but that would not

be very user friendly, as the URLs would be difficult to remember and to type

in. Therefore, WSS 3.0 supports a simple way of re-directing to the appropri-

ate page by adding a /m to the standard URL for a site. Therefore, if my blog

site is http://mi6.spysrus.com/blog, then I can access the mobile version of this

site by using http://mi6.spysrus.com/blog/m, seamlessly redirect me to http://

mi6.spysrus.com/blog/_layouts/mobile/bloghome.aspx. We can see this in

action in Figure 3.13, is a screenshot from an HP iPaq 510 Voice Messenger

device which is a SmartPhone. This shows our blog site being accessed; note

how we can filter the view with our categories and add new posts and com-

ments. The screenshot shows the home page, a blog, and a comment.

For a team site, the mobile home page is a list of those lists within the

site that have mobile views associated with them. You can mobile-enable

most views by modifying the view and enabling it in the Mobile section, as

shown in Figure 3.14.

When you access a document library on a mobile device, you have the

option of downloading the actual document and viewing it, should you have

an application on your device that can do so. We can see this in action in Fig-

ure 3.15, which shows a Word document in a library being viewed by Word

Mobile. Note the custom metadata (Genre, Starring) being displayed from

the Movies document library in the middle picture.

3.2 Mobile Access 57

Chapter 3

Figure 3.13

Blogs on a mobile.

Figure 3.14

Mobile enable

a view.

Figure 3.15

Viewing a

document from

a library.