The adoption of mobile technologies is accelerating rapidly. At least as far as the U.S. is concerned, I credit Apple, the iPhone and the iPhone App Store for capturing the imagination of the consumer and demonstrating the power and potential of mobile computing. Reasonable people might disagree. You could argue that Blackberry took email and messaging mainstream. But whatever your preference for brand or device, it's hard to argue that we're in the midst of a mobile revolution.
So it's especially unfortunate that SharePoint currently has so little to offer the mobile user. Yeah, you can get a slightly better look at a SharePoint page by adding /m to the URL, but the 
average SharePoint page is still cumbersome to unusable on a mobile device. The Safari browser on my iPhone will render the page completely, but again... everything is so small, it's extremely difficult to successfully click on the links required to navigate.
That's why I was so excited recently when we met the team from H3 Solutions and got to see a demo of their new development framework for creating mobile SharePoint applications, called Mobile Entrée. For a basic overview of the Mobile Entrée framework, check out the guest blog post by H3's Jason Hall, So Who Wants to Develop Mobile Apps for SharePoint?
Here's the two sentence value proposition for Mobile Entrée. 1) Build the mobile interface to your SharePoint application with Mobile Entrée once, and you automagically get instant support for iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre and just about any other mobile device you can name. 2) Using Mobile Entrée, you create a view (or many role-specific views) of your SharePoint site or application that includes only those controls a user might need in a mobile context.
I know, I know... this all sounds good, but what does it mean? "Mobile optimized interfaces for SharePoint with native cross device compatibility?" It sounds like a chain of meaningless business buzzwords until you've seen it. So let's take a look at a prototype the team at H3 built. We challenged them to optimize Bamboo's new SharePoint Project Management Central application for mobile... and in literally a matter of hours, they delivered.
A Mobile Interface for SharePoint Project Managers
If you haven't seen it yet, PM Central is the newest addition to Bamboo's lineup of products facilitating project management using SharePoint. By SharePoint standards, PM Central is a pretty big, complex application. It provides project portfolio management, rich task management, advanced calendaring, issue management, and much more. The application includes more than 16 of Bamboo's most popular SharePoint Web Parts.
Here's what the application looks like in a desktop browser...
Now, here is the streamlined mobile interface.
The "reductionist" approach to optimizing for mobile means that a lot of the UI from the desktop application disappears. And yet, the critical functionality, especially those features that would be most useful to someone accessing the application on-the-go with a smart phone is retained.
Personally, I have really enjoyed the intellectual exercise of taking a desktop application like PM Central and thinking through what features need to be surfaced in a mobile context. "Thinking mobile" is generating a lot of new product concepts, and in general reminding us to be efficient and streamlined on the desktop as well.
The other very surprising discovery that this process has yielded is how great a platform SharePoint is going to be for delivering mobile applications. SharePoint's native list-driven user interface translates naturally to the limited screen size of a mobile device. More importantly, SharePoint's robust handling of permissions and groups means that mobile interfaces can be easily optimized for users based on roles and responsibilities. Take PM Central as an example, the interface for a project manager can surface displays and functions pertinent to that person's job... ensuring that a project or projects are on schedule and on budget. The interface for an individual team member can be focused just on assigned tasks. Mobile dashboards showing the status, health and risk of a complete portfolio of projects can be presented to executives and stakeholders. Mobile Entrée makes it easy to isolate a feature set for a particular job function based on roles and responsibilities you've probably already defined in SharePoint. While this blog post has been focused on creating mobile interfaces for existing desktop SharePoint applications, the mind quickly races ahead to mobile-only apps with a SharePoint backend. From help desk operations to mobile sales force automation, it is easy to imagine SharePoint-based mobile applications that are never accessed from a desktop.
Hopefully we've sparked the imagination of a few SharePoint developers, and begun to whet your appetite for mobile access to SharePoint applications. We'll be sharing quite a bit more over the coming weeks and months.
So what's next? If you're a developer, jump in and give Mobile Entrée a try. The fully functional framework is available as a free 30-day trial.
If you're a Bamboo customer, or interested in purchasing mobile-enabled SharePoint applications like the prototype shown above, please let us hear from you. Comment on this post or send email to me at steve.gaitten@bamboosolutions.com We need to hear from you about the SharePoint functionality you want to extend to your mobile users. As always, your feedback will determine our priorities as we roll out these new capabilities. I am especially interested in hearing from those of you who have already purchased PM Central, and would like to acquire the mobile extensions.
Finally, I have invited Joe Herres, one of the principals at H3 to talk about the process of building the prototype PM Central mobile interface. I suspect you will be amazed by the relatively low level of effort required, and the speed at which this was accomplished. Thanks, and stand by for more in the coming days!
UPDATE: Joe's post is now available at PM Central Mobile, 20 Hours Start to Finish.
Posted
Jul 08 2009, 04:37 PM
by
Steve Gaitten
My name is Steve Gaitten, I am Director of Online Operations at Bamboo. My primary mission is to make Bamboo Nation the most useful SharePoint community site on the web. I am also focused on ensuring a world class shopping experience for customers who visit the Bamboo Solutions Online Store. Prior to Bamboo, I spent over a decade at America Online. At AOL my most recent roles included Director of Product Management in the Messaging & Social Media division as well as Managing Editor of AOL Money & Finance. I am a patented inventor, a bad golfer, an enthusiastic horticulturalist and a dog lover.