WP7 Mango Expands SharePoint Support

Something i had always wanted to take advantage of on my Windows Phone was the Office Hub, which includes word, excel, powerpoint and onenote, and the most exciting part of the Office Hub for me was that is had a version of SharePoint Workspace.

However as many phone users also found out, it did not suit many scenarios, with a lot of effort needed to get authentication working properly, most of which was out of the question for many. However i am lucky enough to be trialling Windows Phone 7 – Mango beta, one of the changes includes an update to the Office Hub, this allows you to add SharePoint sites to workspace, even if they use authentication such as NTLM.

The version of SharePoint workspace on the Phone allows you to browse lists and libraries and traverse sub-sites. You cannot add or edit list items, but you can open supported documents (i.e. excel, word, powerpoint) and modify them in the Phone version of these applications and then save them back to the server. A full overview of how to add a SharePoint site into the Phone can be found here.

Lastly, Office365 is also supported as part of the Mango update, the process for this is slightly different, simply add your Office365 email address as an outlook mailbox, and the phone will detect it as being a Office365 site, configuring your Office365 Team Site in the SharePoint page of the Office Hub, also confirming that a mobile version of Lync will be available on the marketplace soon.

Hopefully the next update will support adding/editing list items, as well as InfoPath capabilities.

About Chris Grist

Chris SharePoint Architect for Beach Energy in Adelaide, South Australia. Chris has specialised in SharePoint for the last few years and has over 12 years experience in the IT Industry. Catch Chris on twitter at @griStdoG View all posts by Chris Grist →