SharePoint on Mobile Devices

SharePoint can be viewed in mobile devices in several different ways. You can go with the OOB mobile view, which you can bypass in your device by manipulating the ?Mobile=1 (--> 0) parameter in the url. Or you can disable the mobile view altogether to bring the full experience to all devices, to the extent that it happens to work - mostly good for public facing sites meant for browsing sites, not working with e.g. documents.

But, who says you can't have both? I personally hate it if a website forces me to a mobile site when using my phone or tablet. Many times, all I want to do is browse the site, the full site, not a listing of libraries. Then again, sometimes that is exactly what I want. HTML5 may (or may not, can't know just yet) solve the problem of mobile views, but then again, will it push users, again, to a forced mobile view?

As for currently, I'm very much pro full site for everybody, and using separate mobile apps for the data browsing. In the Windows Phone 7x, there's the inbuilt Office Hub that does the job, providing straightforward access to the SharePoint library. The other platforms, iOS and Android, need a little help from the apps developers.

The most obvious choice would be the SharePlus app, available for both iOS and Android. The Lite version is free, the pro version costing all of 15,99€. Even with the lite version you can nicely browse the contents of sites - the contents of lists and libraries. On my Galaxy Tab this works just perfectly, but for some reason on the iPad I couldn't access our intranet site using the https.

So on my iPad I needed to come up with something else. I found that the harmon.ie SharePoint app (Lite) didn't mind the https, and works fine. It doesn't seem to show all site content, only libraries (the full version might), but a plus for harmon.ie is that it provides easy access to my own MySite automatically.

The Ancient Feel

My Galaxy Tab is only 18 months old. It should, by standards of a time already apparently long gone, still be in its prime, a perfectly modern device. But as technology in this stuff goes, it has already started to feel ancient. It's not the size of the screen, nor any sort of bulkiness of physical design. It's the touch experience, the pre-Win7-like-symptoms of the system, the UI deficiensies. It is, de facto, a first generation tablet.

The last real update the Galaxy Tab got, was the Gingerbread. I can sort of understand, that if the technology of a device is insufficient, there is no mind in pushing the newer versions of the operating systems to it. It would only result in even more user frustration, when things only get worse. In some ways, I feel like even updating to the Gingerbread was a mistake. My Tab used to be quite smooth and trustworthy - nowadays it crashes quite frequently and feels somehow tacky to use.

Not only that, but I am quite disappointed by the browsers for the device. The built-in one? I ditched it long ago. I tried Skyfire, Opera Mini, Firefox mobile and latest and currently the Dolphin browser. Dolphin is my favorite one, and so far has been more or less the one to fullfill my needs. But even so, the browsing experience is nowhere near the built-in browser of the iPad, the Safari, of course.

Before buying my iPad I scouted out the other options, i.e. the newer Android based tablets since that was what I'd been using already for a year or so, and there still is no Windows tablet available. Even though they definitely were more sleek than my poor Tab, and - at least in the store ;) - not at all tacky, I still got myself an iPad, and felt defeated. I don't have anything against iPads per se, as I have stated before. My problem is the hype around it, and the loads of sh*t Apple gets away with, simply by being Apple (and, as for now, the maker of the undeniably best tablet so far).

I have high hopes for Win8 tablets. Android as a UI is like Windows in its XP's. Gives you a lot of modification options and enables you to arrange your icons as you like etc. But in the long run, it gets tiresome. In the end, even I just want my apps available with as low maintenance as possible. The iOS does this - but it is high time they get a worthy competitor. So does WinPhone7. And I myself, after using the WinPhone7 UI on my Lumia for these past months, really hope Microsoft in Win8 tablets will redeem their promises. For I like the UI even better than the iOS which I admit to liking quite a lot!

As for my Galaxy Tab? Is it at the end of its lifecycle already then? For sure no! Ok, it's not as sleek and cool anymore as it used to at least feel, but it is still a good device. My iPad is not 3G, but I can insert my second SIM in my Tab. The Tab is more lightweight and slips easily into my purse. I like it as a Kindle device much better than the iPad (holding it leaves dents on my palms...). It's got some cool apps like the Cartoon Camera, that you don't get on iPads. It's got some games my daughters like to play, that you don't get on iPads.

No, time has not flown by my "age old" Android device just yet. But it is a good reminder of how fast the technology is advancing now. And I don't even have a "new" iPad, I have the iPad2. We'll see how old that feels in a year or so.

OneNote Mobile Apps Review

OneNote is undeniably and without question my all time favorite software application. Especially when combined with Skydrive. Even though there are some slight glitches, or maybe I should say user experience defects, when it comes to the cloud usage; I had a real hard time trying to share my work notebooks via SharePoint and finally resigned to simply store them all in my Skydrive, where my personal one already existed. I even tried Dropbox, but while that is convenient enough on PCs, it doesn't really work on mobile devices.

Hands up, who's not familiar with OneNote and is wondering what the heck am I writing about? Ah, probably those of you didn't even read this far. Ok, hands up, who's wondering what all the fuss is about, it's just a notepad, isn't it? Nope, not just a notepad. It is the most efficient and effortless way I know to make notes on this and that and add images and screenshots and documents and whatnot! to the notebook. Read more on Microsoft's OneNote page.

So, I have my work project information in OneNote, my kids' school schedules and info notes, my travel documents, and all sorts of this and that in OneNote. Already before it was available on any mobile platform, I stored my personal notebook in Skydrive, which enabled me to access it on any laptop I happened to be using (3, on a regular basis; two personal ones and the work laptop). As for last autumn, I had no mobile device on which I could access the notebook. Now I've got three. Oh, rejoice!

Windows phone

The first one, the one with the built-in OneNote app (i.e. Office Hub), was of course my Lumia 800 Windows Mango phone. I didn't really even think of it beforehand, but when I logged in with my WinLive account, as the phone asked me to do, the notebook appeared in my Office Hub. And this further inspired me to share the work notebooks to, as it provided an easy access to different kinds of data without the need to open the laptop.

Naturally the Win phone natively integrated OneNote mobile version is the best one. It allows you to pin notebooks or pages to tiles. It allows you to create and edit notes (pages in notebook sections). You can add to do -lists, numbered and bulleted lists, pictures (either from camera roll or take a new photo) and even audio to the pages. And you can copy-paste text t from e.g. a website to the pages. Pages can also be emailed.

Unfortunately, the phone screen is kinda small for any major note taking and such, so here's one more reason to look forward to the Win8 tablets!

iPad

Then came the iPad. The OneNote app for iPad was released in December last year, and I got my iPad conveniently about a month later. So it was, in fact, among the first applications I installed on the iPad, along with Lync. Out of the three mobile OneNotes, it also holds the second place in features and overall usability - and as for now, the first place in non-OneNote-related usability what with the biggest screen and all.

Like in the Win phone, you can create and edit notebook pages, add pictures from camera roll or take a new photo, add to do -lists and bulleted lists, copy-paste text, and email pages. Numbered lists don't seem to be present, nor audio.

The features that I don't like in the iPad OneNote are that the notebooks are displayed in an apple way as a pop-out sidebar instead of e.g. the starting page. The last viewed page remains open when the app is closed, and the app opens to that page when launched again. I would like to leave the application in the notebook list, not with a page open.

Android

The OneNote Android app was released only today, I could say finally. Since I also have a Galaxy Tab, which I still do use somewhat even while owning an iPad, I jumped at the release and installed the OneNote on my Galaxy Tab. The free version allows up to 500 pages, after which you need to get the full version for a few euros. Only the synced pages count.

The OneNote experience on Android was quite pleasant, the UI resembling the Win phone version more than the iPad one, editing was easy enough with the same possibilities offered as on the other mobile OneNote apps - to do -lists, bullets, numbered list too, the pics from either camera roll or a new photo, and copy-pasting. There is no email page command available though.

The only thing that was a letdown, really, was creating new pages. No matter where I am when creating a new page, it always creates it in Unfiled notes section of the Personal (Web) notebook - which I don't even use, since I already had a personal Skydrive-stored notebook, long before the mobile devices came along. And I can't seem to get rid of this annoying unnecessary and unwanted notebook if I tried - obviously, since the mobile apps want to use it when I don't.

All-in-all

None of the mobile OneNote apps enable moving or copying the pages or sections around. But all-in-all, the basic functions are there, my data from different notebooks is available and easily synced, I can edit the note pages too. Hurray for mobile OneNote - my notetaking in seminars etc. took a huge leap forward with the release of iOs and Android OneNote apps :)

Juggling

It used to be so simple. You had the one PC, stuck in the corner between the desk and the wall, and in order to do whatever you did on the PC back then, play Pacman or Tetris or whatnot, all you needed was to somehow pressure the other one playing Pacman or Tetris or whatnot ot abandon the PC and let you have your turn. This was more or less the case still in the first years of the internet for the masses, up until people started to have the truly peersonal computers, the laptops.

Ok, the same still applies to many, e.g. my kids need to share one laptop. And more often than not, I need to share my iPad or Galaxy Tab with them (for quite a while, I do not intend to get them personal ones just yet), which actually brings us to the topic I originally was going at. The multitude of dedvices to juggle between. When I'm not sharing the gadgets, I more or less find use for each one of them, switching back and forth.

So what's with the juggling? I prefer the Tab when reading a book on Kindle, because it is more lightweight. But then I notice the notification, I have new email. Instead of reading it on the Tab, I set the Tab down and read it on the iPad. Why? Because the Tab does not really do multitasking. I could open the email on top of the book, nut getting back to the book is a strain for the back arrow takes me through the email app instead of taking me back to Kindle.

While I'm at it on the iPad, I check Facebook. There's a video there that I'd like to watch. But darned if I can't play it on the iPad! Decisions decisions, to ditch the book and check the video on the Tab, running the risk that it actually doesn't, or to dig out the laptop from, eh? the daughters' room where she's been playing the Sims on it.

There are so many other examples too, like uploading photos from phone or one of these other mobile devices to Flickr, then needing to open the laptop to organize them fuether. Or pitching a pdf document to dropbox on PC after downloading it from, say, learning center or such, in order to read it more conoveniently on the Tab or iPad. And so on.

So are things more simple with these devices or does the possibility to choose simply make the life with them more complicated? Like with photos streaming from here and there to diifferent folders on the PC, instead of me uploading then from a single camera? I don't know. What I do know, is that none of the devices are good for all things. And the dedvice world is far from being ready. And the instances dealing with all or any ddevice platforms as in internet pages, internet technologies, and applications, are far from perfect.

Probably never will be either, when everybody is pulling their own way, of course.

UI highlights and letdowns

Overall UI and screens
Got to say, I like the Win tiles best. There's the list of applications, and there's the tiles. And I can add more than just apps as tiles. The tile can be a contact person, the live tile showing the person's picture and latest social media updates. It can be a specific "page" or folder or part in an app. Some tiles are live, others not. What I do miss a bit on the WinPhone, is the multiple screens, like Galaxy Tab and iPad have.

On Android, I can add shortcut icons to both applications and parts of applications, and then there's the widgets that I like, too. And I can arrange and drag and drop the icons on each screen page as I wish. On iPad, the icons are apps only, and always auto-organized. But then again, I could, if I would like to, group them inside folders. But no live nothing.

Keyboard
The Galaxy Tab, or rather Android, has the functionally best keyboard, in my opinion. I really like the smart possibility to press and hold in order to type special characters and numbers. And the possibility to not use it, for of course it also has the toggle button for the special characters keyboard, just like iPad and Lumia the Winphone that both lack the press abd hold feature.

As for the iPad, I personally like the split keyboard (came with iOs5), even though the layout isn't perfect in all applications, causing the keyboard to float on top of the field instead of below it. But the best feature in iPad is the possibility to connect the nice small and lightweight wireless Apple keyboard to it, is a definite advantage. How much easier would it be for me too now to be typing this with such a keyboard than typ(o)ing on this touch kb.

Text cursor
Here too, the feature most to my liking is on Galaxy Tab, i.e. Android. First of all, it is possible to simply tap the cursor in the middle of a word, and then select the whole word if needed, or move the cursor to a different spot by dragging a tool.

I don't really like it that by tapping I can place the cursor only at the end or beginning of a word, even though I finally am starting to get used to the press and hold and then place the cursor way of doing it. The select with a double tap is nice though.

E-mail clients
With my Lumia, I love it that I can combine several Outlook accounts into one list view. Of course I could add even the gmail to the same list, but I like to keep the private and work emails separated. And let's emphasize: I like the list view, also on the Androids.

That as opposite to the UI of the iOs email client, that combines all email accounts to the same app without asking, and the list view isn't even the main view (at least not on iPad), but a side bar. I sincerely don't like it that the app opens to an email, the last one I read, instead of showing the email list of a selected mail folder!

OneNote
Same goes for the OneNote app (and actually also Dropbox app and some other similar ones too) for iPad. Otherwise it serves its purpose well enough; I can easily access my cloud shared OneNote notebooks, add notes and such. But, for obvious reasons, the OneNote client for WinPhone is better.

Battery charge level display
The iPad, the iOs, has it natively, the battery charge level percentage is always displayed by the battery. For the Android, you can get a free app to add the percentage display in the status bar. For WinPhone, there apparently is no way to even build such an app. When I want to check the exact battery life time, I need to go to the setting - but at least it's there.

The Pointy Thingy

I got myself a Bamboo pointer pen for the tablets. Mainly with a thought of using it for sketching some work-related designs - which I'm not at all sure I will ever do - but primarily just to have one. It's quite rare for me to but these sort of things for that sort of flimsy reason, but it's been known to happen. At least with the less expensive stuff.

Anyway, my school age daughters, who love their My Horse and Pet Hotel and My Room My Dog and Wher's My Water and whatnot tablet games (where's Angry Birds? you ask. It's there too, but no novelty anymore) and adopted the pen immesiately! Even with their smaller fingers than an adult has, they found the pointing device more accurate and better to use with the games than the finger.

For games, and definately for drawing and sketching plans it sure is. But for flipping through Flipboard or surfing the internet or writing an email or this blog, I wouldn't say so. And what comes to different tablets, it works perfec with the iPad, but the Galaxy Tab screen is just too, I don't know what, but anyway, can't really say it works well enough with that. And it's perfect with the Lumia800 screen too.

My World of Mobile Devices

I have been asked to blog about my experiences with my mobile devices quite many times. I will be blogging about different apps and features separately, but before I get into those details, a small overview of what I play with, and what I think of them.

As for the devices in my current life, Galaxy Tab is the oldest. It has traveled with me to the other side of the world and back. For a year, it was my primary tablet - my only tablet - the device I relied on when I didn't take a laptop with me, or when I simply didn't want to open one, at home or elsewhere. It fits in my purse, it's easy to hold even with one hand, and I like the Android platform.

In a comparison, Galaxy Tab has a rather small and smudgy screen than the iPad. It is more fun surfing the internet with the iPad because of this. It is also more fun to play games with it, according to my daughters, for I don't really play games. But I like to read books rather on the Tab than iPad, because of the pocket book -like size, which also makes it more lightweight and easier to hold. And, it seems, the Kindle in iPad does not have the Amazon store integrated, so all purchases are also made on my Tab Kindle.

The iPad, the newest of my devices, has been as good as I expected. Not superior to Galaxy Tab, other than in the size and quality of the screen, that is, both are good and have their own purposes and best for usage cases. E.g. for a blogger like me, the keyboard possesses a problem. The full one is too wide for my small hands, so I like the split one, really do. But the split keyboard came with the iOs5, and is in no way taken into consideration by most of the applications: it slides on top of the field where I'm supposed to be writing in.

The again, iPad has the Flipboard. There is nothing like it! Though in a way the People feed of the Windows Phone Mango comes actually close. Flipboard is awesome in the way it makes otherwise streaming data into a nice layout magazine. It is for sitting in my armchair or in my bed, scanning the news and the tweets and the FB shares. It is for reading articles when I've got time to read. The WinPhone People feed is a quickie. It combines the Twitter and FB feeds into one stream, allowing me to easily scan through the highlights when I don't have time for more.

That Windows Phone. I got a Lumia 800 a couple months ago, and loved it at once. Well, ok, the initial sucky battery life was a nuisance, but it improved on the maybe third full charge, when I let it be on the charger for maybe 16 hours overnight plus, without touching it while it was on the charger. Ever since the battery life has been much better than it used to be on my previous phone, the HTC Desire, an Android that I did like a lot too.

I love the Mango, I love the Lumia! The UI is nice, I like the (live) tiles. The screen is bright and sharp and sleek, the touch experience very fluent and easy - as is on the iPad. The Galaxy Tab loses this contest, unfortunately the touch experience on that one (mind you, the original 7" one!) is far behind. Lumia still lacks applications like Skype and Kindle (ok, I'm not even sure I'd like to read a book on the small screen), and it lacks the battery life percentage display and the WiFi hotspot I so loved on Desire. Let's see what improvements the upcoming update brings! Hopefully that hotspot as has been rumored.

To be fair, I like all these devices. They all have their good features and they all lack something. As said, I don't really take sides or discriminate. I don't hype about one over the other either. I'm glad to have all these different ones, they more or less complement each other.

And the cloud? I love the cloud too!

I share my OneNote notebook(s) over the internet, one via SkyDrive, other two via SharePoint, plus I use some community ones. I love it that I can easily access them from my iPad and my Lumia. I store some files in Dropbox and love it that they too are accessible from all of my mobile devices. I can read my gmail on all of them, I can combine my two Outlook accounts on my Lumia. I have my Outlook calendar (which is for private appointments as much as for work, all in one) available on each device.

When I take pictures on Lumia, they are automatically uploaded to Skydrive from where I can easily download them to my laptop. And on iPad, to iCloud from where they even automatically drop down to my Pictures folder on my laptop. Although, this creates a new problem: does it make things easier or more difficult for me for real? I archive my photos on a USB hard drive, in folders in a very old fashioned way. To keep up with all these photo streams can be a task! Maybe I should change something in my photo archiving? But so far, I haven't been at home with Lightrooms and such.