Essential SharePoint 2013: Practical Guidance for Meaningful Business Results (2014)

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Planning for Mobile

A key first step in planning for mobility is to understand your business requirements and typical use case scenarios. Some questions to consider include the following:

Does your organization have a large population of mobile device users?

What are the typical activities and functions that people need to perform while they are mobile?

What devices will people be using—a PC, a laptop, a tablet, and/or a smartphone?

Will your organization allow people to access corporate content from a personal device?

Will people outside of your organization (e.g., customers, partners) be accessing SharePoint via a mobile device?

How will mobile access to SharePoint be provided? Your implementation and architecture will be different if you are running SharePoint on-premises or SharePoint Online.

Will people have reliable network connectivity or will they require offline access?

Do you need to update your existing security, governance, and information classification policies to support these new mobile scenarios?

How will mobile devices be supported? Will user support be available outside normal business hours?

Mobile User Personas

When planning for mobile, it is helpful to think about the various user personas that will need mobile access to SharePoint. Many scenarios are common across organizations:

Sales personnel often require access to their customer and supplier information while on the go. This typically includes documents and meeting notes.

Field workers, such as those who perform inspections or servicing at a customer site, may need access to company procedures, forms, and knowledge bases.

Customer service interaction may require that staff be able to access and input data without the barrier of a tethered PC or laptop.

People who work from home will often have access to SharePoint from their organization-issued devices. Many organizations are being asked to extend this same access to personal devices and computers that may not be managed by the organization today.

Customers and partners may be accessing your public Web site or an extranet based on SharePoint.

People who are active using SharePoint’s social features will want to be able to review their newsfeeds, post a question, reply to others, or post a photo while on the go. Mobile access to consumer social networking tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter has set the standard for enterprise social networking solutions. People expect that they will be able to access their social resources from their phones and tablets, and if they cannot, they often will not adopt enterprise social networking solutions and instead will continue to use e-mail and consumer tools to meet their collaboration needs.

Mobile Device Management

Many organizations have existing mobile strategies and device management policies. Some organizations restrict access to content to corporate-issued devices, such as a company laptop. Other organizations allow a BYOD policy where users can use their device of choice.

Often organizations are leveraging some form of mobile device management (MDM) technology to validate that the devices connecting to their corporate resources have adequate security controls in place, such as device encryption and password policies, to ensure that the organization is protected in the event the device is lost or stolen. These MDM tools often support the ability to locate a mobile device and perform a remote wipe of the device’s contents when necessary.

Good Technology and Microsoft’s Windows Intune are two examples of MDM solutions that are available to help manage mobile devices across a variety of platforms, including Windows, iOS, and Android. Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync is often used by organizations as well for some forms of mobile device and policy management.

Mobile Architectural Considerations

Once your organization has decided to support mobile device access to SharePoint, you will need to consider how people will access your SharePoint environment. Some organizations will allow access to SharePoint only from an organization-issued device when the device is connected to the organization’s network, whether that be physically in the office or over a VPN or DirectAccess (DA)-type technology that supports remote access.

Other organizations have evolved beyond supporting access only while connected to the organization’s network. Some organizations have allowed connections to their internal SharePoint environment from external devices. Some organizations have created a SharePoint extranet to support mobile access and extended this environment to support collaboration scenarios with external customers and partners. Organizations are now also evaluating hosted solutions, such as Microsoft’s SharePoint Online (which is discussed in detail in Chapter 11, “Taking SharePoint to the Cloud”), to provide access to SharePoint outside of the organization.

As part of identifying your technology requirements for mobile, you should also review what content will be accessible via mobile devices and determine if you will require data loss prevention (DLP) solutions to protect information leaving the company. One example is leveraging IRM technologies to protect sensitive files or document libraries that may be accessed from mobile devices. IRM technologies allow you to restrict viewing, sending, and/or editing of content opened from SharePoint and include the ability to set an expiration time for when rights are revoked. Consider a scenario where a salesperson has access to a PowerPoint presentation that contains confidential information on future product roadmaps. IRM can be leveraged to ensure that the salesperson cannot edit the document; to prevent others from viewing the file if it is sent to them via e-mail; and to have permissions on the document automatically expire on a specific date, which will require the user to go back to SharePoint to obtain the most current version of the presentation.

You may also want to revisit your information classification policies to consider what content should be accessible via mobile devices. You may choose to allow mobile access only to certain SharePoint environments or sites. For example, you may choose to have different security policies for content that is considered HBI such as SharePoint sites that contain organization trade secrets or customer confidential information such as Social Security or credit card numbers.

Another key aspect to consider is how people will authenticate with SharePoint from their mobile devices. One option is to leverage multifactor authentication technologies to add an extra layer of security when accessing content on mobile devices. This technology is helpful as an additional security check above and beyond the user’s network account and password. Common examples of multifactor authentication tools include RSA’s SecurID and Microsoft’s PhoneFactor, which require users to enter a second secure code (in addition to their SharePoint username and password) to gain access to content.

Depending on how your SharePoint environment has been architected, additional networking and security server infrastructure may be needed to enable people to access your SharePoint environment outside of your organization. To help on-premises customers set up SharePoint 2013 for mobile connectivity, Microsoft has published documentation and reference architectures on its TechNet site at http://zoom.it/E1BL#full.

SharePoint Online (as part of Microsoft’s Office 365 online service) is designed for secure external access and does not require any additional configuration or infrastructure to be accessed from mobile devices.

Mobile Usage Scenarios

There are a variety of mobile use case scenarios that we typically see. Some of these are:

Anywhere, anytime access to SharePoint content. The content may be documents that you are working with, Web pages, wikis, blogs, or various types of list data. Often when working with this form of content on a mobile device the goal is content viewing as opposed to content creation.

Electronic forms are often used on mobile devices by individuals who spend most of their day on the road. For example, they may be used as an inspection checklist for a field engineer working for an insurance company, or to sign up a customer for a new banking account while in a supermarket.

Workflow and task management scenarios are often used in conjunction with documents and forms. Often we ask people to review and approve items, and they may receive the workflow task while on the road.

Social computing is exploding from a consumer perspective. People are checking in on Foursquare, posting photos on Facebook, connecting with business colleagues on LinkedIn, and sharing news and information via Twitter. Many organizations are seeking to leverage similar tools securely within their organization to encourage information sharing, knowledge transfer, and connecting people across the organization. SharePoint 2013 now offers many new social tools that people will be looking to access when they are on the road, waiting for a meeting to begin, or sitting in the airport getting ready to board a flight.

As more documents, forms, and discussions are posted within SharePoint, people are looking for the ability to search this information while on the go regardless of the device.

Business intelligence, such as executive scorecards and dashboards, are great candidates for mobile applications since they are typically more about content viewing and consumption.

Sites and content will be accessed by people outside of your organization. Thus, you will need to determine which content needs to be optimized for mobile devices. For example, an airline may want to have special mobile pages for key functions that its customers will want to access from their mobile devices such as checking in for a flight or reviewing their flight status.

The SharePoint Phone and Tablet Experience

The native SharePoint pages have been enhanced with SharePoint 2013. SharePoint’s automatic mobile browser redirection feature is able to detect the capabilities of the mobile device and then render the appropriate page. For mobile devices that support HTML5, a new contemporary page view will be rendered (see Figure 19-1). This page view has been optimized for modern mobile devices. If the device does not support HTML5, SharePoint will fall back to rendering mobile pages with a classic view, which is similar to what existed in SharePoint 2010. Users also have the choice of rendering SharePoint pages in full site views, which provides a similar experience as if the user were accessing SharePoint from a personal computer. Note that for most mobile devices the full site view will often result in extensive horizontal and vertical scrolling since the screens on mobile devices are not as large as traditional desktop or laptop monitors.

Figure 19-1 SharePoint team site mobile view

SharePoint 2013 has been optimized for tablet devices that support touch, such as Apple iPad and Microsoft Surface. SharePoint has a new touch mode which removes the SharePoint ribbon and other navigational elements and allows the user to focus on viewing and interacting with SharePoint content (see Figure 19-2).

Figure 19-2 SharePoint team site in touch mode

For organizations that want to have greater control over how SharePoint 2013 renders Web pages on mobile devices, a new “channel” feature has been created. Typical use cases for the channel functionality are for organizations that are using SharePoint’s Web content management (WCM) capabilities for their intranet or public-facing Internet sites. The channel feature allows SharePoint 2013 site designers to implement different page templates for different device types. For example, your organization may have different page designs for users accessing SharePoint on an iPhone and on a PC. The key benefit of channels is that they allow content owners to manage one version of the content within SharePoint and enable SharePoint to detect the device (such as an iPhone or PC) viewing the page and then render the appropriate page template specified by the site designer. As mentioned earlier, while channels are a powerful tool in the toolbox of a SharePoint site designer, you should carefully consider what SharePoint sites and pages require this level of design and customization based on the key use cases of your site. Channels are discussed in more detail in Chapter 14, “Managing Web Content.”

SharePoint Newsfeed Mobile Applications

Organizations rolling out SharePoint 2013’s new social capabilities will want to consider supporting the new SharePoint Newsfeed mobile application. The SharePoint Newsfeed application enables people to keep up-to-date on their organizational newsfeed and to post new messages, including photos that they may want to take with their mobile device.

The SharePoint Newsfeed application is available on Windows Phone (see Figure 19-3) and iOS platforms (iPhone, iPad) (see Figure 19-4). A native Windows 8 application (for desktops, laptops, and tablets) is in development and targeted for release in the summer of 2013.

Figure 19-3 SharePoint Newsfeed application on a Windows Phone

Figure 19-4 SharePoint Newsfeed application on an iPad