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SharePoint on the iPhone

In this post I will compare five free apps for the Iphone to use SharePoint on the road. I am going to review iShare, iSharePhone, mDMS, Moshare and iSharePlusLite. These five apps are available form the appstore for free.

iShare did not log onto my SharePoint site so a test run was impossible. iSharePhone is also free but requires some server side stuff which is not an option and a viable model in my opinion. mDMS requires some server side stuff as well. This leaves only Moshare by Moprise and iSharePlusLite by Southlabs.

Moshare is easy to set up. My account is recognized immediately and I can browse through our portal at once. Navigation is nice but our announcements are sorted with the latest item on top and no way to change the sorting. Display of an announcement is nice and even lets you edit or delete the item! Documents can be views in both office 2003 and office 2007 formats. When viewing a document there are two options. The first is to copy a link to the clipboard and the second is an option to email a copy of a document. The latter option is somewhat unnecessary for the hardcore SharePoint users. Navigating you site structure is easy, showing subsites on every level and with the back option you can move easy. Moshare does not offer a breadcrumb so it is not easy to see where you are. Blogs and Wiki’s cannot be opened so there is a big flaw there. The app does not let you change settings so if green is not your color then you will not like the interface… Search enables you to search inside SharePoint and retrieves some great results.

SharePlusLite is a free app that has a pro version as well. Setting your portal up is straightforward. URL’s need http or https. SPL shows your subsites and content directly. Your announcements are sorted the right way, so the newest announcement is on top! The view of an announcement is not that great trying to show everything in an item, I only want the title and body that cannot be viewed directly. The icons of the announcement indicate if an attachment is present. Documents are not opened right away but PDF, office 2003 and 2007 formats are recognized.  An option is presented to email the document but not to copy the link. Icons for the different content are the same as in SharePoint. Blogs do not work in SPL (although they claim they work) but wiki pages can be viewed! Search is only filtering the items shown, no real SharePoint search here.

Actually I cannot choose… The interface of SharePlusLite is much more complete and better. But the functionality in Moshare is much better with better item viewing, editing and real search capabilities. Conclusion is that there are some apps around but quality needs some improvements, but then again what can you expect for free!

One other consideration is: is this any better than the mobile interface, standard since SharePoint 2007. Well actually the interface is quite nice but lacks the ability to browse site structure and is really simple (and loads a lot faster than the apps!).

Question remains how does this work on an iPhone 4 with SharePoint 2010?