SharePoint 2010 Mobile Web Part development

January 17, 2010   22:15

For a SharePoint 2010 demo i’m building a web part that should be accessible by Mobile devices. In SharePint 2010 all mobile devices are redirected by default to the mobile SharePoint rendering engine.

The mobile rendering engine of SharePoint provides mobile users access to the sites with a completely stripped interface. Its main function is to list all libraries and to provide basic access to them. For wiki and blog sites the rendering engine also provides some content rendering.

To keep the amount of data as low as possible, almost all web parts are completely stripped from the mobile site. Only when a web part developer provided a special mobile version of the web part, the web part will be accessible in the interface and to keep the mobile screen as empty as possible, the user must first expand the web part via its title to see it.

Documentation about SharePoint Mobile development is provided at MSDN. At first it all looks quite complex, but building a mobile version of a web part is actually not that hard. Below I will explain the required steps with a ‘Hello world’ example. For this sample I will not rename the default object names provided by the Visual Studio templates.

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SharePoint federated search may cause performance problems because of default settings

September 9, 2009   11:16

My colleague Vincent Boer has been working very hard at one of our clients to sort out a performance problem at their SharePoint Intranet portal.

The problem was that after a search in the search center was performed, the browser would not navigate any further for 1 or 2 minutes. Finally this blog of Sourav provided the right solution.

Since the Infrastructure update, search has been extended with Federated search. The default setting for the federated search results, is to query the online OpenSearch for results. This is fine as long as the web server has internet access, but if internet access is restricted, performance problems will occur in the SharePoint environment. The solution is to alter the configuration and set Federated Search to use the local Index. Basically you’ll have to decide if you would like to use OpenSearch and enable internet access for the server, or keep it locked and use the classic index.

Somehow Microsoft did not include any clear instructions with the Infrastructure update about this new default setting and possible implications for non internet enabled servers. If your Search center is experiencing performance issues, check out Sourav’s blog posting for a possible solution and detailed steps to solve it.

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