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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Two custom development examples build for SharePoint 2007

September 30, 2007   19:26

SharePoint provides a lot of functionality out of the box, but of course there are always parts that have to be custom build. In this post I will show you 2 cool examples of what is possible with SharePoint when you add some custom development. Last week I’ve developed these two custom parts at Macaw to extend the functionality of the document library.

File preview
The standard document library allows the user to manage and download documents. One of the things missing in SharePoint is the option to show a preview of the document. To add this functionality we have decided to add a Web Part that streams the file inside an IFrame. The web part is then connected to the normal document list. I have created a small Flash movie that shows the final functionality.

Send a file attachment by e-mail
One of the out of the box functionalities that SharePoint provides is the possibility to e-mail a direct link to a document that is hosted inside SharePoint. The receiver of the e-mail can click the link inside the message to connect to SharePoint and view the file. This works fine for internal SharePoint users, but sometimes you must also mail a file to an external user.

It requires custom development to send an e-mail with the file attached. To make SharePoint email the file we have used a SharePoint feature to add a new menu option to the item menu that presents the user with an e-mail page. After filling in the form SharePoints sends out the message with the selected file as attachment. Of course you can see a demo of it in another Flash movie.

[UPDATE 12-11-2007]
Changed the flash html files. Because of an error in the script the flash movies where not visible in Firefox.

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