Whitepaper: Mobilizing SharePoint with SharePlus Launchpads

Trend: The Mobile User Experience

The trend is here to stay. Mobile devices are everywhere, giving executives and employees around the globe the chance to capitalize on the advantages of the mobile platform. But do they?

Many companies want to bring their SharePoint experience to mobile devices for a number of reasons. Mobility itself is definitely a number one reason with many advantages, including work flexibility and productivity gains among others. Another important reason, when available, is the possibility to quickly access the information, anytime and everywhere, even without connectivity. Finally, companies that already have custom functionality developed over SharePoint face the challenge of successfully transitioning to the mobile platform.

The SharePlus experience

That’s where Infragistics’ SharePlus can help. An integral part of Infragistics’ Enterprise Mobility solution, SharePlus delivers an intuitive and efficient experience, engaging users while also encouraging communication and knowledge sharing. Users are able to connect with colleagues, track their work, and get notifications on recently modified resources.

In addition, SharePlus provides users with access to SharePoint information securely and precisely when they need it, even without connectivity.

SharePlus flexibility opens up a wide range of possibilities, including quick corporate branding, analytics on the go, and personalized information views. Additionally, integration with ReportPlus empowers users to create amazing dashboards that bring their data to life using charts, pivot tables, gauges, maps, and other visualizations to communicate insight while also achieving a visually compelling result. With launchpads, users are able to extend SharePlus with personalized views for any site, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to display images, animations, rich content, and high quality interactions.

Mobilizing a SharePoint customization

Introduction

When a company wants to bring their custom-tailored SharePoint experience to mobile devices, they take on a complex project.  After years of using custom functionality developed over SharePoint, heavy customization is probably needed.

SharePlus Launchpads offer an efficient and effective solution to many scenarios that require this customization. Not only can launchpads be quickly personalized to meet the company’s needs, but they also bring to the table new platform-specific features, such as interactive gestures and online/offline data availability.

The scenario

A good example scenario is a company in need of a generic horizontal solution that includes area-specific sites, such as Sales, Human Resources, Financial, and Production. In this example, every site might be customized in order to maximize the user productivity in SharePoint: the Human Resources site can be organized to promote general news and social communication, while the Sales site might be all about the analysis of data, tracking customers, and searching specific libraries with price lists and other documentation.

This whole solution would require different sites, each with a specific purpose on its own - and SharePlus can make that happen. What follows next is an overview of the solution.

SharePlus solves the problem

In this particular solution, all SharePlus users can navigate to any of the available area-specific sites. When the SharePlus app opens, the user is presented with a welcome launchpad that works as a personalized doorway to SharePoint. Below you can see a sample launchpad suitable for this scenario.

Now, let’s assume you are the user and want to navigate to the Human Resources site. After tapping over the link to the site, you are presented with another launchpad displaying the latest corporate news and the existing communities with top discussions. All of this content, including News and Discussion Topics, is dynamically loaded from SharePoint. All SharePlus launchpads are highly interactive, and links to the SharePoint content can be navigated easily. So for example, you can open the community’s discussions and contribute your own thoughts.

The SharePoint content presented by launchpads is retrieved from the same location used to display the web page content in a browser. Meaning that once the content is updated, both the launchpad and the web page will automatically display the updated information. In addition, by using SharePlus synchronization capabilities, the updated content can also be presented while offline. Launchpads are responsive, they respond and adapt to the screen size or orientation of mobile devices. When you compare the screenshot of the mobile device launchpad above and the actual SharePoint site below, you can see this illustrated nicely.

In addition, SharePlus enables users to access all the SharePoint content from their sites whenever they need it, even without a working internet connection. So, in this example, let’s say you’re traveling for business, and make edits to your SharePoint data while you’re on the plane. When you land, you can sync your new content and maximize your mobile productivity in SharePoint, thanks to SharePlus.

Optimizing the access to information

Introduction

For companies with hundreds of sites and a large amount of SharePoint data, the key value comes from achieving a vertical solution that ensures the fastest possible access to information. Specific users require a quick and personalized access to their relevant work information.

This optimized experience can be thoroughly achieved with SharePlus. Application Launchpads will ensure quick and personalized access to these specific groups of users, while ReportPlus dashboards can provide users with valuable data analysis capabilities.

The scenario

Let’s take a look at scenario #2. Unlike the first scenario, a vertical solution is now recommended, as the company must provide a new group of users with their everyday business resources in the best possible way. As an example, let’s work with the group of users from the Sales area:  the sales executives. Their tasks normally include making appointments, managing price lists, reporting or analyzing the pipeline, forecasting and planning targets, recording orders, and sending details to their company, among others.

This solution is not about personalized sites or specific areas; these sales executives require customized access to their resources, which are spread across different sites within SharePoint. For these users, that information should be all available together from the very beginning.

SharePlus solves the problem

When the SharePlus app first opens, all sales executives will be presented with their personal mobile launchpad. This welcome screen will include all their everyday business resources already displayed - or, when necessary, a link to the place where they are stored in SharePoint.

In this launchpad, sales executives can access their calendars to check on their appointments, consult their price lists stored in document libraries, and open new forms to complete and save new orders.

The sales manager may need more information, particularly around data analysis. This requirement can be met by displaying a ReportPlus dashboard inside SharePlus similar to the one shown here:

Using ReportPlus dashboards, the manager can access charts and pivot tables to gain insight about the department’s performance. In addition, the link to this dashboard can be secured, for example, by adding restricted SharePoint permissions to this content.

Finally, sales executives may need access to their content while visiting customers. By taking advantage of the offline capabilities found within SharePlus, they get to access their content whenever they need it, whether they have a working internet connection or not.

Conclusion

Whereas SharePoint is a platform used to create server-side solutions that integrate intranet portals, document and file management, websites, and social networking; Infragistics SharePlus is an extensible platform designed to create SharePoint-enabled solutions for mobile devices. Launchpads and dashboards provide extensibility over SharePlus, offering an efficient and effective solution to the mobilization problem, embracing flexibility and app customization.