Developing a winning Enterprise Mobile-First strategy is at the top of most CIOs' checklists. With SharePoint being positioned as an Enterprise Collaboration and Productivity Platform, mobilizing the Portals and Apps is part of enriching the B2E (Business-to-Employee) experience. The general perception is that turning on “Mobile View” in SharePoint 2013 will result in sites becoming Mobile-Friendly. However, the majority of the time, the resulting UI and UX do not meet the customer’s expectations. Mostly, customers are surprised to discover that SharePoint’s “Mobile View” although branded as Mobile-Ready, was not Mobile-Friendly, out of the box.
Although Device Channels in SharePoint 2013, really showed a lot of promise to solve the Mobility challenges, it came with its own set of limitations. As Developers, most of us know the pain involved in managing multiple pieces of code and the limited number of devices that can be targeted. Design Manager does not solve the problem. It only prevents you from using SharePoint Designer to create your HTML Markup and CSS code. It doesn’t abstract you out of SharePoint’s default styles and Markup as such.
Using AngularJS as the base framework, Bootstrap and HTML5 for responsiveness, and SharePoint 2013’s REST API model as the service layer for transactions, mobile friendliness can be accomplished easily. The recommended architecture considerations would be:
While the usage of Bootstrap and Media Queries, is pretty obvious for building the styles needed for mobile responsiveness, some of the high-level advantages of using AngularJS framework with SharePoint are:
Additionally, SharePoint 2013 REST API provided the necessary Endpoints, to securely interact with data in Lists and Libraries across various Sites within a Web Application.
Using this framework would not only help solve any current SharePoint Mobility challenges but also provide a base for Scalability, Extensibility, and Flexibility. Some of the additional benefits observed are: