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Going mobile with SharePoint? Not so fast




December 19, 2012 —  (Page 1 of 2)
The idea of responsive Web design is that you create one website design, with one structure that will load a given Web page for any device. The Web page will respond automatically to the device at the client-side, adapting to the device’s width and rendering a semi-tailored interface for it.

Briefly, this is done through fluid grid technology, which sets the width of the Web page at percentages based on the width of the device display, rather than fixed widths. As the screen shrinks, the HTML and CSS will hide some elements the screen has no room for, or switch from a three-column format to two-column, or even perhaps change the navigation to make it more mobile friendly.

The term was coined around June 2010 (Ethan Marcotte on the website “A List Apart” has written extensively on the subject) and it has made its way into the SharePoint world last year.

Yet SharePoint presents certain challenges when it comes to deploying on mobile devices.

The good news is that not too many people have yet tried to deploy SharePoint onto mobile devices, according to Eric Overfield of PixelMill. Responsive Web design “is still really new in the SharePoint world. It’s kind of difficult because SharePoint wasn’t built around those principles,” he said.

In responsive Web design, the browser knows its own width (thanks to a property in CSS3 called media query) and loads what it’s told to load, based on that width. A quick problem for SharePoint right out of the chute is that IE8, Microsoft’s browser, doesn’t recognize CSS3.

But beyond that, there are other challenges.

First, in a responsive design world, the server does not care about what it’s sending to the device; the server sends the same files to every different device, and the device is given enough information to know how to render the page based on the device. (This, Overfield noted, points out a problem: This strategy requires every device to download all data and styling that it might not even need, and at a heavy cost to those using devices tied to limited data plans.) In the SharePoint world, you can use device channels coupled with responsive Web design to create a semi-custom experience for each device, he said, but he added that “it’s kind of tricky to do. SharePoint 2013 is supposed to help out with the image-loading a little bit, but I don’t have enough experience with it to tell you if that is or is not the case. My initial feeling is that it’s still going to take a lot of work, probably more work than people are going to want to put into it.”

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Comments


12/24/2012 01:31:41 AM EST

Sounds like the real issue is SP's use of wide tables. The idea of having multiple sites for different device types (desktop / mobile / tablet) is a good one if you can afford the high costs and justifiable if you have the high traffic volume and device diversity. For more run-of-the-mill business sites (internal and external), responsive design, despite the media download issue, is a far better solution than not having a mobile or tablet strategy. As is too often the case, MS is late to the responsive site party. They'll probably make it for the next SP release. Or some start up will fill the gap. The IE CSS 3.0 issue is a red-herring--the default CSS for a responsive site is for the desktop browser, including IE. The CSS 3.0 techniques for re-formatting the content automatically are used by the tablet and mobile browsers--and the mainstream devices all understand the CSS 3.0 media rules.

United StatesLarry Kluger


 
 
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