If you’ve chosen SharePoint as your enterprise intranet portal platform then chances are you’re considering different approaches to mobilizing the portal. After all, that mobile phone is like a portal in your pocket.

This post starts by looking at Microsoft’s approach to mobile in SharePoint 2013, which largely revolved around Device Channels and Mobile Views. Then, we offer another approach that leverages Bootstrap, which is rapidly emerging as a leading technology for responsive  mobile and desktop user experience design.

SharePoint Device Channels:

Device Channels essentially enable you to serve up different SharePoint master pages to different user agents throughout the site. Essentially, instead of having one master page that adapts to the different user agents within the code of the master page itself, you have this administrative capability within the administrative console to create different master pages and then associate them with different user agents.

The upside is that instead of having to maintain this switching mechanism within the master page code, Device Channels give you the ability to manage the adaption of presentation templates for different devices within the administrative console.

This makes the overall management of the different templates easier and more organized so you can present one view to handheld devices, one view to tablets, one view to desktop and so on. That was the main new feature that SharePoint 2013 brought to mobility.

SharePoint Mobile View templates:

The second piece of the SharePoint 2013 approach to mobile involved Mobile Views. You can read more about Mobile Views here, but essentially these are delivered templates that provide “mobile browser experiences available for viewing a SharePoint site”.

Mobile Views haven’t really taken off. That’s probably not through any fault of Microsoft, however, it’s just that the mobile web experience is evolving so quickly that the templates Microsoft delivered in SharePoint 2013 now appear almost antiquated in their look and feel when held up against what’s available today. And here’s why.

The Rise of the Bootstrap Framework: bootstrap-icon-b3

More common within mobile is the Bootstrap framework, which has risen as the dominant presentation framework not just for mobile, but for desktop alike.

Bootstrap is a CSS and JavaScript framework and library that was originally developed by Twitter, but has now become the de facto standard for building responsive, screen-agnostic web applications.

It’s a set of UI widgets and constructs such as menus, alerts, etc that are touch-optimized with an out-of-the-box responsive capability.

Bootstrap is widely supported across a wide variety of device types. In fact, Bootstrap has gained so much traction and popularity that even the latest release of the Google Chrome browser included native Bootstrap support.

Bootstrap for SharePoint:

Despite the inclusion of Device Channels and Mobile Views in SharePoint 2013, it’s more common now for organizations to replace the SharePoint CSS and layouts with a Bootstrap-based version of it so that you automatically get that responsiveness across desktop, handheld, tablet, etc. TheBootstrapTheme

For SharePoint 2013 Somnio offers a Bootstrap3 theme that is becoming quite popular due to its excellent quality. There’s also another take that works on both SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010 on CodePlex.

Both of these templates can easily be re-themed and what’s more, they’re very affordable, or even free.

This is the direction we recommend clients pursue, or at least investigate, not just because Bootstrap is the direction that the web is heading but it just gives your SharePoint portal instant mobile-friendliness with minimal effort.

The Latest from InFlight:

In addition, the latest release of our InFlight ClearViews and PeopleSoft mobile apps have been developed using Bootstrap.

As a result, if you deploy our ClearView live tiles to a Bootstrap-enabled SharePoint portal then you’ll enjoy out-of-the-box mobility for this content. Likewise, if you choose to deploy our PeopleSoft mobile apps, you can do so knowing that they can be grafted directly into your SharePoint portal to ensure a consistent look and feel from the portal in your pocket to the one at your desktop.

This gives your SharePoint mobile strategy a big leg up. Not only does adopting a bootstrap structure come at an affordable price (i.e. free) but it aligns your SharePoint portal with the direction the web is taking. We’ve also aligned our product development strategy with this approach.

Contact me directly at jbonin@inflightcorp.com with questions or for more information. You can also click the button below to schedule a demonstration of how you can mobilize SharePoint with Bootstrap.

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