Posts Tagged ‘iTunes’

SharePoint on your iPhone with Moshare

Sunday, May 16th, 2010

It seems that iPhone’s, and I guess now the iPad, are increasingly being used in business.  While some would probably argue about how appropriate that is, ultimately I think IT organisations should be embracing this change and be working out ways to help their businesses use and benefit from these tools securely.

As the company I work for are big users of both iPhones and SharePoint, I always take a look at apps that try to make the two work together.  One such app is Moshare from Moprise.

Moshare allows you to connect the app to specific SharePoint sites and access the lists, documents etc in the Site.  It seems to work pretty well, you can connect to a site easily provided you know the URL, and the app then displays the various lists and libraries within it (see the pictures below).

Within the libraries documents are listed and can be opened as you’d expect.  I’ve tried it out with the obvious Office documents and PDF’s that you’d expect to find and all open fine.  What’s more it provides searching within the site, though I couldn’t find a way to navigate to sub-sites – they have to be added separately.

Something I’d like to see added would be the ability to enter your password at the time of use.  At the moment you can’t add the site without having to enter your username and password and have the iPhone cache it.  Without details of how those credentials are stored, I can see some IT administrators not liking that at all.

All in all though it’s a nice little app.  As an added bonus at the moment it’s free to celebrate the launch of SharePoint 2010, so head over to the app store and grab a copy.

Moshare-siteview Moshare-LibraryView Moshare-DocumentView

iPhone Enterprise Deployment

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Alongside the release of the V.3 iPhone firmware Apple have also updated their Enterprise Deployment Guide.

If you’re using iPhones within a corporate environment this is a really useful doc.  I provides some good info on how best to configure settings for VPN connections, Exchange access, Wifi settings etc, and also how provision these settings and other applications to your companies iPhones.

One of the interesting changes to the overall solution has been the addition of an ‘activation-only mode’ to iTunes.  This setting configures iTunes to only only activate the iPhone then eject the device.  In combination with some of the other restrictions available both on installation and at runtime (through the parental controls) it goes some way to making iTunes more palatable to businesses.  I can only assume this was added in response to a fairly common complaint from businesses that they didn’t really want to install iTunes on their corporate machines.  Whilst this doesn’t do away with the need, it does help to mitigate some of the concerns around it.

I may write about some of the particular subjects covered in the doc over the next few weeks, but I thought I’d post up the link in case anyone hasn’t seen it.