Microsoft’s SharePoint iOS Mobile App

Since Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, took over leadership of the company in February 2014, significant changes and progress are being made. This is particularly the case for Microsoft’s move into mobile. It started with Android and iOS versions of its flagship Office products — Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The latest product to become mobile friendly is SharePoint — a collaboration platform that helps an organization create an in-house intranet.

If you are a smaller organization, you may not be utilizing SharePoint. If that is the case, you can skip the rest of this week’s TechTips. However, if you have upgraded to Office 365 (or are thinking about it), then you might want to pay attention.

The SharePoint mobile app allows individuals to access key information contained within the platform such as company bulletins, SharePoint applications, and shared workspaces while away from the office. Previously, information contained within SharePoint could only be accessed from a desktop computer.

The app itself has three main tabs: Sites, Links, and People.

Sites: This tab gives users access to each of the SharePoint sites that they’re a part of at work. They can see recent activity, files, and posts from the site, as well as open a menu to access all of the stored content from their phone.

People: As its name implies, this tap lets users look up coworkers, view their profiles, see what they have been working on, and who they have been working with.

Links: The Links tab is pretty straightforward. It simply displays relevant links for users to click on, allowing them quick access to whatever matters to them most, like expense tracking portals and shared calendars.

A comprehensive search feature lets users find sites, files and people across their organization’s intranet, SharePoint team sites, and OneDrive (Microsoft’s cloud storage platform) folders that they have access to.

This mobile app will work for Office 365 users using SharePoint online, as well as companies using SharePoint Server 2013 and 2016. Versions for Windows and Android devices will be available in the second half of 2016.

Have you used the SharePoint mobile app? If so, please share your experience in the Comments section below.