The last couple of weeks I have been focussing on finding a solution to let the iPad communicate with SharePoint. In my research on the Internet I found the following applications:
- SharePlus
- Documents to Go
With these two applications you can use the iPad to view your SharePoint portal and, for example, add announcements or edit documents.
SharePlus
SharePlus is an application created by Southlabs (http://www.southlabs.com). By using SharePlus you can view your SharePoint portal on the iPad (or iPhone, Mac and playbook) and perform most of the actions you normally would, by using the browser. I used the Pro version ($ 15) but you can try out the free version. Check out this URL for the differences between the two:
http://www.southlabs.com/detail.aspx?id=SharePlus
The start screen of SharePlus will look like this:
You can now add the SharePoint site you want to view. By using the Navigator menu you add three type of SharePoint portals:
- On Premise
- Form based authentication
- Office 365
The first two you would expect but I am pretty excited about the third option. Southlabs made it possible to use SharePoint Online 2010 from the Office 365 suite. That is really fast and impressive. After you’ve added the SharePoint Online site you will have to use your credentials:
I advise selecting the Keep me signed in option so you don’t have to do this every time 😉 After you’ve signed in, you will see the content of the SharePoint site:
You immediately have a nice overview of all the lists and libraries your SharePoint site contains. It is really easy to create new items. Let’s create an announcement (aankondigingen in Dutch). Just click on the list and on the + sign in the top right corner:
Now choose Add announcement and the create item screen will appear:
The create item screen looks similar to the browser version and will show all the standard and custom columns. After creating the announcement it will appear in the list:
You can easily edit or delete it by selecting the item and using the edit button in the top right corner. This works the same for all the other SharePoint items (apart from documents, but more about that in my follow up blog post).
Documents to Go
Documents to Go is an application to create and edit Office documents on non-Microsoft devices. The application has been created by Dataviz (http://www.dataviz.com/products/documentstogo/). It costs around $ 10 so that is not too bad. You can create the following documents:
There are a couple of nice design options available:
You can make text bold or italic, or just give it a nice blue colour 
The other features are aimed at aligning text, and in the picture below you can use bulleted or numbered lists.
So you can use a number of features to create a Word document. The same applies for Excel and with PowerPoint you get three templates to create presentation slides.
I hope you’ve gotten a nice overview of these two applications. In my follow up blog post I will show you how editing documents works with SharePlus and Documents to Go.
Tim R's Space 