It’s wonderful to end the week with two of my favorite passions, SharePoint and Windows Phone 7. The last few months I’ve been working on a special project that you can install on your Windows Phone 7 starting today.
SharePoint Server 2010 running on Windows Phone 7.
That’s right. Now you no longer need an IT shop to use SharePoint. You can just deploy it on your own phone and decide how to run it.
Why would anyone deploy a server to your phone? Several reasons but mostly it’s because you can totally control your entire SharePoint environment even if you’re out of the office or offline.
Scott Haack, Senior Principle Program Manager in Bellevue, Oregon said this about why this project came about:
“It’s about choices. SharePoint Server 2010 on the mobile platform allows users to have choices about who runs their IT systems and decides how the system is configured without having to go through complicated business processes.”
It’s all about competition too. Here’s what Phil Haanselman, Principle Platform Program Manager in Portland, Washington says about the platform:
“With SharePoint Server 2010 on the Windows Phone 7 this pushes the platform to the edge and beyond. There is nothing like this on the iOS or WebOS and nobody is thinking in this space. It’s going to be game changing.”
Bringing the Pieces Together
I knew it was going to be a big job but I was up for it. There were so many pieces to get co-ordinated and I knew I would have a few challenges along the way. Here’s what it took to bring it all together.
IIS Express to the Rescue
Back in June when Scott Guthrie announced IIS Express I got thinking about SharePoint and the Mobile user. Wouldn’t it be great if they could run SharePoint on their phones! I knew Windows Phone 7 was coming up as I was currently in the beta and building Silverlight apps already. I knew SharePoint would run on Window 7 so why not combine the best of both worlds.
IIS Express is a lightweight component that weighs in at under 10mb. It also does not require administrative access to run applications and has a full feature set including SSL, URL Rewrite, and other IIS 7.x modules. All packaged together that can be run from a single location and does not require any registration/configuration steps.
It seemed like IIS Express was perfect to run on WP7.
NoDo Delays
Getting IIS Express onto the phone was going to be a bit of a challenge however with some work and co-ordination with high ranking figures at Microsoft I was able to get it to compile down into a single DLL file.
To get it onto the phone I worked with top people on the Windows Phone team and packaged IIS Express into the next update, the infamous NoDo release. So as of right now, anyone with NoDo installed actually has web server available to them. There were several other updates we packaged into NoDo that were put there for SharePoint Server to run (mostly around Kerberos ticket support and background processing).
So as a result this was the primary reason why NoDo was delayed. I do apologize to the community for the NoDo delays, but now you know the reason. It was so mobile users could run SharePoint.
Getting past the NoDo release the Windows Phone 7 was now ready and enabled for serving up .aspx pages and SharePoint.
Redesigning Central Administration
The biggest challenge was having to rebuild the Central Administration site to work with the Metro look and feel. It was a lot of work but we’ve built all the screens as new using the Windows Phone 7 controls. This was done so you have good touch targets to hit. In early betas, we were just using the out of the box Central Admin web pages but it was hard to click on things and I was always zooming in and out. So I built the Metro screens to make it easier for you to work with Central Admin.
Everything is all there and hopefully organized in a good way so you won’t be totally thrown back when using the WP7 version of SharePoint. Here’s Central Admin running on WP7.
The Metro Way
With the Metro overhaul of Central Admin we wired everything back up. Using MVVM was key in being able to have the UI respond to what you did so it was easy to show real-time information about the server.
Here’s how you can create a new Web Application with Central Admin on the Windows Phone 7
First select Web Applications from Application Management pivot. You’ll see this menu
Now click on Manage web applications. We couldn’t implement the Ribbon in Windows Phone 7 so from the list select Create New Web Application. You’ll be presented with a data entry screen to enter all the information for your new web app:
All of the options are there just like the current release of SharePoint. Unfortunately due to some last minute problems and trying to get this done by the end of the week we were not able to include Claims Based Authentication so only Classic Mode is available. Anyone would be a Fool to try to deliver something in April without testing it so this was why this decision was made.
Complete Feature Set, Almost
Not exactly. As I said we don’t support Claims Based Authentication and there are few other features in SharePoint 2010 we don’t support. Here’s a list of the current restrictions. These have been left out either due to time constraints or technical limitations on the phone platform. A few of these features will be available in the Mango release of Windows Phone 7 due out sometime in 2012.
- Kerberos. Kerberos support is not fully implemented so it’s suggested to keep web sites running under NTLM (most of the system works under Kerberos but without a true integrated authentication on the Windows Phone 7 not everything works, yet)
- Content Deployment. This isn’t implemented at all in this release due to time constraints. It’s planned for a future release. Hopefully this doesn’t hinder people too much.
- InfoPath Forms Services. This was tricky but with some clever coding, we’re able to convert, on the fly InfoPath forms into Windows Phone 7 controls. However in some last minute testing we found that InfoPath forms with complex rules breaks the model. Simple forms work, complex forms will be delivered in Service Pack 1 due out later in the year.
- Define blocked file types. Unfortunately as we don’t have complete control over access to the Windows Phone 7 sub-systems (like the registry) so we’re unable to control blocked file types. No word on when this feature might be available.
Leveraging the Phone
This release doesn’t just allow you to run SharePoint Server on your phone but we’ve also leveraged specific features of the WP7 platform as well. For example you can now hook up SharePoint Picture Libraries to the Windows Phone 7 Media Library and any picture taken on the your phone can instantly be available to anyone browsing the site.
The other big integration point is Geolocation. Windows Phone 7 devices all have a built-in GPS. SharePoint Server 2010 leverages this by geotagging any content. A new feature in Document Libraries allows users to geotag documents with location information which can then be used to filter documents and lists based on locality and even plot document creation locations on a Bing Map using the built-in Bing Map Controls.
It’s really up to the SharePoint web part developer to figure out how best to leverage these new capabilities. Like it was said before, this is game changing.
Availability
Most importantly when can you get this?
Right now!
Download the .xap file here directly and you can instantly sideload it onto your Windows Phone 7 (developer unlock required). If you’re not a developer then you’ll have to wait for the app to make it through Marketplace Certification which should be any day now.
You do require the NoDo update to be able to run SharePoint Server 2010 on your phone so please make sure you have that installed first. The software will detect if IIS Express is installed or not and unfortunately fail if you don’t have the update yet.
The software will be released on CodePlex in the next while under the Apache License so anyone can contribute to it. Please contact me offline if you’re interested.
After MIX11 we’ll be making the server available as a NuGet package that can be deployed anywhere without the need to access the Windows Phone Marketplace. Stay tuned for news on this.
Many Thanks
Many thanks to all the wonderful people that made this project possible. Without their co-operation we wouldn’t be where we are today:
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Eduard de Dene
- John Aubrey
- Sizdah Bedar
- Joseph Boskin
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