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Chapter 4

Discovering SharePoint in Your Pocket

IN THIS CHAPTER

Installing the SharePoint Mobile App

Finding your way around the SharePoint Mobile App

Getting familiar with the features available

Over the years, SharePoint has become the dominant product for company intranet sites. Remember, an intranet site is a website for only your organization and includes things like human resources information, company policies, time entry, and so on. Microsoft recognized that more and more people are using mobile devices; thus, it created a SharePoint Mobile App. Think of the SharePoint Mobile App as SharePoint running on your mobile phone. Microsoft likes to claim that the app provides your organization’s intranet right in your pocket.

In this chapter, you get the SharePoint Mobile App installed and learn how to use the app, including how to navigate and access some of the most common elements of SharePoint.

Installing the SharePoint Mobile App

Before diving into the functionality of the SharePoint Mobile App, you first need to install it on your smartphone and/or device.

Installing on iOS

To install the SharePoint Mobile App on your iPhone or iPad:

1 Open the Apple App Store on your iOS device.

2 Tap Search at the bottom of the screen to display the Search bar.

3 Search for “sharepoint” in the search bar.Make sure you choose the Microsoft app, as shown in Figure 4-1.

4 Tap the Get button to install the app on your device.

5 Once the app has finished installing, tap the Open button.

FIGURE 4-1: Installing the SharePoint app in the Apple App Store.

Installing on Android

To install the SharePoint Mobile App on your Android phone or tablet:

1 Open the Google Play store on your Android device.

2 Search for “sharepoint” in the search bar.Make sure you choose the Microsoft app, as shown in Figure 4-2.

3 Tap the Install button to install the app on your device.

4 Once the app has finished downloading and installing, tap the Open button.

FIGURE 4-2: Installing the SharePoint app in the Google Play store.

Signing into the SharePoint Mobile App

When you first open the SharePoint Mobile App after installing it, you are presented with a sign-in screen where you can choose to sign into SharePoint Online or SharePoint Server (the on-premises version of SharePoint run by your local IT team), as shown in Figure 4-3.

To keep things simple, we will sign into SharePoint Online using the trial account we created in Chapter 1. If your organization is using SharePoint Server On-Premises, then you will need to get the sign-in information from your IT department.

FIGURE 4-3: The SharePoint Mobile App sign-in screen.

To sign into SharePoint Online:

1 Tap the Sign in to SharePoint Online button.

2 Enter your username.In Chapter 1, we created our account and chose the account name sharepointfordummies.This gives us the domain: sharepointfordummies.onmicrosoft.com. We also chose the username as info. So our sign in username is info@sharepointfordummies.onmicrosoft.com.

3 Enter your password and tap Sign In.You will be asked if you want to let the app give you notifications. For our example, we do.

4 Tap Yes.The first-run experience for the SharePoint Mobile App appears and provides you guidance on the Find tab at the bottom of the screen, as shown in Figure 4-4.

Congratulations! You are up and running with SharePoint on your mobile device.

FIGURE 4-4: The initial screen after signing into the SharePoint Mobile App for the first time.

Finding Your SharePoint Stuff with the Find Tab

When you first sign into the SharePoint Mobile App, the screen opens with the Find tab already selected, as shown earlier in Figure 4-4. The other tabs you will notice at the bottom of the screen include a News tab and a Me tab. The Find tab is critical to the SharePoint Mobile App for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that SharePoint has a lot of stuff, and your mobile device has a small screen. Finding the stuff you need can be a challenge.

The Find tab includes sections for your Frequent SharePoint sites, People, Recent files, and Featured links. Under the Frequent sites, People, and Recent files sections, you can expand the search even further beyond your frequently visited sites. For example, you can browse for more files or search for a file in the Recent files section, and search for more people in the People section.

Exploring a SharePoint site

Because we have only created one SharePoint site (in Chapter 1) at this point, that site is prominently displayed as our frequent site on the Find tab, as shown in Figure 4-5. We also created another site called “Web Parts Examples” that you will see in the screenshot, but won’t use it for now.

FIGURE 4-5: The Frequent sites section of the Find screen.

To open the site, called “Communication site” in this example, just tap the site name. The app opens the site and we are in the same SharePoint site we would be in if we opened the site in a web browser. Figure 4-6 shows our SharePoint site open in the mobile app.

We can swipe the screen with our thumb and move down the screen. The first section we see is called News. The next section is called Events, which is followed by a Documents section.

The reason we are seeing these sections is because we created the site using the Team site template. It may not have been obvious in Chapter 1 that we created a Team site because the process of getting started with this template is very straightforward. We cover creating sites using other templates in Chapter 5, and in those cases, you will see different sections as you open those sites in the SharePoint Mobile App.

FIGURE 4-6: The SharePoint site.

You can customize the sections that show up on the default page of a SharePoint site. For example, if you want to add a particular SharePoint Library or List app you have created, you are free to do so. We cover how to do this in Chapter 6.

Opening navigation

The site navigation menu is located in the upper-left corner of the screen in the form of three horizontal lines. This is often called a “hamburger menu” because some have said it looks similar to a hamburger. If you tap the hamburger menu the navigation for the SharePoint site slides out from the left side of the screen, as shown in Figure 4-7.

The SharePoint site you view in the SharePoint Mobile App is the exact same SharePoint site you can view in your web browser on a desktop or laptop computer. If you change a SharePoint site, you are changing the site for both the users of the SharePoint Mobile App and for those who access the site through a traditional web browser. As you develop your SharePoint sites, it is a good idea to keep in mind the experience users will have on the site when they are using their web browsers or their phones or tablets.

FIGURE 4-7: The navigation menu on the SharePoint Mobile App.

You can open a SharePoint component from the navigation menu by tapping that item. If you don’t want to navigate away from the screen you are currently on, you can slide the navigation back to the left and it will close for you.

Getting the Latest News with the News Tab

The News tab is a one-stop location for all the news coming in from across the various parts of SharePoint that you have access to. This includes news from different sites as well as announcements and other social news posts.

The News tab is shown in Figure 4-8, and we posted a news page about the new book. We posted the news page on our laptop and then on our smartphone, we swiped down to refresh the page and the news appeared right away. We cover the social aspects of SharePoint in Chapter 10.

FIGURE 4-8: The News tab on the SharePoint Mobile App.

All About You with the Me Tab

The Me tab shows you your profile, lets you edit your profile, and shows a listing of all of your recent and saved content. The Me tab is shown in Figure 4-9.

You will notice a listing of a couple of pages we recently worked on: “My First Page” and “first-webpart-page.” These pages show up because SharePoint thinks that since we recently worked on these, we might want to view our latest work. This is a recurring theme throughout SharePoint.

One of the recurring complaints of SharePoint in the past was that there was just too much content “stuff” everywhere, and it was hard to find anything. This problem becomes bigger when you are working on a small smartphone screen or tablet because you don’t have as much screen real estate to view things. The solution Microsoft came up with is to show your recent content first, since it is likely that what you were recently working on, say before lunch, you will want to continue working on after lunch. We cover working with content in greater detail in Chapter 7.

Also on the Me tab is the Settings icon that looks like a gear. It is located in the top-right corner of the screen. When you tap the gear icon, the Settings screen appears, as shown in Figure 4-10.

FIGURE 4-9: The Me tab on the SharePoint Mobile App.

FIGURE 4-10: The Settings screen of the SharePoint Mobile App.

From the Settings screen you can edit your profile, clear your account cache on this device, switch the account you are using, sign out, send feedback, toggle push notifications, learn about what’s new in the app, see the version of the app you are currently using, send feedback, view help, set privacy and cookies, and review third-party notices. We cover working with your Microsoft 365 Profile page in Chapter 13.