Monthly Archives: March 2012

Developing Mobile apps for SharePoint series – Intro

At the recent New Zealand and Australia SharePoint Conferences I ran a session on what you need to know to build mobile apps for SharePoint.

Topics I covered included:

  • Mobile SharePoint options
    • Out of the box functionality
    • 3rd party extensions options
    • Existing Native App options on Windows Phone and iPad
  • Authentication with SharePoint
    • Programmatically using Forms authentication from a phone
    • UAG options (Forms to NTLM)
  • Accessing SharePoint On Prem
    • Azure Service Bus Relay
  • APIs and Data
    • API Options
    • REST and JSON support in SharePoint 2010

To follow up from these sessions I have decided to start a series of posts on some of these topics to help spread the word and hopefully help people get started.

In particular in this series I want to cover off the more developer centric topics from this talk about:

  • Programmatic forms authentication with SharePoint
  • Azure Service Bus relay options to get access to on prem SharePoint from a device on the internet
  • Securing Service Bus relay using ACS

Part 1 – will cover how to authenticate with SharePoint using Forms authentication.  Why forms?  Well most Mobile platforms don’t support NTLM authentication out of the box (Windows Phone included) and so another authentication system is required.  Also NTLM wont work over the internet which is where most mobile devices will be connecting from.

Part 2 – will cover using REST and JSON to push and pull data in and out of SharePoint from your mobile app.

Part 3 – will cover using Azure Service Bus to assist with connecting to on-prem SharePoint environments from a device on the internet.  All without deploying additional hardware/software to your DMZ.  I’m just calling it out as an option since its pretty nifty.

Part 4 – securing your service bus connections to ensure only people you allow can connect to your data.

All the posts will include full source and instructions so you can get cracking and try some of these things out for yourselves.

Stay tuned for Part 1 in the next few days.

-Chris.