Office for iPad: Can “Real” SharePoint Be Far Behind?

Office for iPad: Can “Real” SharePoint Be Far Behind?

The business world is buzzing with the news about Microsoft’s release of Office for the iPad. At JFD, we were already pretty excited about the potential of Office 365, especially when we experienced its seamless integration with the online version of SharePoint. Allowing the iPad to integrate with Office 365 points out just how rapidly Microsoft’s cloud offering is growing up… I can’t wait to see how they integrate the iPad with SharePoint Online!

Speaking of SharePoint Online, true connectivity with the iPad isn’t our biggest concern. The feature that we really need to see improved is how SharePoint Online provides for Public Facing Portals or websites.

While the process for initiating a public facing SharePoint site is a dream come true, the feature set that you are allowed to use in your new “SharePoint website” is disturbingly underpowered. In its current iteration, public facing SharePoint Online sites won’t even let you use Lists or Libraries, two of SharePoint’s most powerful features! This means that even implementing something as simple as a “contact us” form, a basic requirement of any public facing website, is a surprisingly difficult thing to do.

Today, if you want to implement a real SharePoint Portal including a content management system and forms processing, the only solution is an “on premise” version of SharePoint. It’s going to be interesting to see just how difficult it is for SharePoint Online to provide the capabilities that the on premise version enjoys when it comes to creating Public Facing Web Portals. I’m especially curious about how they will handle the migration of custom branding, layout and CSS, when they upgrade clients from the current version of SharePoint Online to the 2015 version.

While the future looks very bright for Office 365 and SharePoint Online there are still a few significant hurdles for the SharePoint piece of the puzzle, not the least of which is iPad support.