iPhone + Sharepoint

Question

Hey,

is there a way to connect the iPhone with Sharepoint? I wonder, if it is possible to implement the HTTP or WEBDAV protocol of Sharepoint in Cocoa/Objective-C.

Regards

Answer 1

Not being an iPhone developer I can't say what tools it has to develop with but I am assuming that you do not want to just connect to the web page using the browser. Does Safari not work with Sharepoint on the iPhone or are you talking about connecting to the web services to create an app to see lists?

Sharepoint is built on Windows Sharepoint Services which, amongst other things, provide web services to give you the lists. Does the iPhone have tools to get data from web services?

There are a few tutorials on how to do it in .NET which you could interpret. Here is an example, http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/SharePointListWebService.aspx?display=Print

Answer 2

What exactly are you trying to achieve?

HTTP is HTTP, whether it's Sharepoint or not. You can access the mobile version of your Sharepoint site using Mobile Safari by going to http://yoursite/m/. It's not pretty, but it lets you complete most basic tasks. You could access the full version if you wanted, but I'd doubt all the javascript in use would work properly.

Ultimately you'll be constrained by the capabilities of the device. I'm sure a WEBDAV-enabled Sharepoint client is perfectly possible (in fact I know several apps use WEBDAV to allow using the iPhone as portable storage), but would you really want to be downloading/editing/uploading documents on your iPhone?

You could potentially do something involving the Sharepoint web services, and build a custom interface around them (it's all just plain HTTP), but I can't see the benefit over the supplied web interface.

Answer 3

A generic WebDAV client for the iPhone should work fine (unless Sharepoint has got WebDAV issues I'm not aware of). You may want to try DAV-E.

Answer 4

Assuming you have sufficient control over the SharePoint environment, I'd recommend developing a custom interface on the SharePoint server - If you're from a .net background, making SharePoint provide data in the format expected by iphone will be a lot easier than figuring out low level web service calls in a completely unfamilar development model.