We’re coming across more and more educational establishments (typically universities but also some forward thinking schools) who are utilising SharePoint 2010 for their learning platform or at least storing learning content and are also deploying iPads.

Initially we were seeing that these awere typically being used by management staff but as the clear benefits were becoming more apparent wider trials & in some cases deployment to complete cohorts were becoming more prevalent.

We regularly get asked how devices such as iPads can link with the SharePoint content repository and there are a number of options for achieving this. If the need is to simply connect to SharePoint for a moment in time, maybe to read documents or view content then the SharePoint system can be configured to display to an iPad as it would with any other device via a browser. This, however, can be a bit of a limiting experience (e.g. dropdown nav doesn’t work well) and therefore the second option is to create a specific mobile interface which can contain a stripped down version of the normal user interface.

If however, the need is to take connect to SharePoint and then take content off-line then there are apps that can do this. I have so far evaluated 2 which are SharePlus & Colligo Briefcase. Both seem pretty good but on balance I like the Colligo product (although this may partly because I had access to the Enterprise version as a partner of theirs). The product allows the iPad to synchronise with a SharePoint library, take content offline, open content (e.g. PDF/Word) in a viewer and potentially (requiring a seperate product) then allow users to add redline text to the document (I’m thinking this is ideal for general unstructured student notes).

Although I’ve made reference to education establishments (which seems to be where the most requests are coming from) of course this would equally apply to any organisation.

Happy to discuss with anybody interested in more detail if you want to get in touch…