Use SharePoint on your iPad or iPhone
(MoneyWatch) COMMENTARY The iPad is something of a paradox; it's a consumer-friendly device, but millions of them are showing up in small businesses. Conventional wisdom says it's only for consumption, but you can now run everything from Photoshop to Microsoft Office. And now you can add Microsoft SharePoint to the list.
Collaborating with an iPad in a corporate environment is sometimes challenging, because the ubiquitous tablet hasn't had the same access to SharePoint as laptops and desktops. Sharing a document, then, has meant sending attachments, and iPads were blocked from accessing the vast stores of corporate documents already archived in SharePoint. Now harmon.ie delivers substantially the same SharePoint experience as your desktop PC provides.
There are several versions of harmon.ie available. Harmon.ie Lite is a free download which provides complete read-only access to your corporate SharePoint site (just log in with your existing credentials) -- you can view and download anything stored there. Harmon.ie Premium costs $20 and adds the ability to upload documents and email from your iOS device to SharePoint. An enterprise edition will ship later this year.
Harmon.ie is yet another tool in the iPad's productivity and business toolbox at your disposal. Now it's possible to create or edit a document on the go and upload it directly to the same SharePoint infrastructure as you would have done with a laptop just a year or two ago -- and an iPad is an awful lot lighter in your backpack.
