Chapter 4
IN THIS CHAPTER
Installing the SharePoint Mobile App
Finding your way around the SharePoint Mobile App
Getting familiar with the features available
Over the years, SharePoint has become the dominant product for company intranet sites. Remember, an intranet site is a website for only your organization and includes things like human resources information, company policies, time entry, and so on. Microsoft recognized that more and more people are using mobile devices; thus, it created a SharePoint Mobile App. Think of the SharePoint Mobile App as SharePoint running on your mobile phone. Microsoft likes to claim that the app provides your organization’s intranet right in your pocket.
In this chapter, you get the SharePoint Mobile App installed and learn how to use the app, including how to navigate and access some of the most common elements of SharePoint.
Before diving into the functionality of the SharePoint Mobile App, you first need to install it on your smartphone and/or device.
To install the SharePoint Mobile App on your iPhone or iPad:
Search for “SharePoint” in the search bar.
Make sure you choose the Microsoft app, as shown in Figure 4-1.
To install the SharePoint Mobile App on your Android phone or tablet:
Search for “SharePoint” in the search bar.
Make sure you choose the Microsoft app, as shown in Figure 4-2.
When you first open the SharePoint Mobile App after installing it, you are presented with a sign-in screen where you can choose to sign into SharePoint Online or SharePoint Server (the on-premises version of SharePoint run by your local IT team), as shown in Figure 4-3.
To keep things simple, we will sign into SharePoint Online using the trial account we created in Chapter 1. If your organization is using SharePoint Server 2019 on-premises, then you will need to get the sign-in information from your IT department.
To sign into SharePoint Online:
Enter your username.
In Chapter 1, we created our account and chose the account name sp2019fd. This gives us the domain: sp2019fd.onmicrosoft.com
. We also chose the username as rosemarie
. So our sign in username is [email protected]
.
Enter your password and tap Sign In.
You will be asked if you want to let the app give you notifications. For our example, we do.
Tap Yes.
The first-run experience for the SharePoint Mobile App appears and provides you guidance on the Find tab at the bottom of the screen, as shown in Figure 4-4.
Congratulations! You are up and running with SharePoint on your mobile device.
When you first sign into the SharePoint Mobile App, the screen opens with the Find tab already selected, as shown earlier in Figure 4-4. The other tabs you will notice at the bottom of the screen include a News tab and a Me tab. The Find tab is critical to the SharePoint Mobile App for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that SharePoint has a lot of stuff, and your mobile device has a small screen. Finding the stuff you need can be a challenge.
The Find tab includes sections for your Frequent SharePoint sites, People, Recent files, and Featured links. Under the Frequent sites, People, and Recent files sections, you can expand the search even further beyond your frequently visited sites. For example, you can browse for more files or search for a file in the Recent files section, and search for more people in the People section.
Since we have only created one SharePoint site (in Chapter 1) at this point, that site is prominently displayed as our frequent site on the Find tab, as shown in Figure 4-5.
To open the site, called “SharePoint 2019 For Dummies” in this example, just tap the site name. The app opens the site and we are in the same SharePoint site we would be in if we opened the site in a web browser. Figure 4-6 shows the SharePoint 2019 For Dummies site open in the mobile app.
We can swipe the screen with our thumb and move down the screen. The first section we see is called News. The next section is called Quick links, which is followed by an Activity section and a Documents section.
The reason we are seeing these sections is because we created the site using the Team Site template. It wasn’t obvious in Chapter 1 that we created a team site because the process of getting started with this template is very straightforward. We cover creating sites using other templates in Chapter 5, and in those cases, you will see different sections as you open those sites in the SharePoint Mobile App.
The site navigation menu is located in the upper-left corner of the screen in the form of three horizontal lines. This is often called a “hamburger menu” because some have said it looks similar to a hamburger. If you tap the hamburger menu the navigation for the SharePoint site slides out from the left side of the screen, as shown in Figure 4-7.
You can open a SharePoint component from the navigation menu by tapping that item. If you don’t want to navigate away from the screen you are currently on, you can slide the navigation back to the left and it will close for you.
The News tab is a one-stop location for all the news coming in from across the various parts of SharePoint that you have access to. This includes news from different sites as well as announcements and other social news posts.
The News tab is shown in Figure 4-8, although we don’t yet have any news because this is a brand-new SharePoint site. We cover the social aspects of SharePoint in Chapter 10.
The Me tab shows you your profile, let’s you edit your profile, and shows a listing of all of your recent and saved content. The Me tab is shown in Figure 4-9.
You will notice a listing of a couple of pages we recently worked on: “MyWeb-PartPage” and “A cool new SharePoint page.” These pages show up because SharePoint thinks that since we recently worked on these, we might want to view our latest work. This is a recurring theme throughout SharePoint.
Also on the Me tab is a settings icon that looks like a gear. It is located in the top-right corner of the screen. When you tap the gear icon, the Settings screen appears, as shown in Figure 4-10.
From the Settings screen you can edit your profile, clear your account cache on this device, switch the account you are using, sign out, send feedback, toggle push notifications, learn about what’s new in the app, see the version of the app you are currently using, send feedback, view help, set privacy and cookies, and review third-party notices. We cover working with your Office 365 profile page in Chapter 12.