Windows Phone 7 and SharePoint

I’m often asked about Office on Windows Phone 7 (typically how much does it cost it comes bundled with the OS, no extra charge). It struck me though, that if you don’t have a phone (or you haven’t had a chance to play with one) then you wont have seen the Office hub or apps and the fidelity with which “desktop” Office documents can be presented in Windows Phone 7.

I threw together a quick video (and it was thrown together quickly – there’s no sound) that gives you a flavour of the Office experience on the phone.

I start with OneNote (I can sync OneNote notebooks with my desktop in the cloud) then briefly open Excel, Word and PowerPoint. I then show the SharePoint UI in the hub (but I don’t have a SharePoint server to connect to – more on that in a moment).Finally I move to Outlook and open some rich document attachments – you can see the animations in PowerPoint, the chart in Excel etc. Hopefully it gives you an idea.

The main point of this post though is to highlight an excellent post on SharePoint integration in Windows Phone 7 by Paul Stubbs, a SharePoint evangelist at Microsoft. His post walks through how you would build a Silverlight application for Windows Phone 7 that talks to SharePoint Server. He also links to an article on PCWorld.com and a short video that give you a better idea of the native SharePoint capabilities on WP7.

Read Developing Windows Phone 7 Applications for SharePoint 2010