Mobile + SharePoint 2013 = Possible?

Question

In SharePoint 2013, is there a framework between SharePoint + Windows Mobil 8 and android in order to faciliate the integration?

Answer 1

For Windows Phone 8 (and 7) the SDK has been released which essentially provides via Visual Studio 2012 a lot project templates enabling fast development and authentication samples for developers. Find a starting point here http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dpe_nigeria/archive/2013/03/05/download-sharepoint-sdk-for-windows-phone-8-free-developer-resources.aspx

However, as you might know SharePoint 2013 comes with OAuth v2 authentication support, as it relies on Claims Authentication. Beyond this, in terms of data access, more than 90% of the SharePoint 2013 API is exposed now via CSOM, with JSOM or REST API. Basically, as soon as you handled properly the authentication, you could very easily consume all type of data from Mobile clients, Tablet or Web sites.

I found that developing with REST is the best and fastest as you could easily format the response as JSON (see here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp142385.aspx)

Answer 2

In addition to using REST and other windows phone mobile templates as described by Marius, I would also suggest the following:

1. Utilize the Sharepoint 2013 Mobile Device Channels - Allows for automatic mappings between pools of devices and master pages, page layouts, CSS which will be useful in delineating windows phone and android styles - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj862343.aspx

2. Use Knockout JS in combination with the REST API - knockout is a very powerful JSON data driven UI rendering template framework that is independent of jquery. Using this framework along with JSON based REST API calls will make for rapid development - http://knockoutjs.com/