Those who have been using SharePoint from Microsoft for a long time have some good news headed their way. Per reports, Microsoft has now revealed the first SharePoint app for Windows Phone users.
The SharePoint app was announced earlier this month at the SharePoint Conference 2012 held in Las Vegas. During the conference, the company demonstrated a wide variety of new product enhancements in SharePoint 2013 and also highlighted significant investments in social, cloud, and mobile capabilities.
SharePoint, one of the biggest corporate features Microsoft has to offer in the desktop world, allows users to work in groups and collaborate with each other in terms of documents, files, etc. However, now Microsoft has turned the service into a new mobile feature that provides an additional edge to Windows Phones.
“The SharePoint Newsfeed for Windows Phone makes it easy to stay connected with your colleagues using SharePoint's social features. You can post to newsfeeds on all your SharePoint sites, follow people, documents, and tags, and more,” the official app page states.
The feature, since its arrival, became one of Microsoft’s most popular business products ever. The company, later, during the conference in Las Vegas, announced that it has grown to more than $2 billion, adjusted, in annual revenue.
“This growth underscores the power and passion of the SharePoint community of customers, partners and developers,” said Jeff Teper, corporate vice president, Microsoft. “The new SharePoint is a pivotal release that not only delivers an amazing amount of innovation today, it lays the foundation for exciting new innovations in the future.”
The SharePoint Newsfeed app will now allow users to create new status posts, add comments to ongoing discussions, read and like their colleagues’ posts, @mention a colleague directly, use hashtags, upload photos, discover people profiles, and work with followed documents.
However, some may argue that the feature is not necessarily new to Windows Phone as in the past users always had some access to SharePoint servers using the Office Hub. Nonetheless, the difference with this new app is that it allows users to handle all the social features of SharePoint as well as handling documents like it allowed previously.
The SharePoint Newsfeed app is free to download and works on any Windows Phone running version 7.5 or higher.
