Applied Knowledge Group's (AKG) partnership with H3 Solutions is focused on their flagship product, Mobile Entrée (ME), that will allow AKG to provide a tailored mobile SharePoint experience for their clients. Mobile Entrée is an extension to the SharePoint Solution Feature Architecture of both SharePoint 2010 and MOSS 2007 and is leading the way in SharePoint mobile access.
Mobile Entrée provides users with a fully-loaded solution to connect to SharePoint Sites and applications from their Smartphone. It ensures you keep business processes moving and easily access business intelligence (BI) to make critical decisions anytime, anywhere. It provides a familiar, efficient platform for developers and IT staff as well. With Mobile Entrée, AKG’s consultants can configure custom screen views to comfortably view SharePoint lists, document libraries, discussion boards, surveys, approval/feedback workflows, managed content types, and much more on a Smartphone device. AKG can also leverage the framework to create custom mobile applications. All solutions (out of the box and custom) are delivered through the browser and no client application needs to be installed on the smartphones.
Mobile Entrée goes above and beyond SharePoint 2010 Mobile Solutions
Whether on a Windows Phone, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, Palm Pre or a Nokia systems phone Mobile Entrée ® 2.0 offers AKG’s clients above and beyond the mobile capability that MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010 provide.
Mobile Entree and SharePoint 2010 Mobile Features Comparison:
The screen shots below are a sample of different sites/pages in mobile view. Please note the images on the left of each example demonstrate out of the box (OOTB) SharePoint mobile views. On the right side are samples of SharePoint accessed through the Mobile Entrée Framework. Please also note all the examples show SharePoint OOTB capability with Mobile Entrée OOTB configurable capability (no custom mobile application development).
Provides Mobile Access to...
SharePoint 2010 provides access to: Pages, Document Libraries, basic lists, and Search. Mobile Entrée (ME) extends that list by also providing access to discussion boards, surveys, and workflow tasks. While SharePoint 2010 has limited key performance indicator (KPI) functionality, ME fully renders KPI Lists as well as the ability to create items based on managed content types and customize the look of your mobile-enabled lists.
Customization
SharePoint 2010 out of the box provides the same customization options as 2007, through the use of the Mobile web part extension and mobile layouts. Mobile Entrée provides an extension to SharePoint’s core Solution/Feature architecture that provides an application programming interface (API) to build mobile applications that are packaged and deployed as SharePoint Features.
AJAX framework
SharePoint 2010 Out of the Box does not have a mobile AJAX framework. Mobile Entree includes an AJAX framework on devices that support it and an easy to use API for developers to integrate with the presentation technology.
For Developers...
To write a custom mobile app is challenging and involved. If you want AJAX capability you have to build it yourself and test on your targeted devices. If you want a customized look/feel you have to test it on all the devices you want to support it in SharePoint 2010. While similar to developing web parts in SharePoint, developing mobile applications for ME is even easier. The Mobile Entrée .NET library provides the methods and controls as well as the CSS and HTML for rendering on the different Devices. ME has implemented many mobile best practices so that developers don’t have to become mobile experts.
Business Intelligence (BI)
SharePoint 2010 Out of the Box mobile Solutions provides limited access to BI with Excel services. In the SharePoint 2010 example to the left you can click on the ‘image icon’ to get a spark line, though this is presented as just an image by itself on the screen with no context. Mobile Entree provides the ability to present BI in the form of cell ranges, graphs, charts, and dashboards and combine them into interactive pivot tables on the smart phone. Their solutions leverage Microsoft SharePoint Excel Services and Excel. The power of this functionality increases both with SharePoint 2010 and with Excel 2010, however basic functionality does exist for SharePoint 2007.
Workflow
Custom mobile applications cannot be tied to their desktop equivalents in SharePoint 2010. This means that you have to have two separate links to your mobile/full app. Mobile Entree provides a URL mapping system to developers to allow them to take advantage of existing workflow emails and links.
My Site 
SharePoint 2010 provides read-only access to limited information on My Sites, such as user contact information and a link to their content site. Mobile Entrée provides a rich interface to update your status message, browse your colleagues, post to note boards and view your News Feed. The Mobile Entree My Site allows users the option to 'update with location' and dial the mobile phone number listed directly from the page. The "My Colleagues", "My Note Board" and "My News Feed" links are additional convenient options.
Web Content Management (WCM) Pages
SharePoint 2010 will render page content simply without the masterpage container. WCM pages from a publishing site are not accessible out of the box. Mobile Entrée provides a configurable application for seamlessly extending your WCM pages to mobile devices. This application is tightly integrated with the rest of Mobile Entrée and can be used to tie in other SharePoint content as well as custom mobile applications.
For more information about AKG's Partnership with Mobile Entree or to Request a Mobile Entree demo please contact Lindsay O'Bannon at akginfo@akgroup.com or call at 703-860-1145.