Responsive Design for Sharepoint
I recently spoke at SharePoint and .NET Saturday Bermuda, a one day conference co-hosted by the Bermuda SharePoint Users Group and the Bermuda .NET Users Group. The keynote by Joel Oleson focused on the trends of mobile and tablet use in the enterprise, and ways that Sharepoint development addresses this trend. Responsive Design is the order of the day. Enterprise web applications must be constructed in a flexible, adaptive manner that detects and responds to the device type. That is, the web pages should look different and display appropriately different content depending on whether they’re browsed with a PC, a tablet, or a phone.(or a watch) From a web design standpoint, this means planning for three basic layouts: big, medium, and small. Using a combination of server-side and client-side technologies, the page then serves up different these various layouts depending on the detected device type. While a few of the core components of Sharepoint provide some leverage in this direction, developers wanting more should turn to frameworks such as Zurb or Twitter Bootstrap. An ambitious Codeplex project is underway to bring those frameworks under the Sharepoint tent.