A Comparison Between the Microsoft SharePoint Mobile App and Infragistics SharePlus: Simplicity and Customization

When determining the right mobile solution for your business, there are several considerations to make, including to ensure end user adoption and deployment success. In our last blog, we gave a brief overview of the major items to consider when moving towards a new mobile solution. This blog utilizes direct comparisons between Microsoft's SharePoint mobile app and Infragistics SharePlus to highlight the how a simple and customizable UX can reduce app abandonment.  

Simplicity: The One App vs. Two Apps User Experience 

SharePoint for iOS App Review: “I had high expectations for the app until I had a hard time getting to what I wanted. Keep getting annoying prompts for OneDrive to handle files.  Not deploying this company wide until a myriad of items get fixed." 

Microsoft has taken a multiple app approach to mobile file access. To access any files offline and online files located in other locations beyond favorites or recents, the user is pushed from SharePoint to OneDrive.  This requires the user to download, manage and navigate between two apps.  For the user, this creates a dissonant experience, with two incongruous looks and feels. This two-application experience leads to frustration and to low adoption rates for teams, as most users expect a fully integrated, one-stop solution.  

The SharePlus solution has been designed with simplicity in mind, providing one place and one simple and easy experience for mobile users to quickly find and access the files they need.  The SharePlus environment is fully integrated with SharePoint with no back and forth switch back between applications, allowing a user to find their relevant data with a few clicks with no worry about how the data might be displayed. 

Customizable: Mobile Workspaces 

SharePlus has also taken the concept of simplifying navigation to the next level with additional functionality that enables organizations to fully configure custom mobile workspaces and provide end users with curated content experiences. These mobile workspaces can be specifically tailored to meet mobile team needs providing one tap access to content. They are deployed using templates with no coding required to ensure deployment is also simple and near instantaneous.   

Ultimately, users have a vote too in their day-to-day product usage. If a solution doesn't meet the needs of your workers, success with deployment is going to drop. This is one of the major considerations when moving towards an enterprise-ready solution.  Other considerations, like the transformational power of the application and the use of powerful functionalities, are explored in our other app comparison blogs. If you're interested in experiencing the navigation experience for yourself, try out the SharePlus demo and see what a one-app mobility solution can do.