Mobile

Notes from Mike's Notebook:

There are a few…well, let’s just call them “challenges” with anonymous sites in SharePoint 2010. Here’s the list of issues I’ve discovered so far that exist when with default settings in place:

1. Anonymous sites can’t be accessed from mobile devices.
2. The content query web part doesn’t work.
3. Grouped views in sharepoint lists / libraries don’t work.
4. Word docs cannot be opened without a login prompt (other formats work fine (pdf and excel for example))
5. Document Sets are not functional

Mobile Devices

SharePoint automatically detects that a user is connected with a mobile browser, and redirects them to a mobile view of the page. However, by default anonymous users don’t have access to this page. However, if you have a publishing site, then most likely you will find that the default mobile view is poor and not worth enabling for anonymous access anyway. In this situation, the likely goal is to not redirect the users to the mobile page. (If you’re trying to prevent the user from being redirected, see the next section below)

By the way, you can test the mobile experience by adding ?mobile=1 to a page in a normal browser.

More details

When a mobile user connects to the site, they are automatically redirected to /_layouts/mblwp.aspx. This mobile page requires a user to have the ViewFormPages permission. And, an anonymous user does not have this permission by default. More specifically, permissions for anonymous users are driven by the “limited access” permission level. To see what this permissions this permission level has, go to:

http://server/_layouts/role.aspx

Pay special attention to the “view application pages” permission for the “limited access” role:

On a non-publishing site, that value is checked, and on a publishing site it is not. SharePoint turns this permission off on publishing sites using a feature called “viewformpageslockdown”. To repeat, if viewformpageslockdown is enabled, anonymous users won’t have access to application pages, since anonymous users get their permissions from the limited access permission level. So, one solution to this problem is relatively simple:

1. Disable the viewformpageslockdown feature
2. Disable anonymous access
3. Enable anonymous access

The last two steps are required to re-set the permissions for anonymous users. If you skip it, it won’t work.

The down-side to this of course, is that anonymous users now have access to all application pages. This means anonymous users would be able to browse to:

http://server/Pages/forms/allitems.aspx

More info on all of this: ECM Blog

Prevent mobile users from being redirected

The other solution for mobile pages is to not redirect them at all. In reality, this is the better answer for anonymous sites as the mobile experience is really designed for collaboration sites, not publishing sites. There are a couple strategies out there to disable the redirect. One is to modify the compat.browse file and specify that each device listed is not actually a mobile device. More info on this is here:

Randy Drisgill's Blog

Another strategy is to modify the browserCaps section of web.config:

<browserCaps>
 <result type=”System.Web.Mobile.MobileCapabilities, System.Web.Mobile, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a”/>
 <filter>isMobileDevice=false</filter>
 </browserCaps>

The above is from: TechNet Forum