Native Project Server Support and the iPad. It works. Sort of.

By blurg64

With the introduction of Service Pack One, Microsoft have introduced Cross Browser support to the timesheet, task and risk and issue features of PWA (in addition to the existing support of the Project workspaces), for the following browsers:

  • Internet Explorer 9 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008
  • Internet Explorer 8 (32-bit) on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008
  • Internet Explorer 7 (32-bit) on Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003
  • Firefox 3.6.8+ on Mac OS X v10.6, Windows 7 (32-bit/64-bit), Windows Vista SP2, Windows XP SP3, Windows Server 2003 and UNIX/Linux
  • Google Chrome 6.0 on Windows 7
  • Apple Safari 5 on Mac OS X v10.6

What isn’t listed is Safari for iOS which the iPad uses which I was keen to see would work or not. Like many people, I purchased an iPad so I could sit on the sofa and catch up with twitter, RSS feeds, email and play Angry Birds without having to have a massive laptop burning a hole through my legs.  So the idea of being able to fill in my timesheets in Project Server using an iPad really appeals to me.

Anyway to cut a long story short, I thought I would wire up my SP1 + June CU VM to my home network and point my iPad over at PWA to see what would happen. To my surprise, instead of seeing the new cross browser error message (below)…

Project Server - Non Compatible Browser

I was granted with this Smile

PWA on iPad

Clicking through the cross browser pages (Tasks, Timesheets and Risks / Issues), the pages seem to render fine, both in portrait and landscape mode:

Timesheets on iPad

However the issues seem to start when you try and use the app.

Splitter Bar

To start with the splitter bar (as highlighted above) doesn’t seem to work via the touch interface, which if you have a lot of fields being displayed in the left hand pane, can make the screen unusable.  There is a potential workaround for this, by reducing the number of columns in the view, however these won’t be reflected until a new period is created.

More Timesheets on iPad

Scroll Bars

Like the splitter bar, the scroll bars don’t seem to operate as expected, but touching on the region outside of the actual scroll bar as marked in red below will work

image

On closer inspection the scroll bar itself is not a traditional scroll bar, instead it is one rendered in HTML as part of the JSGrid, which might explain why Safari on the iPad is having trouble interacting with it.

Keyboard sensitivity

Again, more of a limitation of the iPad, but when trying to enter text into a timesheet entry towards the bottom of the screen, the keyboard will fly out and obscure where the text entry is taking place.

Tasks and the iPad keyboard

One option is to run this in portrait mode, but that will have the side effect of hiding some of the columns of information.

Ribbon

Finally, the ribbon seems to be having a bit of a hard time when used on the iPad. When you pinch to zoom in, the ribbon tries to do it’s best and resizes as per the screen below. However when you zoom out the ribbon can take a while to realise. This isn’t a Project thing per se, and I would imagine it’s an issue with all SharePoint sites viewed via the iPad.

iPad Ribbon Confusion

Conclusion

As I said above, Project Web App on the iPad works, sort of. But it does have some limitations and annoyances which you will need to work around. As this isn’t an officially supported browser within SP1, if you use the iPad you will have to live with these, but kudos to the Project team for their excellent implementation of cross browser and not explicitly blocking the iPad.