One of the (always more) emerging needs of nowaday's software applications is
the possibility to embrace the mobile world.
The future Sharepoint 2007 has a native support for mobile
applications by introducing the concept of Mobile Views, as explained
here
by Martin Kearn.
Every list and library in Sharepoint 2007 is capable of
hosting Mobile Views, that are standard views of lists or
libraries that an administrator has defined as being mobile enabled.
When it's defined to be mobile-enabled, a list appear as follow:
Although Mobile Views are certainly an interesting and useful
feature to have embedded into the Sharepoint environment, I can't consider it as
a "revolutionary" feature. This type of "views" can be built also nowadays by
writing custom mobile applications that make use of Sharepoint's webservices. To
be really mobile, I think that Sharepoint needs to have a real mobile
application to work with, with a more robust interface that permits to work
with the portal at its full potential (manage events, calendar, tasks, documents
etc. just like to be on the web).
As an example, I can take the last CRM Mobile released by Microsoft
in these days. It has a powerful mobile interface, not only "views" on the
engine.
We'll have something similar for Sharepoint? I hope so...