Mobile SIF-application : Cross-platform development of a Xamarin application utilizing data from a SharePoint intranet solution

Abstract: Xamarin, a cross-platform development framework, was used in this project for the development of a proof-of-concept mobile client application for an existing intranet solution. The intranet consists of Microsoft SharePoint components and is a pre-assembled product produced by the requestor of this project; Sogeti. To fetch the intranet’s data, a web API was implemented as an intermediary between the mobile application and the intranet. The Xamarin application targets three different mobile platforms including iOS, Android and Universal Windows Platform, and since Xamarin allows for shared logic between different operating systems, this approach was adopted to the greatest extent possible. However, during the development of the project several problems were encountered that prompted platform-specific implementations. For example, the user authentication process needed to be implemented in a platform-specific manner in the client application and some parts of the graphical user interface needed to be adapted to each individual platform as well. Even though the development of the applications was not completely finished, four out of seven of the original requirements set forth by Sogeti at the beginning of the project were achieved. These fulfilled requirements include, among other functionality, the implementation of displaying news articles and attention messages from a user’s specific intranet solution. Overall, the project was found to be successful, especially with regard to evaluating how well Xamarin and cross-platform development works with these kinds of mobile applications.