iPad project

[mbexon]

Hi all,

I'm looking for some help with a project I'm working on with a set of iPads and the lead person at my organisation isn't sure if it is possible.

What my end user has is thousands of documents on a sharepoint site that the iPads need to access. So there is a generic login to the sharepoint site which is all set up and working. The end user would have liked the iPad to be locked to the sharepoint app but during testing the documents don't display that well in Word online so the full Word app may be required now.

The documents that are accessed on sharepoint also need to be downloaded and saved to the iPad so we would like a shortcut to a local folder on the home screen and thats the bit that my lead doesn't think will work because the folder would be read only, meaning you can't save anything to it.

The point of these iPads is that they will hold documents for chemicals someone has been using, so if there is an accident a paramedic can take the iPad, meaning there won't be a network connection for sharepoint, so they need to see what chemicals the person has used to know how to treat them.

Any help or suggestions anyone can provide would be great.

[damienbarrett]

Have you ordered the iPads yet? If not, consider spending a bit more for iPads with cellular, and then you won't have to worry about online vs. offline data, synchronization, etc.

Barring that, I've seen Google Docs do a good job with access to offline data, editing it, and then synchronizing the changes when the iPad comes back onto WiFi.

[mbexon]

Yes they have already been purchased, thank you for the suggestion of google docs, we are quite heavily invested in Microsoft products here but I can suggest it as an option if there is nothing else.

I don't think cellular was an option for this either because there are currently 58 iPads with a view to expanding that number for the same department and for others, so we'll have hundreds of them eventually.

[mainelysteve]

Have you tried using the OneDrive app to access your Sharepoint site? From what I've gleamed thus far you can set individual files to be available offline in much the same way as Damien described with Google Docs. Doesn't quite align with using single app mode, but you can just setup the iPad so that only a subset of apps are available to use i.e. OneDrive, Word, etc.