Disabling Mobile Web Page Access in SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010

I recently developed a web site for a marketing campaign and I decided to use SharePoint Foundation 2010 as the platform.  The web site looked great when viewed from the browser, however, I was getting a lot of complaints that the web site wasn’t viewable from people’s BlackBerrys and iPhones. 

On mobile phones, SharePoint seems to redirect to the View All Site Content page (/_layouts/mobile/mbllists.aspx).  The screen that showed on my own iPhone looked something like this:

This isn’t very helpful for the average user who just wants to get to the home page directly.  Furthermore, I really don’t want users seeing my list and library structure and I definitely didn’t want users to have to browse down to the web page itself where ever it may be (in my case the Site Assets document library).

I really didn’t have any time to create a mobile view for the web site and I figured that most mobile phones now a days have screens good enough to view most full size web sites.

At first, I thought disabling mobile views might be a site setting so I went to my Site Actions –> Site Settings pages to see where this might be.  First thing I noticed was the Mobile Site URL (?Mobile=1) on my site settings home page:

Next, I started digging around the Central Administration Site Settings and my Web Site Site Settings for this setting but it was no where to be found.   And then I went digging through the API to see if this was a flag to turn this off and nothing. 

Solution

In the end I found this blog post by the Office Team [1] which helped me realize what I was missing.  SharePoint is just using the default ASP.NET Browser Definition File Schema [2] to control whether it’s control adapters will redirect to the mobile views of SharePoint or not.

There is an App_Browsers directory by default in a SharePoint created web application structure (i.e. C:inetpubwwwrootwssVirtualDirectories80) which is called compat.browser.

Opening this file up, you see the various browsers and a flag called isMobileDevice:

To disable mobile SharePoint views, just find the browsers you want to disable it for and set the value of this flag to “false”. Or do what I did and do a find and replace on:

find on:

<capability name="isMobileDevice"                        value="true" />

replace with:

<capability name="isMobileDevice"                        value="false" />

Just watch out for extra spacing during your find and replace.

[1] http://blogs.technet.com/b/office2010/archive/2010/03/09/configure-sharepoint-server-2010-for-mobile-device-access.aspx

[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228122.aspx