My top missing features in Windows Phone 7 - SharePoint Contacts, Tasks and Calendars

I have been an advocate of Windows Phone 7 (WP7) for quite some time now, especially having owned and used a WP7 device for over 9 months now. However, there are some things that I really do find lacking.

Microsoft have been pushing the SharePoint integration with WP7 quite hard, especially with the recent announcements for SharePoint Online to support BCS (which basically opens up the door to have WCF calls made from your Office 365 SharePoint Online site, so you could do two-way WP7 applications which integrate tightly with your SharePoint applications!).

However, there are some features which I think would really concrete this device for small businesses as THE device to have.

Let me give you two example quotes from small businesses who were looking to implement Office 365 / SharePoint Online with a Windows Phone 7;

"Plumbing Business - We would like to use SharePoint task lists to document jobs and push those tasks to our plumbers using their phone.
Our problem is that when the plumber updates the task, we want to it write back to SharePoint.." 

"Pub Landlords - We want to use SharePoint Online to track and store all of our suppliers and contacts that we use, but how do I get those contacts onto my phone? If one of my suppliers calls, how do I know who they are?"

These are just examples of some of the reasons why I think WP7 is missing a trick.

Missing Feature 1 - Use SharePoint Contacts as Phone Book
At the moment there is no way for my WP7 device to use a SharePoint contact list as a phone book. This is a MAJOR piece of functionality I have been asked about by the last 3 clients who were implementing SharePoint Online.

They have all of their contacts centralised and through the web. They can bring them into the desktop Outlook application (with even two-way synchronisation!) but they can't even get them read-only on their phone.

You really should be allowed to "link" one or more SP contact lists with your phone book, so that when someone in your sales team get a phone call the contact details pop-up.

Missing Feature 2 - WP7 overlay with SharePoint Calendar
Pretty similar story here for the calendar. Person is out on site and wants to engage with their {Supplier | Customer | Partner}. They get asked simple requests like "can you book a meeting room for us next week?"

How awesome would it be to be able to bring up a SharePoint Calendar being used for resource bookings, central meetings or events, and overlay it with your own personal calendars (so that you get notifications and can view everyhing in one calendar).

They already do this with Hotmail / Live accounts, so why not SharePoint? This really is a must .. the ability to invite / write to that Calendar from the standard Calendar interface would be a bonus!

Missing Feature 3 - Working with SharePoint Tasks
This is a standard one here .. and really works on so many different levels;

• I want to see my tasks in a SharePoint List in my WP7 calendar
• I want to get notifications on my WP7 when a SharePoint task is overdue
• I want to be able to update the details of a SharePoint task while I am roaming, and people in the office to see those details straight away

If you can wire in the SharePoint workflow / events to the Task list this suddenly becomes very very powerful! You could build entire business centric applications using nothing other than some centrally controlled Task Lists, some Workflow (which you knocked up in SharePoint Designer in a couple of days) and an off-the-shelf WP7 device!

.....

This really is the tip of the iceberg, I could go on and on, but I really think that until this gets fixed the WP7 will continue to be nothing more than a decent consumer device, with little to offer to businesses beyond what other handsets are doing.

Any Android / iPhone / Blackberry (or lets face it .. 10 year old Nokia) can synchronise your Exchange Mailbox ... it is the SharePoint (and other LOB) integration that will make WP7 an "Enterprise" device!!