Just yesterday Office for iPad was officially launched. However it seems that barely less than 24 hours of its launch, a bug for the app has since been spotted. Basically for users who rely on the SharePoint 2010, you guys can expect to run into a little obstacle. This is apparently because the collaborative editing platform relies on ActiveX controls to access documents.
However because Apple’s iOS devices have moved away from the need to use plug-ins like ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight, and etc., it has created a problem for users looking to share and collaborate on documents together. In fact this was a point of contention during iOS’ early days where competitors would proudly boast Flash capabilities, although we all know how that turned out.
In any case for users trying to open a document within the SP 2010 Document Library, they will be met with an error message, stating that “there is no SharePoint Foundation application available to open the app.” Thankfully there are workarounds which Microsoft has since shared on its website (Excel workaround, PowerPoint workaround).
To Microsoft’s credit, the workarounds were published on the day the tablet was launched, indicating that this is a problem Microsoft knew about beforehand. While these workarounds help, hopefully Microsoft will be able to come up with a more permanent fix in the near future.