Real life testing: 14 days as an iPhone6 user

As a great surprise to some of you, I have decided to seek out answers to the questions I often get around running Office365 and Project Online on Apple mobile devices. Some of the iPhone questions are rather basic such as “Can I do my timesheets?”, “Does Project Online/Office365 work well from Safari?”, “How does the new PowerBI app work from my mobile device?”. Others are more technical like “Can I connect and use the Microsoft Office/Power BI Apps from my iPhone with my company AD account”. These and more questions, I will try to answer over the next couple of weeks.

To make it a real life test case, I have decided to give up on my beloved Lumia 930, and replace it for 14 days with an iPhone 6 Plus. I have previously done the same test using a Samsung Android device but had to give up after a few days – it simply lacked some basic features I needed.

In order for me to also feel, somewhat, within my comfort zone, I have added the latest Microsoft productivity stack and a couple of Microsoft Project Apps (made by Microsoft Partners). This “clean-up” has left me with the following screen that looks like a hybrid of a Microsoft and an Apple device.

To raise the bar a little, I have also decided to only record my actual hours using my iPhone. To achieve this, without having to use a browser, I will use the Task Management App made by the Microsoft Partner, Project Sensei. (Link to App description).

Once installed, the interface for recording your time and managing your tasks looks like this – (very nice):

Finally, the new Microsoft PowerBI App, allows me to connect to my updated Project Online reports, that I use daily in my job as CEO. This I will also try to achieve with the use of my new device.

Before I can begin, and actually use the device for my tests, I need to overcome the first challenge. This is around logging on to the various Microsoft Apps (OneNote, OneDrive and PowerBI) using my company provided email address (which is synchronized using ADFS).

Problem 1:

When entering your logon/user account, you are routed to the ADFS logon page. Here you enter your user name (domain user) and password, but you are not able to hit the sign-in button afterwards.

Solution:

Inform or request from your system administration, that the server running ADFS needs an update which can be found here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2989956/. This update would in most cases solve the issue and if not, you should look for which security models that are supported by Microsoft.

Follow me in the coming weeks to hear more about my experience from being a temporary iPhone user running a project portfolio in Microsoft Project Online.