SharePoint links loading app, not browser

[Kevin Blount]

I'm not a Windows Phone user or developer myself, but I am a developer for a SharePoint site. This site is a public facing, marketing/support SharePoint 2010 site with Publishing enabled, for customers and prospective customers alike. We're finding an issue specifically with Windows 8 phones, which is why I'm coming here to ask this question (as well as SharePoint sites).

Basically, if we send an email to someone containing a link to a page on our HTTPS website, and that user uses 'regular' email on their Windows 8 phone, then Office hub launches a SharePoint app, instead of a browser. We're finding that the app is then showing internal lists instead of the published pages that the link points to. i.e. let's say the link is https://root/foobar/Pages/blah.aspx, the Office hub app shows the internal lists (workflow tasks, documents, etc.) for the 'foobar' site, instead of the 'blah.aspx' page.

We're looking to see what Windows Phone 8/Office hub email uses to determine if a link is from a SharePoint site or not. Or, what with SharePoint we can turn off/disable to stop Office hub recognizing a link as SharePoint, so that visitors to our site will see the correctly published page instead of the site with internal (and potentially confidential) lists.

We know that Office hub can be configured to opening SharePoint links in a browser, but this means that ALL SharePoint sites would be impacted, not just ours, and we cannot expect new visitors to our site to know they have to do this before coming to our site.

Can any offer any insight into how Office hub knows a link is for a SharePoint site? or any other advice/options for investigation?

Cheers

Kevin

 

[dootndo2]

I am a SharePoint developer that works on a public SharePoint portal. On the phone, the default configuration is to open it with the Office Hub.

Go to Settings --> Applications --> Office

Uncheck "Open SharePoint links in the Office hub"

This is done to optimize the end user experience rather than show them in the browser. There is also a "..." at the bottom when the hub is open and the user can select "Open in Browser".

Hope this helps.

dootndo2

 

[Kevin Blount]

Unfortunately it doesn't really help. I had mentioned that we'd found this option in the phones settings, but this impacts ALL SharePoint websites, not just ours. We probably have customers that use SharePoint internally and live that SharePoint app on their Windows Phone 8, so the solution we're looking for would allow OUR site to default to the browser, but other SP based sites to continue within Office hub as (probably) expected.

One side effect of Office hub opening our site 'locally' is that internal lists, such as Documents, are exposed. This could potentially be a security risk or a way for people to see documents that they don't necessarily have permissions for.

Kevin

 

[tiwahu]

Looks like this is happening again for links in emails and SMS to SharePoint (i.e., Office365) public website URLs. I can't figure out why you'd want the public website to open in the SharePoint app on the phone by default. Noticed it happening after the GDR2 update. Same behavior with GDR3 Preview.

Any ideas? Some hidden setting for the public website to prevent this default behavior?

 

[tiwahu]

Just in case someone else stumbles into this thread, there's an ongoing discussion here:
Issue with opening links on Windows Phone 8 to SharePoint public web - Microsoft Community