Being left to your own Device Channels in 2013

By Randy Drisgill

September 11, 2012 —  (Page 1 of 2)
If you are building a SharePoint site, whether it’s for an internal intranet portal or a public-facing Internet site, chances are you will need to support different types of mobile devices. SharePoint 2013 includes an interesting feature called Device Channels (included when Publishing is activated on a site collection) that can help tailor your SharePoint UI to specific devices. To accomplish this task, Device Channels use partial string matching in the device’s browser User Agent to display different information to users based on their device.

To try out Device Channels, you have to first create one. From a Publishing site, click Site Actions > Site Settings and then navigate to Device Channels (you can also manage Device Channels from inside the new Design Manager menu). From there, you can either edit or create Device Channels, so click Create a Channel. From here you can assign a few settings:
• Name – This will be how the Device Channel is referenced in the SharePoint UI when site owners are applying master pages.
• Alias – This will be how the Device Channel is referenced behind the scenes in code.
• Description – A brief description shown in the SharePoint UI.
• Device Inclusion Rules – This is where you enter User-Agent substrings for devices. Enter part of a browser User-Agent string and, based on the order of the Device Channels, whichever one matches the string first will be the Device Channel that is applied for a given browser.
• Active – Allows you to turn Device Channels on and off. This will control whether the Device Channel shows in the SharePoint UI or not.

For this test, you can make a device channel that targets a particular browser like Chrome. Enter “Chrome” for the Name, Alias and Device Inclusion Rules (the word Chrome is in the User Agent for the browser), then click the checkbox for Active and click Save. Now that you have a Device Channel created, an easy way to see it in action is to apply a different master page to that channel. Click Site Settings > Master Page and you will now see a new option under Site Master Page for Chrome:



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