The document outlines the advantages and limitations of device channels and responsive web design for optimizing website performance across different devices. Device channels allow for targeted content rendering, improved user experience, and traffic routing, while also limiting rendering size by excluding irrelevant content. It also emphasizes the importance of combining both approaches to ensure a robust and future-proof solution for various devices.

1. Device Channels
Prepared by : Prashanth BS

2. Advantages
• Enables you to render certain site content, style your content, and
even change images—while maintaining the same URL across a
pool of different devices.
• Target devices - Target different designs based on user agent
string for different devices. Device channels can be ordered and
stored in a list.
• Define channels for single devices or group of devices and Assign
alternate “Master Pages” per channel
• Ranking device channels - It helps for proper traffic routing by
ordering the most specific rules at the top for higher priority.
• To define a mobile fallback Device Channel you have to define
only one Device Inclusion Rule which has to be equal to
$FALLBACKMOBILEUSERAGENTS

3. • Selectively include or exclude portion of page layouts per
channel - Content inside a device channel panel is not rendered
at all on the non-specified channels hence reduces the rendered
size of a page for devices by eliminating bulky content. This
provides a way to increase site responsiveness on bandwidth-
constrained devices.
• Image Renditions - helps you improve the user experience of
your website by optimizing images.
• From troubleshooting point of view where the user and the
helpdesk employee would see the same interface despite the
possible differences in their screen resolutions or browser
window sizes.
Advantages

4. • This feature is only available for publishing sites.
• Multiple Master page needs to created, since every channel
needs to be associated with a Master page
• You can have a maximum of 10 device channels including the
default configured on a specific site for an on-premises
installation, and a total of two device channels when using
SharePoint Online.
• 150 inclusion rules per device channel.
• Device Channels are designed to help you provide the visitors if
your website with the best User Experience suitable for their
device. They are in no way a security measure and you shouldn’t
be using Device Channels to hide confidential data from your
visitors. Because anonymous users can switch between Device
Channels using query string parameters or cookies, using Device
Channels for security purposes is a bad idea and could lead to
disclosing confidential information to general public.
Limitations

5. Device Channels Responsive Web Design
Device management
Uses the identity of the browser on
the particular device to decide
which presentation style to use
Property management
Uses a device’s screen size to
determine the presentation layer
Different HTML for every channel
•Will always load the same
experience for the same device
regardless of the browser window
size.
•But depending on how many
different devices your site visitors
use, managing the different devices
and experiences can become
complex.
Same HTML for every device
•Responsive web design can cause
different experiences to be loaded
depending on the size of the
browser window.
Uses different master pages to
ensure that only the relevant
markup is served to users and
therefore optimized performance of
the website.
Changes only the presentation layer
of the website. Although you can
hide some pieces of the page in the
browser using CSS, they are still
present in the website’s code and
therefore loaded.

6. Device Channels Responsive Web Design
More flexibility
•You can serve different content to
different devices
•You get more flexibility in controlling
the markup of your website for the
different devices
•You can apply additional
optimizations to your website, such as
resizing images and videos server-
side using the renditions capability,
which further improves the
performance and user experience of
your website.
Limited by CSS support and
capabilities
•Same content is served when
using responsive web design.
Custom Vary-By User Agent
response header required
Preferred by Internet search
engines - since the same HTML
is sent to every device, it’s
sufficient for an Internet search
engine to index the content
once, and it can be sure that the
search results will apply the
search query on every device

7. Device Channels Responsive Web Design
More management
(support for new devices) – Any
new device to be supported will
need a separate Device channel/
inclusion of rule
Future proof (device size)

8. • Combine responsive web design and SharePoint 2013 device
channels to benefit from the strengths of both approaches
• When combining responsive web design and device channels,
you could use responsive web design to create the baseline
cross-device experience
• By using responsive web design to build the baseline for the
cross-browser experience, we benefit from its future-proofness
and robustness. For the specific exceptions, we can benefit
from the granular control that SharePoint device channels
offer us.
Combining responsive web design and
device channels
Combining responsive web design and
device channels