NewsGator (http://www.newsgator.com), the company making SharePoint social, has released SharePoint's first native social iPhone client. It, and a companion client for the soon-to-be-released iPad, provide on-the-road users with direct access to their enterprise social computing environments without the need for a browser.

As a mobile client for NewsGator Social Sites, the social computing environment most deeply integrated into the SharePoint collaboration platform, the iPhone client accesses all the relevant updates from the user's colleagues and communities. According to the folks at NewsGator, for the first time, mobile users can use an iPhone to: send status updates, videos and photos to social sites; comment on and "like" valuable updates; see notifications when others comment on or like your updates; participate in community discussions; target a question to a person or group; see the updates that you're radiating to others; view updates from a specific colleague or community; look up contact info for colleagues; and more.

NewsGator will release the native iPad client for Social Sites with all of these capabilities when the new tablet device hits the market this spring. The new iPhone and microblogging features are part of Social Sites 3.1, available now.