Intune custom notifications just arrived

This is just a quick post to demonstrate a really cool feature that's just arrived in the Intune console. You can use this feature to quickly notify employees about an important event and messages can be customized for any general communication purpose. Custom notification messages include a short title and a message body of 500 characters or less.

What you should know

• Supported on managed iOS and Android devices (not Windows)
• Company Portal is required
• Messages appear as standard push notifications from the Company Portal
• Intune doesn't actually save the messages
• You can send up to 25 messages per hour
• Intune and the Company Portal app can’t guarantee delivery of a custom notification. Custom notifications might show up after several hours of delay, if at all, so they shouldn't be used for urgent messages
• Custom notifications can be visible on lock screens on both iOS and Android devices depending on device settings.

Sending a custom notification

So how do we send these notifications. 

Navigate to Devices > Send custom notifications.

Enter a title (max. 50 characters) and a body (max. 500 characters).

Assign the notification to the group you need....

...and create the notification.

Intune processes the message immediately. It doesn't save it so you can't see a list of notifications. This is the only confirmation we can see.

On a device, users see custom notification messages that are sent by Intune as a standard push notification from the Company Portal app. On iOS devices, if the Company Portal app is open when the notification is received, the notification displays in the app instead of being a push notification. This is what happened in my test. The dialog above popped up for me and I couldn't miss it.

The notification remains until the user dismisses it.

This is a cracking little feature and I hope you enjoy it.

Until next time...

AutoPilot hybrid - issue resetting devices

Issue

I'm implementing an AutoPilot process for a customer at the moment involving hybrid AAD join of Windows 10 1809 devices (Lenovo T480 laptops). In general the AutoPilot process works. However we ran into trouble when we retired or reset a device that had been previously joined to Azure AD. The behaviour was consistent and the devices never joined AD or AAD.

After sign in the devices were stuck on "Please wait while we set up your device". (The screenshot above shows 1809 VM on the left and 1903 on the right).

After about 30 minutes they would fail with:

“Something went wrong. Confirm that you are using the correct sign-in information and that your organization uses this feature. You can try to do this again or contact your system administrator with the error code 80070774”

This suggested that there was something preventing the Offline Domain Join from completing and the process timed out. I researched the problem and saw that I wasn't alone. Similar issues were reported in the TechNet forums.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/fc2a8b82-7ee2-4e65-9b4a-b4ad4a0e102f/computer-stuck-at-quotplease-wait-while-we-set-up-your-devicequot-when-autopilot-profile-is

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/33430c1d-4f41-4e8f-8ace-3125dda40115/intune-hybrid-domain-join-error?forum=microsoftintuneprod

• I made sure that the devices did not still exist in AD or Azure AD but it did not make any difference.
• Also I made sure that the ODJ profile was assigned to a dynamic group of my AutoPilot devices. Remember the solution worked perfectly first time around. It only gave trouble when the devices were reset.
• The AutoPilot device group was based on the presence of the ZTDId attribute.

Workaround

I reached out to the product group and Michael Niehaus gave me some advice. He suggested that only way to get it to reliably work was to remove all the device objects (AAD, Intune, Autopilot) and then re-import the device to Autopilot to start over. He also suggested a possible workaround. Target the Domain Join device configuration policy to "All Devices" instead of AutoPilot devices only as that would help with the ODJ timeout problems. 

That's what I did. I changed the targeting and it worked. The devices joined both AD and Azure AD as normal. Thanks Michael.

I hope this helps you if you find yourself in the same situation. 

Until next time......

AutoPilot CSV file formatting issues

I've been uploading hardware IDs to Intune for my customer so that the devices can be provisioned using AutoPilot and Intune. We create CSV files in batches of 50 and everything has been going well so far. However the process started to fail today.

Intune would not accept the formatting of the CSV files. 

Each row must have a minimum of 3 columns

The formatting looked ok to me though. It was a CSV file of 50 devices created using the -append parameter.

Get-WindowsAutoPilotInfo.ps1 -OutputFile .\batch1.csv -append

The project leverages Microsoft Teams for collaboration and I subsequently discovered that the files had been uploaded to Teams and downloaded again. This must have caused some subtle issue with the formatting. Once I got the original files I was able to continue as normal.

I've also noticed that a simple edit of the CSV file can cause formatting issues. There was a duplicate line in one of the files but simply deleting the line caused an issue.

In the end I uploaded the file with the duplicate and just accepted the import error.

I hope this helps anyone else scratching their head with AutoPilot CSV formatting issues. My advice:

1. Use the original CSV file only
2. Keep editing of the CSV file to a minimum

Until next time....