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...