Since Azure Mobile Engagement became generally available a few months ago, we have been working hard to improve the service and build exciting new features for you!

In a nutshell, Azure Mobile Engagement is a SaaS-delivered, data-driven user engagement platform that enables real-time fine-grain user segmentation, app user analytics, and contextually-aware smart push notifications and in-app messaging across all connected devices. It closes the loop for developers, app owners and LoB decision makers to get directly in touch with app users in a personal, contextually-aware and non-intrusive way.

Here is a quick summary of some of the new capabilities we have added since September:

Support for Windows 10 Universal Apps

We released an updated Windows Universal SDK with support for Windows 10 Universal Apps. We previously supported Windows 8/8.1 apps running on Windows 10, but now you can also integrate Azure Mobile Engagement in a new Windows 10 Universal App. Feel free to fire away Visual Studio to create fantastic Universal Apps which can run on phones, tablets and eventually XBOX – all benefitting from powerful targeted and personalized notification capabilities to build user engagement! Look here for the Windows 10 instructions to integrate Azure Mobile Engagement.

Power BI dashboard

We are excited to announce that we now have a Power BI Content Pack. The Power BI team has a great article that walks through the quick steps to connect your Power BI dashboard to your Mobile Engagement backend to produce beautiful and useful charts and visuals like the one below.

New Troubleshooting feature

To help developers integrate Mobile Engagement with few problems, we have added features and documentation around troubleshooting. An example of such a feature is under Troubleshooting which, given a Device ID, provides detailed information about the Device as seen by our system:

 

Take a look at this Troubleshooting article about how to find the root cause of common issues such as, why a push notification does not reach the device.

Deprecating pre-GA SDKs

You might have seen this communication, but to recap, in the new GA version of our SDKs, we have optimized our communication protocol. As a consequence of this, we plan to deprecate the pre-GA, preview SDK versions from Feb 1st, 2016.

IMPORTANT: If you are an existing Mobile Engagement user, please make sure to check the SDK version you are using and we are requesting you to:

• Upgrade your mobile apps to the following Azure Mobile Engagement SDK versions:
  • iOS SDK 3.0.0 or above
  • Android SDK 4.0.0 or above
  • Cordova SDK v2.0.0 or above
  • Windows SDKs are not impacted by this change.

Publish the updated mobile apps to the store so your app users are able to download and update the mobile apps on their devices, well ahead of February 1, 2016.

Documentation updates

• New whitepaper on “Real world ways to maximize user engagement and monetization” using Azure Mobile Engagement
• New detailed documentation covering the onboarding process and best practices for integrating Azure Mobile Engagement
• Two new case studies detailing the implementation of Azure Mobile Engagement for gaming and media
• Understanding the Mobile Engagement User Interface. We have updated the documents here taking you through the different aspects of Azure Mobile Engagement portal. This will enable you to get an overview of the product without creating an account or Mobile Engagement app
• New How-To section within Microsoft Azure documentation to help with common tasks like:
  • How to include Emojis in your notifications
  • How to personalize your notifications by including user names

Recent videos on Azure Mobile Engagement

• From AzureCon: Real world scenarios to implement Azure Mobile Engagement
• Channel 9 Cloud Cover episode: Azure Mobile Engagement overview

We’d like to hear from you! Please don’t hesitate to connect with us.

• Provide feature requests through UserVoice
• Ask questions on MSDN forum
• Connect with us on Twitter