Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part III: Push Notifications

SharePoint Server 2013 supports applications on mobile devices that should receive notifications from a SharePoint site.

For mobile devices to receive such notifications, device applications must register with a SharePoint site. Once registered, you can write event handler code to interact with Microsoft Push Notification Service (MPNS) or notification services of other mobile device platforms. Notifications are sent from the server where the application is hosted to the registered mobile device application.

When the push notification feature is activated, a subscription store is created at the website level to store information from devices that have registered with the SharePoint site to receive notifications. This subscription store is created as a hidden list that cannot be viewed directly by a user or an administrator.

Limit 1: 2,000 device registrations for push notifications per website

Once this limit is reached, no further registrations can be performed unless entries are cleared from the subscription store.

You could clear specific device entries that have not been updated in the subscription store for 30 days, or the entire contents of the subscription store based on preference.

This article will help you clean up: Clear push notification registrations from the subscription store in SharePoint 2013 Preview

Limit 2: Windows Phone only (at the moment)

There are no push notifications for iOS devices at the moment. Maybe some developer out there want’s to grab Apple’s “Local and Push Notification Programming Guide” and implemente an iOS version?

Push Notification Feature

To enable mobile device registration on a site, the Push Notifications feature must be activated on the site. You can activate or deactivate Push Notifications in Site Settings under Site Actions and Manage Site Features.

The Push Notification Feature ID is 41E1D4BF-B1A2-47F7-AB80-D5D6CBBA3092.

With this ID you can activate the feature. The Push Notification Feature is not activated by default in a SharePoint Server installation.

The feature is available in SharePoint Foundation 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013.

Extensibility

There is a lot of hand coding involved at the moment. For example, you have to construct the xml for the toast notification message yourself. I expect this to change until the final release of SharePoint 2013.

Further information:

• MSDN: How to: Configure and use push notifications in SharePoint 2013 apps for Windows Phone
• MSDN Code Sample: SharePoint 2013: Create push notifications in SharePoint for Windows Phone apps
• MSDN: Push Notifications Overview for Windows Phone
• Blog: #SP2013INFOWKND: Push Notifications in SharePoint 2013 (Furuknap)

Other blog posts in this series:

• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part I: Overview
• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part II: Device channels and the SharePoint page model
• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part III: Push Notifications
• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part IV: Location
• Mobile devices and SharePoint 2013 – Part V: Custom Applications