Release Notes for the Cisco Enterprise Mobility Services Platform Release 3.1
Introduction to the Enterprise Mobility Services Platform
EMSP Architecture and Back End
Support for the Waterfall SMS Gateway
Support for the Ullevaal SMS Gateway
Meraki AP Synchronization based on Network ID
SMS Gateway for SMS Notifications
Add Variable Drop-down list to Add Variables in Smart Links
Provision to Cease Network Synchronization
Different Welcome Message for Repeat User
Smart Links for Welcome Messages
Support to Set Default Country in Data Capture Module
Search Feature for Experience Zone and Proximity Rules
Support for the Ullevaal SMS Gateway
Skip Option in the Data Capture Form
EMSP Architecture and Back End
Notification Frequency in the Engagement Rule
Display AP Names and Mac Address in the Add Zone Window
Location-Specific Access Code Manager
Location Hierarchy Optimization
Access Code Management Optimization
Displaying Locations in the Alphabetical Order for Access Code
Disabled Default Show Interstitial Option for New Portals
Display Associated Access Codes When Deleting Locations
Changed OTP to Verification Code in Portal
Deprecated the Advertisement Module
Renamed the Tool Tips for Upload Image Buttons
Title field in the Data Capture Module
Network Synchronization Status in the Dashboard
Meraki Network Synchronization Based on Organization ID
Increased Character Limit for Custom Access Code
Changed the Default Time for Engagement Rule
Warning Message for Incorrect Image Size
Publish Button in the Portals Page
Disabled the Save and Resume Button for New Proximity Rules
Replace Option in the CSS Editor
New Users/Repeat Users in the Reports
Support for the Waterfall SMS Gateway
ASCII Support Validation for Data Capture Form
Modified the Gender Options in the Data Capture Form
Renamed the Labels for Hard SMS with OTP Verification
Captive Portal UI Enhancements
Gender Tags Based on Data Capture Form Entry
Smart Recognization of Mobile Numbers
Post Data to Third Party API’s & Modify User Tags
This document describes the system requirements, new features, enhancements, and known issues for the Cisco Enterprise Mobility Services Platform. Use this document in conjunction with the documents listed in the “Support” section.
Cisco Enterprise Mobility Services Platform is a mobile-application platform that enables you quickly create and deploy context-aware experiences that engage people on their mobile devices. The cloud-based Enterprise Mobility Services Platform more securely integrates with your existing Cisco mobile network infrastructure. It uses context-aware data, like location and user profile information, to deliver personalized experiences that engage people on their mobile devices.
With this software platform, you can create captive portals or splash pages for guest Internet access and authentication. You can also develop native and web-based mobile apps, or add context-awareness to your existing mobile apps. Organizations can push personalized content to visitors and customers on their mobile devices to create new opportunities for engagement and revenue.
Enterprise Mobility Services Platform helps you:
The platform includes adapters to interface with Cisco Meraki Cloud controllers, the Cisco Connected Mobile Experience, and Cisco wireless LAN controllers. In this way, it more securely integrates with your existing mobile network infrastructure.
This section lists the hardware requirements, operating systems, software requirements, and browsers for the Enterprise Mobility Services Platform.
EMSP Architecture and Back End
Rule engine is re-architected to replace the experience zone based behavior of the platform. The platform is also enriched with advanced capabilities like customer targeting, customer behavioral targeting, scheduling, and so on. Moreover, Rule Engine helps to define different types of captive experience based on the user segment or user behavior.
The Rule Engine implementation provides the basis for the feature of serving captive portals based on rules.
To support backward compatibility, rule engine falls back to experience zone definition if it is unable to find a matching rule. Rule Engine provides the runtime with complete information required to process the request such as time zone and location metadata along with captive experience, for seamless rendering of captive portal.
Spark Engine has been re-architected and redesigned to support the evolved version of proximity rules that are based on Sense, Identify, Schedule, and Act concept. This new concept simplifies the overall complexity in configuring advanced engagement rules, offers flexibility in scheduling rules and making API calls as an action.
The engine is built for scale (built on Spark Framework and moved away from Google BigQuery to Amazon RedShift).
The new spark engine architecture allows the engine to run on lower end servers and scale according to the need.
The engagement rule sections has been enhanced to support multiple customer-specific SMS gateways.
The Proximity Engine now supports the SMS gateway “Waterfall” to send sms notifications based on the engagement rules.
The Proximity engine now supports the SMS gateway “Ullevaal” to send sms notifications based on the engagement rules.
For Reports, the Data export API can be customized to provide data other than the standard set of data. Exports are provided as flat files that are uploaded directly to the customer data center over SFTP.
Export data format has a header section and supports the comma delimiter. Mac address can be exported in the decrypted format, and the location ID and path can be retrieved from the database.
Now the synchronization of Access Points in the Location Hierarchy is done based on the network ID for Meraki. So, even if the network name is changed in Meraki, synchronization with Meraki happens properly.
The Reports section is completely revamped to provide to display in a new outlook with more useful information. A fully functional reports section is launched.The report section now provides information on Customer Acquisition, User Activity, and Customer Engagement.
The Engagement Rule option now enables you to configure the SMS gateway through which you want to send notifications. This feature helps you to configure different SMS gateways for various engagement rules.
You cannot add the SMS gateways through the dashboard. Only the hard coded SMS gateways are available for selection.
SMS Gateway selection is mandatory for configuring SMS notifications.
A drop-down list, “Add Variable”, is added for the URL fields and notification message boxes that use smart links. The Add Variable drop-down list lists all the variables such as First Name, Last Name, Mobile Number, Gender, Mac Address, and so on that you can add to the smart links.
The Add Variable drop-down list is added to the following features:
You can now cease the synchronization between the wireless provider network and dashboard, if required. However, you may have to make the request to use this functionality, whenever required. You can use this functionality if you want to avoid the changes made in your wireless network to be reflected in the dashboard.
The Welcome module is enabled to display different messages for first time user and repeat users of the portal. A new check box “Add a custom message for Repeat Users” and a text box to enter the welcome message are added to the Welcome module to support this feature.
The Welcome Message module now supports adding smart links in the welcome message. The smart links allow you to include the personal details such as first name, last name, mobile number, and so on of the customer in the welcome message for a repeat user, provided the customer data is captured using the Data Capture module. For first time user, you can add only the location variable.
A new field, Search, is added to the Locations window to search for locations and access points in the location hierarchy.
The Data Capture module in the portals is enabled to configure a default country for mobile numbers. In the Data Capture Module, a new drop-down list “Default Country” is added for the Field Element “Mobile Number”. During customer acquisition, when the customer accesses the Data Capture form, the country code for the default country will appear in the mobile field.
A new tab, SDK, is added to the Tools section in the WiFi Engage dashboard. SDK is available for iOS and android platforms. You can download the SDK from this section. In addition, you can also download the Help documents for both iOS and android versions, which explain how to integrate the SDK with your app.
A new field, Search, is added for the experience zone option, and the proximity rules such as engagement rules, captive portal rules, and profile rules. You can search for the Proximity rules based on Rule name, Location name, or Status of the rule.
This feature verifies the email address entered by the customer to avoid authentication for fake / invalid e-mail IDs. Runtime will send SMTP messages to the email addresses and verify the responses to confirm the email entered is a valid one.
The EMSP runtime now supports the SMS gateway “Ullevaal” to send sms notifications based on the engagement rules.
EMSP Architecture and Back End
The following enhancements are made to the EMSP Architecture and Back End:
The proximity engine is enhanced to send notifications exactly based on the notification frequency mentioned in the engagement rule. Previously, there was discrepancy between the configured notification frequency and the triggered one.
To improve the response time of the Manage Locations option, a Redis based cache layer is introduced in the location hierarchy section.
When adding a zone, now the access point names will also be displayed along with the Mac address of the access points. This eases the identification of required APs. Previously, only Mac address was displayed.
Access Code Manager users are now created as location-specific. Previously, the access code manager users were created for experience zones. The Invite User screen is modified to display locations instead of experience zones for the user type “Access Code Manager”.
The name fields in portals, proximity rules, and so on now allows you add particular ASCII characters. You can add ASCII characters for location names, portal names, rule name, and SSID name.
Dashboard is enhanced to optimize the location loading and accessing process. This reduces the time required to load and access the location in the location hierarchy, especially when you are having many locations.
Previously, more time was taking to load locations and to perform location related operations, if the customer is having locations in large number.
For Access Codes, the way the access codes are fetched from the database and displayed in the dashboard is enhanced to increase the speed for loading and modifying the access codes.
Client side optimization is done to increase the speed in accessing the Experience Zone.
Locations are sorted and displayed in alphabetical order to the Access Code Manager. This eases to locate the required location.
The “Show Interstitial” check box in the Get Internet module will not appear as selected by default. User has to explicitly select this option, if required. Previously, the “Show Interstitial” check box used to appear as selected by default.
To ensure that access codes associated to a location are not deleted accidentally, the Delete Confirmation window now displays all the access codes associated with that location.
In the portal, for the Hard SMS with OTP authentication module, the label “OTP” is changed to “Verification Code”. In the language support template, the label “OTP” is changed to “Verification Code” for the “ALERT_OTP_EXPIRED” key.
As the usage rate is low, the Advertisement module that was available for portals is deprecated.
In the portal, the tool tip for the Upload Image button that appears in most of the modules are re-labeled based on the type of image to upload.
A new field, Title, is now available in the Data Capture module. If you configure this field in the Data Capture Module, in run time, the titles, Mr and Ms, will be available for selection for customers in the Data Capture form.
The WiFi Engage is enhanced to display the synchronization status with the network servers. When you log in to WiFi Engage, the status of synchronization is displayed in the Manage Locations page. When synchronizing, the synchronization icon will be in the rotating mode. Once the synchronization is completed successfully, a tick mark is displayed. If any error occurs during the synchronization, an error icon appears. You can view the errors by clicking this error icon.
The Meraki network synchronization is enhanced to update based on the organization ID so that the synchronization happens even if the organization name is changed in the Meraki dashboard.
The maximum character limit for custom access code is increased to 100 characters. When creating custom access codes for Fixed/Monthly/Weekly access codes, the maximum characters that you can enter is increased to 100 characters.
When creating an Engagement rule, in the “Set a time range for the rule” section, the default start date will be set to 9 AM and end date will be set to 6 PM. Earlier, the current time used to appear as default start time and end time.
When uploading an image in the Promotions and Offers module for a portal, warning messages are shown if the image size is different from the size of the image uploaded initially. The size of the image added first to module will be set as the required image size.
For Meraki, now UTF-8 characters are supported for names. You can use the UTF-8 characters, when renaming the locations, adding groups/zones, creating SSIDs, creating portals, and creating proximity rules.
If you are editing a published portal, and saving the changes without publishing, a Publish button appears for that portal in the portals page.You can publish the changes made to the portal any time using this Publish button.
When you create a proximity rule such as captive portal rule or engagement rule, only the Save button will be available for selection. After saving the rule, the Save and Resume button will be enabled using which you can publish the rule. This enhancement helps you avoid publishing the incorrect or unwanted proximity rules accidentally.
A Replace File option will be available for each item added to the Upload Assets tab of the css editor. You can replace the items with new ones, but the file name remains the same. So, you don’t have to make changes in the css editor to incorporate the replaced file.
When you access the Reports section in the Dashboard, the Reports get loaded. If any particular section of the Report is not loaded due to any failure, a Retry button appears for that section, using which you can retry to load the report for that section alone rather than reloading the page.
In the Engagement Reports section of the Reports, a New Users/ Repeat Users graph is added.
The error pages that appear during the customer acquisition is redesigned to display in a different look and feel.
The EMSP now supports the SMS gateway “Waterfall” to send sms notifications based on the engagement rules.
Optimized the SMPP message sending functionality. This will reduce the number of bind calls made to the SMPP gateway and keep the connections alive.
In the Data Capture form, the entry of special characters in the First Name and Last Name fields are restricted as the names usually don’t need these characters. However the customer can enter space, hyphen, and dot.
In the Data Capture form, the “Others” option that was available for selection in the Gender field is changed to “Prefer not to say”. The options now available for selection for gender are “Male”, “Female”, and “Prefer not to say”.
The labels and messages for Hard SMS authentication are modified as follows:
The Gender tags are created based on the Data Capture Form entry as follows:
When entering the mobile number, if the customer enters “0” immediately after the country code, that “0” is trimmed before sending the message to the mobile number. For example, if the user specifies the mobile number as “+9109696867676”, where “91” is the country code, the number will be edited to “+919696867676” before sending the message.
This feature is enabled for “Hard SMS with Verification Code” and ‘Soft SMS’ authentication, and the Mobile number field in the Data capture form for E-mail Authentication.
In the runtime, during portal authentication, the data collected from end user can be posted to third party API’s. The API endpoint and request payload definition can be done at rule creation and the same information will be passed on to runtime during captive portal load. Runtime will post the user information to API server, which in turn will interpolate the variables in request payload and make a call to the configured endpoint.
Runtime also supports addition and removal of user tags based on captive portal rules. The rule can be configured to add / remove specific tags when the user lands on the captive portal.
The support documentation is available at https://emsp.cisco.com