Forum Discussion
Text message to MS Voice number in Teams
In our company we use MS Voice system and love the integration with Teams. But, a vendor tried to Text me a message and of course he grabs my business card and texts the number on the card, which is a MS Voice number. Text fails..
Sure would be nice to have that text come into Teams (since it's associated to my account/email/Teams) as an outside SMS message and I could reply withing Teams to that message.
7 Replies
It is unfortunate that the Microsoft Business Voice still does not have Text Messaging available. This is a huge hinderance for most businesses as you have indicated. I check every month to see if they finally have added this feature as it had been represented 2-3 years ago. The problem with many of MS products is that they move on to a new product or project before that finish an existing product. I was very involved with the early stages of the Power Platform - PowerApps, Flow, etc. It would take 2-5 years to actually fix something that had a huge impact on the usability of the product. Really hope they start to take a different approach and become more transparent on these activities.
Hey MarcBailey I think Microsoft is finally around the corner with this. I've been told they are aiming for EOY 2023 although their https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=SMS still says nothing about it.
In the meantime, there are a couple of options
- Use a Direct Routing provider that can provide SMS (ex. Screenshot from yakchat:)
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/operator-connect-mobile-plan- allowing employees to use the same cell # in teams and for their mobile/sms
- We have been using Yakchat for 6 months and it works, however we luckily had 2 extra dormant numbers that we were able to use.
We are definitely looking forward to the day we can use the SMS and calling on the same number.
- You can try Clerk Chat. You can enable SMS & Calling on your teams number or bring in your existing phone/landline number inside teams and use it.
Visit them at https://clerk.chat/ - As some of the reports have titles that say "PSTN and SMS (Preview)", I'd say that Microsoft is likely working on it behind the scenes.
- Hi,
You are not the only one asking for this, there are a couple of uservoice requests.
https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/34266145-add-sms-capabilities
In theory it would be possible for Microsoft to add this to Calling Plan customers, since they are the carrier there (or at least have a contract with a carrier to provide Calling Plan numbers). But the problem with sending SMS to a landline number is that not all carriers have support for this.
I know some carriers that created apps in Teams to send text messages, but that is not Teams native and not for receiving.- Good to see there are others... I did a search for this topic and didn't find anything. I really can't see how this can be that difficult. The Voice# is tied to the Teams user (how Teams can use VOIP) and Teams can send messages (chat) to users. There are other collaboration/voice systems that do it. I can't believe MS can't do this.
