SMS Texting through Office 365

Copper Contributor

Dear All,

Is there a possibility of sending SMS messages, lets say in case of an emergency, to all employees or students in an education environment, using Office 365 platform. I believe natively it is not possible but is there any addin built on top of O365 which can provide this kind of service. The idea is to store user's mobile number in an active directory attribute and use it in case of an emergency situation to send alerts.

 

Alerts using webmail only work for US, Canada and Romania but not for other countries so that is not an option for users in France.

 

Thanks for any feedback/suggestions.

 

26 Replies

Thank you Sir for your feedback. I will look into it. Thanks once again for taking your time to respond.

Have a nice day.

We at Chatabox are pleased to announce a service running entirely in Microsoft Azure and connected to O365 which offers 2-way SMS for Skype for Business.  We now have over 20 customers in trialling the new service in 5 countries and we would be very happy to help you.  Please contact info@chatabox.co.uk.

Hi Sajid , please have a look into the Office store add-in : https://store.office.com/en-us/app.aspx?assetid=WA104380716

 

This allows you to send sms to all SharePoint Site users , froma SharePoint List. 

Does Chatabox integrate with Microsoft Teams as well?

Hi,
We are planning to add SMS to Teams in Q1 2019. I will ensure that we announce when this has been added on this forum if you are interested.
Yes, that would be helpful, thanks!

Has SMS for Office (SMS via SharePoint) become available? Also, will there be any additional cost to have it added as an addon to SharePoint? I noticed a third party SMS is available at cost, is this it? 

Hi Brian,

The Teams SMS add-on is not yet available but we are on track to release the Teams add-on this quarter (before the end of March).  There is a monthly subscription for the Chatabox service which you can find here and this price will be the same for Teams.

 

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

 

Best regards

Mike

 Hi Brian,

 

SMS for Office (SMS via SharePoint)  is a SharePoint App (add-in) already available since 2016. IT allows you to send SMS to SharePoint users, AD security groups and even Office 365 groups. You can install the add-in from here https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/office/WA104380716?tab=Overview 

 

Pricing : 

https://timeparity.com/sms-sharepoint#pricing

The add-in requires you to purchase licenses from within the add-in that come with free SMS for you to use. Post exhausting the free SMS that comes with license , you can send SMS by adding credits.

Microsoft has removed ability to send text messages to mobile phones through Outlook from all newer versions after 2010. Microsoft had this feature in Outlook 2007 and 2010 several years back but I don't know why they removed this awesome feature from later version of Outlook. Secondly it is very complicated to configure the alerts. However in Office 365 they have option to send text alerts and reminders to self but this feature of sending SMS messages is available in specific regions and with specific service providers only. This is the biggest drawback we have in the latest versions of Outlook.

 

There are some service providers who provide email to SMS service but most of them have either add-ins only for the client versions or the charges are very high. Well, the service providers Microsoft has included in Outlook 365 are also not so cheap.

 

So far you can use Red Oxygen which supports multiple platform with same email address. So far it is going good. Very soon they are going to launch 365 web app as well. Hope that will be able to fulfill these requirements.

Any update as to when this feature will be available if at all?  Thanks @mikerossi 

@mikerossi 

 

I just signed up for the phone system through MS Teams but don't see the SMS feature. Has that ever been rolled out? If not, how soon will it be rolled out and will the system allow for both SMS and MMS?

@dom23 Chatabox now has SMS for Microsoft Teams in pre-release and we support both SMS and MMS. We will be making the service available through the Microsoft Store but until then you can download the manifest and install if you have sideloading enabled in Teams: http://chatabox.co.uk/software-download-teams/

@rameshverma4u  

 

I was able to accomplish this in a roundabout way by forwarding Office 365 e-mail to my gmail account.  Gmail then has the option to set up forwarding as an SMS text message using a filter, so that only mail sent to the Office 365 address is forwarded.

Have a look at this tool:  SendSMS Flow for Office 365

@Richard-Evans 

 

Could you describe this further?  Did you forward all Outlook messages to gmail or just for the sms messages?  What were the steps to forward the e-mails to gmail and to create the sms messages in gmail?  Thank you!

You can easily export contacts and upload a file, or even copy/paste into a mass texting service.

e-hello. is this ready? looking to text employees via their number in @mikerossi