I’m looking for a PC based app to help manage text based messaging. I’d prefer something free, and an outlook plug-in would be any better, but I’m not opposed to a service with a nominal fee. Are any of you using a service like this for work? My use case is to notify groups when email servers or systems are down, or when we want to expedite messages to those in the field during an emergency alert.
My preference to PC based is because my message templates, contact lists et al will be on a network or one drive share. Need to be able to share it with others on my team. My hope is back and forth communication can be accomplished through the app, and not just outbound messaging. I’m also hoping to stay away from keeping up with the email address version of everyone’s SMS phone number.
Group sizes have never been more than 20, although of the service supports larger lists, we could also use the service for alerts through the whole office as well (200 people)
The first thing that Tech Support does when they have problems with Microsoft Outlook is to turn off all plug-ins. There are a lot of plug-ins but they tend not to work nice with the other Microsoft products. Now all the plug-ins are actually written in Visual Basic 6.0, the same with all the macros used in Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc… One could write their own macro, or plug-in, and do anything you wish with some very powerful commands. But beware, Marcos are like the Big Bad Wolf that could just blow the Little Piggies house down, eat Grandma, or eat your harddrive. . . . and you thought that was just a Fairy Tale.
I use Google Voice. It works, but is not really the best texting platform. Being able to log in on any PC with Chrome browser is very nice though. In the past, I tried Mighty Text and was happy.
if you are looking for a text interface but want to keep your cell phone look into pushbullet!
if you’re looking to do sms gateway without a cell phone twilo is by far the best bet.
Push bullet supports curl which is available on most any system you’re working with plus browser plug ins with pop up
