SMS Texting is now available in our NITRO Studio, adding greater communication and collaboration capabilities to the applications you can build in Microsoft Office 365 and Teams.
When using NITRO Studio with Microsoft Office 365 and Teams, you can send alerts and notifications to just about any cell phone. Not only that, SMS Texting can be used to initiate workflows that power business process automation – and get work done.
You can send and receive texts as part of SharePoint and Office 365 workflows and applications to:
- Notify users, customers, and staff can when a ticket or request is received.
- Send updates via text when status changes, a ticket is resolved, or on other events.
- Respond with customizable action verbs (“APPROVE”, “CLOSE”, etc.) to drive workflows.
To set up SMS Texting in NITRO Studio, the first step is to get a free account with Twilio, a well-known commercial texting service. When you sign up, Twilio will provide one or more phone numbers that will be used for the texting service. (The account is free to set up, but there will be a small charge per text sent.)
In NITRO Studio’s “NITRO Site Settings”, you enter in the Account SID and Auth Token that Twilio provides. After that, it is simply a matter of setting up NITRO for outgoing and incoming texts, as follows:
SENDING OUTGOING TEXTS
Outgoing texts can notify users, managers, customers, and staff on ticket creation, updates, and resolution. They can let someone know the status of an order or purchase. A manager can receive a text when approval is needed and the requester can be sent a text when the request is approved or denied.
Configuring the outgoing texts is simplicity itself. In both NITRO Custom Actions and NITRO Workflows, you will see an action for “Send SMS Text”. That action is triggered by whatever criteria is appropriate – item is created, item is modified, status changes, user clicks a button on the form, etc.
The outgoing message is set up as follows:
From is the phone number Twilio provides. Be sure to let your users know to add that to their phone’s Contacts list or at least not block texts from that number.
To is usually pulled from one or more fields on the ticket or request form, such as “Requester Mobile Phone”. (That information is either entered directly by the user or auto-filled on the form.) You can also enter in specific phone numbers or people’s names in the To line.
Body can be up to 600 characters and contain text, placeholders from the ticket form, such as Title or ID, or calculated expressions.
Note that users can choose what communication path they prefer — email, text, or both. This choice can be made per ticket or set globally for each user.
All outgoing texts are logged for diagnostic, compliance, and troubleshooting purposes.
RECEIVING INCOMING TEXTS
NITRO Studio can also be setup to receive and process incoming texts. “Action Verbs” in the incoming message kick off workflows that perform specific functions in the application. This makes it very easy for employees to move business processes along while on their cell phones.
For example, you might have an automated text that goes out to a manager when a request needs approval. That manager can respond with “APPROVE” and this will run the approval workflows in the application. Or a staff member might respond with “CLOSE” to mark a ticket completed.
Using customizable Action Verbs along with the advanced text parsing feature in NITRO Studio, you can institute many types of responses that are perfectly suited to the needs of your organization and your users’ preferences.
The incoming text receiver filters out texts that are spam or unauthorized. All incoming texts are logged for diagnostic, compliance, and troubleshooting purposes.
CONCLUSION
SMS Texting is a valuable feature to have in your SharePoint or Office 365 workflows. By opening another channel of communication, users and staff can stay informed while not being tied to email. With the ability to respond using certain pre-defined “verbs”, business processes can be further automated with minimal effort.
Take advantage of this and the many other features in NITRO Studio to power your digital transformation and get the best use out of Office 365 and SharePoint!
See also our “Introducing SMS Texting!” webinar on this page:
https://www.crowcanyon.com/resources/nitro-studio-workshops/
