What is the best way to deal with sms and mms?

[anaxagorasbc (nick stiv)]

Our current workflow is that each employee has a DID, deskphone or softphone at their desk, and they also use an app on the cell phone. They get text messages pushed to their cellphones and softphone apps. They also are plugged into ivr call queues.

We also have a main corporate number that goes to our IVR that everyone takes turn checking SMS/MMS on.

Ideally i’d like everything to work through one softphone app (paid is ok, as long as reasonably priced per seat), we haven’t picked one yet, just using free Zoiper right now for testing. I also plan on using the freepbx crm module, so if it supports logging sms/mms to the CRM that would be best. Or maybe i could do this through zapier as an alternative.

What is the best way to maintain this workflow? Can i funnel sms/mms through freepbx (i see it has support for sms webhooks, i’m unsure if that also works for mms?) and then to the softphone’s messaging app? Would this support pushing messages to the softphone app/mobile app? or would we be better off just having a separate app for sms/mms only for push? Or are there softphone apps that can handle sms/mms directly to the trunks?

I’ve used voip.ms in the past, so they’d be my first choice, but as long as the provider has reasonable rates for a small business, especially if it’s easier to integrate than another. I’m currently just messing around with a free trial of sipstation trunks that was a freepbx promo, but it looks like the free trial doesn’t support sms/mms.

[anaxagorasbc (nick stiv)]

I tried clearly ip’s trunks + their clearly softphone. worked well for a single number, but not for multiple numbers. Basically with the clearly anywhere each extension can only communicate with 1 did for sms/mms. I beleive through the freepbx ucp and the clearly anywhere extension you can have 1 extension use multiple dids. The only option i can think of is having a separate extension assigned to the common corporate did, then cloning the softphone app with android and having the cloned version of the app use the shared corporate number.

I looked at voip.ms, their andoid app only supports sms and no mms, and mms is silently stripped, at least pass through a message that says “mms received please login to the web portal” but it doesn’t, it’s just silent… I did not try the freepbx integration with webhooks, but according to the voip.ms documentation i could find mms is only supported through their web portal.

there is an app i found called texable that’s $5 a month per line, it looks like it works with multiple voip carriers and supports mms, but it doesn’t seem to support multiple numbers on a single account unless you have their $75/month plan. So i’m stuck with the same possible option of having multiple cloned apps installed ours phones to support the corporate line.