Overview

This article is for administrators, and details the feature list and recommendations for the Evolve Messaging application.

When the Evolve Messaging app is run in a web browser, we recommend using Google Chrome.  However, the Evolve Messaging app is supported in Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari. 

Additionally, the Evolve Messaging app can be manually uploaded into a Microsoft Teams environment by an M365 admin, or installed from the Office/Teams App Store (Q1 2021).  The Evolve Messaging app is supported in the following Microsoft Teams clients:

• The desktop client on Windows & Mac OS
• The mobile client on iOS and Android

Evolve Messaging App Settings

Display

• Themes, Language, Time Zone, and Date Format
• Visual Notifications, Audio Notifications.  Currently, notifications are supported via browsers on Windows and MAC only.
  • 1H 2021 MS Teams integration to provide notification inside of the MS Teams app on desktop and mobile.

Additional Options

• Message Downloads - Download active conversation to a .csv file.  Currently does not support the ability to download the MMS images, only text.
• Take an interactive application tour
• Provide Application Feedback of bugs and feature requests

Contacts

• Search Contacts - Search is based on alphanumeric characters.  Results span Favorites, My Contacts, Enterprise Contacts, Groups, and All
• Favorites - Contacts you manually add to your Favorites list.  You can use the ellipsis menu to make a contact a favorite or when in a chat window click the star icon.
• My Contacts
  • Microsoft 365 Integration.  When enabled, configured and authenticated, the user's M365 mailbox contacts will be displayed for searching and messaging (target availability January 2021)
  • Manual entered contacts by a user that contains the mandatory fields - Name, Phone Number and Type of Number.  Users can optionally add the Company Name to a contact.  These contacts are securely stored in an Evolve IP database on encrypted disk.
• Enterprise Contacts - This is your internal users in Azure AD that is populated after performing the Teams integration process within your O365 tenant and providing Evolve the details to configure in the Evolve Messaging platform.
• Groups - Users can manually create groups and add contacts to those groups.  These groups are unique to each user.  Users then have the ability to "blast a message" to the group.  This will create individual threads.  Think of this as sending a "notification" to a group of users.
  • Conversational Group Messaging - The ability all users in a group to send and receive all messages together like your smartphone is targeting a release in Q2 2021.
• All - The combination of your My Contacts and Enterprise Contacts.

Messages

• Sending and receiving text messages, according to the supported size and file types listed below.  There is a limit of 250 characters in a single SMS, the app will allow you to send larger and break the message up into multiple messages automatically.  There is a limit of 700 characters combined with an MMS before the app will break up the message to send as multiple messages automatically.
• Download messages for active conversation to CSV format for the following increments: 30, 60, 90 days; 6, 12, 18 months; or a custom date range.
• Add unknown numbers to contacts
• Copy a message; Download files and images
• Search messages and contacts with alphanumeric characters
• Start a new message with a known contact or phone number
• Add the contact of a conversation to your Favorites
• Share a contact card

Supported Message Types

There is a 600KB limit to sending and receiving a message.  There is a display in the app of the MMS to know if the file is smaller or larger than 600kb.  Here are the supported message types:

• SMS and MMS
• GIF, Emoji, Images
• JPEG, PNG, 3GP

Unsupported file types:  AMR

Compliance

When using the Evolve Messages app, Evolve IP clients are natively compliant with end users that do not wish to receive Business Messaging on their cell phones which may be 1) unsolicited or 2) numbers of end users may have changed hands, along with other use cases.  

For the end user receiving the message, they can reply with the message "stop" if they wish to opt-out of receiving messages from the Evolve Messages user.  Note that when opting out of SMS, the user must send "stop" as a singular text message response (not case-sensitive).

For the Evolve Messaging user and the external user on their cell phone, they will be given the following message:

• NETWORK MSG:  You replied with the word "stop" which blocks all texts from this number.  Text back "unstop" to receive messages again.

If the user sends the "unstop" message, both the cell user and the Evolve Messaging user will receive the following message:

• NETWORK MSG:  You replied with the word "unstop" and will begin receiving messages again from this number.

Note than when a user opts out of receiving messages, they are only opted out of messaging from that particular number.  If other users in your organization message that user, they will be sent/received.  

Product Roadmap / Known Issues

1. Microsoft Teams notifications.  When installing the Evolve Messaging app inside Microsoft Teams, users will not be given an audio or visual indicator of a new message.  They need to check into the app periodically for new messages.  Evolve IP is developing a bot for the app to be launched using the Microsoft AppSource which will provide the integration for visual and audio notifications.  Target release - Summer 2021  
2. Administrator Reporting and Downloading of Messages.  Evolve IP is architecting the Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) to get the messages securely into our Data Warehouse.  From there, customers will connect Microsoft Power BI to our DW for reporting and downloading of text messages. Target release - Summer 2021 

Application Feedback

We encourage our customers to report bugs and provide feature requests using the following link. If you already see a bug or feature request on the board, simply click the VOTE button to increase priority:  https://evolvesms.featureupvote.com/