THIS PRODUCT IS IN THE EARLY FIELD TRIAL PHASE FOR SPECIFIC CLIENTS UNTIL GENERALLY AVAILABLE IN Q2 2021.

The following document is designed for Evolve IP client administrators to know a detailed feature list of what is currently supported with the Evolve Messaging application.  This will be separate, at this time, than the OSSmosis Administrator functionality to manage users and platform settings. 

Evolve IP recommends using the Evolve Messaging app running in a Chrome browser as a web app, but the app is also supported in MS Edge, Firefox, and Safari.  When manually uploaded into MS Teams by M365 admins or implemented from the Microsoft AppSource (Q1 2021) the Evolve Messaging app is supported in Windows desktop and web version and MAC desktop version.  Evolve Messages is supported as a web app and inside of MS Teams mobile app on iOS and Android mobile devices.  Running the Evolve Messaging inside of Microsoft Teams in the Safari browser is not supported at this time.

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

General Use

• Search contacts based on alphanumeric characters
• Results span Favorites, My Contacts, Enterprise Contacts, Groups, and All

Contacts

• 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 - Since Evolve Messaging is sold with our unified communications solution, the Enterprise Contacts from your hosted Evolve Hosted PBX platform internal users' business phone numbers.
• 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.  

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/