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Can Microsoft Teams send text messages?
There are many times when it would be helpful to send text messages via Teams. Fortunately, there are ways to do this through Microsoft and third-party applications.
As people begin to rely more on real-time communication through collaboration tools, like Microsoft Teams, the differences in texting and IM are becoming less clear. This is especially the case when the recipient is not a corporate user and still needs to be able to communicate with a Teams user.
Communication gets even trickier if users don't have Teams installed on their personal phones. In these cases, users might want to receive messages and notifications through text message. To that end, IT admins are working to enable Microsoft Teams to send text messages.
Microsoft has begun rolling out text messaging capabilities for Calling Plan customers. For organizations on other Teams phone plans, text messaging can be enabled in two ways.
Use cases for Teams text messaging
There are a number of examples where it is helpful to reach out to end users through text message when the Teams app is not available on a personal device or a smartphone.
Some organizations ban their employees from using their personal devices to send text messages to customers or other end users for work-related communication. Using Microsoft Teams to send outbound messages to end users who would receive them by text is a great way to ensure all communication is maintained outside of employees' personal devices and inside of Teams.
Organizations can also use Teams text messaging for customer communications, such as automated reminders or alerts. This can be enabled with Microsoft Power Automate to set up text messaging to customer devices.
How to enable native Teams text messaging
For an organization to enable text messaging on a company-issued device, the end user must be licensed for Microsoft 365 Business Voice or have an E5 license with Teams phone capabilities. In addition, the tenant must also be located in a country that supports text messaging via SMS.
Once the licenses are acquired, Teams administrators must assign a phone number to the user and ensure they configure the service account that will send and receive texts. Teams' administrative console offers an option to enable text messaging capabilities to the phone number that's assigned to a user.
How to use third-party services for Teams text messaging
Multiple service providers, such as Heymarket, Twilio, EZ Texting and touchSMS, support text communication organizations that opt to use text messaging with Teams or other Microsoft services. Integrating Teams with a third-party provider enables text messaging capabilities such as group chats, multifactor authentication and text scheduling.
Reda Chouffani runs a consulting practice he co-founded, Biz Technology Solutions Inc., and is CTO at New Charter Technologies. He is a technology consultant with a focus on healthcare and manufacturing, cloud expert and business intelligence architect who helps enterprises make the best use of technology.
