Make it possible for T-Mobile customers to get notices by text
According to a posting on the Supportal, "T-Mobile and Sprint have changed their guidelines on how they route and handle SMTP to SMS traffic and that they no longer accept traditional SMTP to SMS traffic, especially when that traffic appears to be generated from an application and not a human. The recommendation from these carriers for anyone experiencing an issue with sending messages to their customer base via SMTP to SMS is to invest in a short code service which will allow their customers to opt-in to the messages." (https://iii.rightanswers.com/portal/app/portlets/results/viewsolution.jsp?solutionid=210611154739507)
In other words, our patrons cannot be sure of getting notifications by text message if they use T-Mobile as their cellphone carrier. That's 25% of our registered patrons with a carrier listed in their account.
The Supportal article goes on to say "The development required to allow Polaris to be able to utilize a short code for text messaging in order to support this change made by T-Mobile and Sprint is currently considered to be an enhancement. Our recommendation is for any libraries interested in seeing short code messaging supported in Polaris is to advocate for this feature via the IdeaLab as something to be developed in a future version."
So this is that advocacy! :-) It's really not great if 1/4 of our patrons who want text messages can't get them.
Bill Taylor
shared this idea
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Jason Bedsaul
commented
With all due respect to Sam's comment and suggestion that this is 'already supported', offering an additional-cost solution to the problem is hardly 'already supported'. That's akin to saying format roll ups are already supported because Vega Discovery has them.
Ideally, there would be some consideration to developing a solution to this native to Polaris so having this 'idea' in already supported status prevents any additional voting on this issue.
If the solution to this issue is outside of the scope of development and the solution will not be included in the core subscription cost, then perhaps that should be stated instead - Can't develop / Can't fix - or something along those lines?
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AdminSamantha Quell
(Admin, Innovative)
commented
We're actually working with a partner vendor on a new SMS solution for Polaris. We have two libraries live with the solution today and a few more in beta testing. I'm going to mark this solution as already supported. If you are interested in SMS messages, please contact your account manager for more information.