I am looking for an answering service that will operate like a pager and send a message to a cell phone. I want to replace a pager but not have to give out and post a cell phone number. It would be great if there could even be a menu so that the message is sent to different people depending on what menu option is selected.

Anyone use anything like this? I've gone through a lot of stuff on google but most of it has nothing to do with what i want, i'm having trouble figuring out what to search for.

10/24/2008 9:58:07 AM

My employer has something like this. I don't know what company we hire to operate it, but i used to have to carry around a pager, but a little while back, they added SMS support, so it just gets sent to my phone.

that probably doesn't help much, except to let you know that it exists.

10/24/2008 10:15:04 AM

You can send an email to pretty much any cellphone and it will arive there as SMS. You need the cellphone number and the provider's mail domain. For example if your number is 1-234-567-8910 and your provider is att the email address is 2345678910@mobile.att.net.

If you create a list of contacts for all the devices in you email system, you could then send emails to them and they'd get delivered like a page.

The downside to SMS is that its way less depedable than paging and theres no failure notifications (aside from bad address). With a normal paging system you dial a carriers paging modem, tell it to send a page to whoever, and then the carrier responds wether it reached the pager or not. For example if you're paging a doctor and they're out of the coverage area its important to get that failure message. If you send via SMS the carrier accepts the message and delivers when the phone is next available.

If you want something thats designed for paging, hiplink makes a pretty nice paging server that does paging and SMS emails. And has a pretty nice set of external apis.

What my company does is we send all tech on call pages to a central address (techpager@domain.com). The address is actually a group that contains the email addresses of everyone in IT + the email address of our pager. We all get the paged email in our own accounts and then on our blackberries. In your situation you'd replace the list of addresses with a list of peoples SMS Phone email addresses. That way the address people page to is pager@yourdomain.com and anyone using it doesn't know the phone numbers or addresses that that actually goes to.

10/24/2008 1:26:49 PM

i thought this was implied, but i need a phone number

i know you can email phones

10/24/2008 4:59:09 PM

You can get a virtual pbx from virtualpbx.com and set it so someone calls they are prompted to leave a voicemail message. virtualpbx then calls your cell phone or can text msg you to notify you that there is a new voicemail msg

http://www.virtualpbx.com/support/tutorials/paging.asp

Quote :

"If the extension owner so wishes, he may simply enter his cell phone number in contact phone number 7 and check the MSG box on the web or declare the pager to be a combination cell-phone/pager unit. In this case his cell phone will be called each time that a voice or fax mail arrives"

should be about $15/mo for an account

10/24/2008 6:13:49 PM