Using iPhone as Pager for Business

I have the same problem. I work in a hospital and carry around my iPhone AND a pager. I want to get rid of the pager and make it so that people in the hospital can pick up a landline telephone and send me a numeric page that will go to my iPhone instead of to my pager. Any ideas on how to make this happen? Some ideas I had were: find an AT&T voicemail number that the person dials from a landline, then it prompts them to input my telephone number, then it lets them either leave a callback number or leave a voicemail. This would be ideal.

Also was thinking that maybe there's a company out there that does "virtual paging" where someone would page this "virtual number" and that company would send me an SMS text.

If you know of any ways around this problem, please put your ideas down here.

Thanks!

This is ridiculous. How hard could it possibly be to enhance the the text alerts to make them usable as pager? No wonder my company is stuck in proof of concept mode with iPhone.

I did away with my pager 3 yrs ago, and just use my phone (Razr at first, iPhone past 2 yrs). My answering service just calls me direct. Patients and hospital staff are quite surprised at how quickly their calls are answered. All the hospital units were given my phone number to call preferentially, my service secondary. This works well since I share call with a few physicians, so call is spread out. There was some busy work involved, but, there aren't that many different extension numbers on the hospital units that 95% of my patients are on. Just named them and put them in the address book. If you can't pick up the phone right away, visual voice mail then is more informative. One advantage to using an iPhone vs a pager.... there are radio dead spots in the depths of the hospital (radiology, elevators). Pagers miss the call, your phone picks up the missed call notification and voice mail notification as it reconnects to the wireless. As an aside, told all the consultants I use to call my cell preferentially after office hours... much speedier and personal service.

Good morning everyone. Does anyone know what an "access number" is. I am a firefighter and to be able to receive the information on active fire calls on my iPhone, they are asking for an "access number" They told me that this number will make my iPhone work as a pager to receive the information, but i have no idea what this number is.

Thanks for your help.

Get yourself set up with this company called PhoneWire at http://www.answersolo.com. It's like the good old pager days, who used to offer the alpha-dispatch service, but this is for your cell phone! They give you your own private toll-free number that rings directly to live English-speaking American operators who will answer your calls as your personal assistant, 24/7, take the message from the caller, then type it out and send it to your iPhone screen and your computer's e-mail address. You can even set it up to automatically forward your unanswered cell phone calls to them instead of bothering with voicemail anymore! I've used them for years and, trust me, you just can't beat the price.

A paging company on the internet... pagersdirect.net offers a virtual paging service that works like a regular pager but the numeric or alphanumeric message rings to an email address or appears as a text message. I have it linked to my iphone and haven't carried a pager in two years. The direct link for this service is here: http://www.pagersdirect.net/pagersdirect-pagers-pagersdirect-virtual-pager-svc-c -29_67.html

Found a company that claims their answering service functions like a "virtual pager" at http://ringalice.com/how-does-it-work I've set them up with my iPhone 3GS and it works perfectly well. All you do is enter the call forwarding code they provide you with once you activate the service, then people either call your cell phone and are automatically forwarded to the operator if you don't answer OR people can directly call the toll-free phone number they give you for the service and leave a message with the operator immediately. The operators send you the caller's message as a text message or e-mail instantly! The monthly price is fair, but I paid quarterly for the 20% discount, and I really appreciate getting the actual message as dictated by the caller, not just a "callback number". Absolutely love it!!

We currently use BlackBerry's as our pagers. I'd love to lose the BB and get an iPhone, but since the BB is required for paging, i haven't been able to make the move. We are able to configure the BB to look for a specific word anywhere in the subject line of an email to change the message to a "Level 1" message. A level 1 message can then vibrate or issue a different ringtone so we know someone just paged us. Does anyone know if this is possible on an iPhone?

Just changed from a BB to iphone. With BB I had PageSync from USA Mobility our pager carrier. My pages came accross exactly as a test page on my pager with a loud annoying pager sound. The same service with my iphone gives me a text message with an alert that will not wake me from sleep. I don't want an annoying alert everytime I get a text message but I need a different alert when the text is from my pager service and loud enough to wake me if I am asleep and on call. Has anyone found a solution for that?

There are a bunch of pager apps on the App Store.

Personally I use the app called "Pager". It goes off when I receive an SMS from our monitoring server here in our Data Center. It allows me to change the tone based on the sender, so I can keep my text messages a quiet simple tone that wont wake me, and have my paged alerts scare the hibbie-jeebies out of me.

It's free too 🙂

Hope this helps 🙂

Edit -- Ok, it's a free app, but does come with a subscription fee. Thought I should clarify. I think it's worth it, but you could just get a third-party site to do the exact same thing, and have no App. It also sets a "Pager number" which some could see as insecure, as anyone could set it as theirs and receive your pages... but the only information that comes via our pages is an internal IP and alert level, so we're not too concerned.

Message was edited by: Scynthyace

This is an amazing oversight for apple... especially after 4 releases of the IOS!

All that's stopping us from moving our company from blackberry to iPhone is the lack of ability to customize alert tones depending on sender/subject/content with e-mails... or anything for that matter.

Seriously apple... how hard is this?

Well, this is a work around...
Set up the app called PushMail ($2.99). Disable the iPhone's built in mail recieved sound and then set up the app according to its directions. It has the ability to use different sounds according to the sender or subject. It also has quiet times, to prevent it from making any noise during the night.

Simon, I've come up with a solution that works well for me. You need to purchase Prowl from the App store. After that, you can setup forwarding rules on your mail client to Prowl (there is a mail gateway you can use here, http://mail2prowl.de/, or you can roll your own with the Prowl API). Since we use Exchange/Outlook at work, I've created some Outlook scripting calls to interact directly with Rules and have documented this here: http://bubba.org/index.php?id=461091729996829223

Hi everyone,

Is there any one that is using Pagesync app for blackberry ? I looking also for replacement for it, I heard about WIC pager....
What is the most important thing about paging.

Thanks you All.