Hello.
Is anyone using Vega Interact SMS? Is it true SMS messaging? Has it functioned correctly for you, and are patrons reliably receiving the texts, as of summer 2026?
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We just launched it in April. Delivery seems to be pretty reliable, and it is true SMS. The major drawbacks are below.
Not compatible with iTiva:
I donāt know if you do phone notices, but we found out AFTER we signed the contract with Innovative that Vega Interact and iTiva canāt both run on your system. I donāt totally understand the technical details, but apparently they use the same export channel. We ended up delaying our Interact launch for several months while we looked into a new phone notices setup.
Report portal is not well-supported or well-built for library customers:
The company that actually sends the notices and provides the portal is Cirrus, and the reporting/management portal is a Cirrus product, not an Innovative product. We received almost no training on the portal, there was almost no documentation available, and the Vega Support team seems unfamiliar with it. We havenāt had to use it for much but I donāt feel at all confident that weād be able to if we wanted to. There isā¦janky-ness in every part of the setup, like only allowing one shared login per Vega customer that is not tied to an email address (forget two-factor authentication) to a numeric failure code system we had to open a TICKET to have Innovative interpret.
Opt out setup is poor:
Patrons can opt out by replying āstopā to a message, and every step of the process reports that back to us as though they are opting out for the account that generated the message. However, the opt-out is by phone number, so, for example, if a parent with three children replies āstopā to a message on her account, staff need to find all three kidsā accounts that use the same phone number and update those accounts. Also, we are only prompted to do that by receiving an email from the Cirrus portalāthe system does not pass anything back to Polaris itself similar to LX Starter passing back email bounce notifications and the patronās notification option being updated to a backup method. Instead, an opted-out patron just gets no notifications and thereās no indication on their account of what happened unless staff get that email and manually update the account.
Need to still select a carrier in the patron record:
This one only applies to you if you are a Polaris library, I think. True SMS is carrier-neutral, but POLARIS is designed not to let you select text messaging as a notification option unless you specify both which phone number field will receive texts and what mobile carrier that phone number uses. We removed all the actual carriers from our database table and only have a single placeholder āAny Mobile Carrierā, but staff still have to āselectā from a dropdown menu of a single one in the patron record in order to enroll patrons in texts. The same thing happens via the PAC or Vega Discover if the patron wants to change their notification options themselves.
Despite the disadvantages, itās still been much better than using email-to-SMS, which carriers are supporting less and less. However, if I could go back in time, I would do a separate RFP for SMS notifications and consider third-party services like MessageBee instead of just automatically going with Innovativeās product. I think we might have ended up with a more user-friendly product for a lower cost.
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