The Laravel News site has posted the third part of their series about the construction of helpdesk software. In this latest article they integrate Nexmo for real-time messaging using Nexmo Stitch.

Welcome back to the third and final (for now!) part of the Deskmo series. In Part 2 added support for voice calls, with text-to-speech and transcription support.

Today, we’re going to add in-app messaging using Nexmo Stitch. Stitch takes care of all of the heavy lifting for real-time chat, providing you with a websocket that you connect to and listen for events relating to your application.

The article starts by listing out some prerequisites (a Nexmo client account and the Deskmo project) as well as an installation of the Nexmo Stitch command-line client. It then walks you through the process of setting up a Nexmo user profile for each user in the helpdesk software and updating the database with this new information. It then shows how to add in-app notification messaging and linking the messages and tickets together with a conversation ID. With Stitch installed you can then create the chat interface and link the backend to the Nexmo service as a user easily sending and receiving messages.

The Laravel News site has published a tutorial for those Laravel users out there that would like to integrate their application with Nexmo for the sending and receiving (and handling) of SMS messages in your application.

This is the first part of a series of tutorials by Michael Heap, covering how to build a multi-channel help desk system with Laravel. In this post, we’ll take a basic web based help desk system and extend it to send and receive SMS messages using the built-in Laravel notification system (which is powered by Nexmo).

The tutorial starts with some of the prerequisites you'll need to get started including a Nexmo account and the ngrok tool for exposing your site publicly while still hosting it locally. It then starts in on the functionality, using the Deskmo repository as a starting place. After a few setup steps the article has you hop over to Nexmo and purchase a number to use for the SMS and configure the application to use this number. Next it shows how to send a sample message when a ticket is created and how to receive an incoming SMS message to pull in the information and create a new ticket.