SMS paging s/w recommendations ?

[Thomas Ritter]

Is anybody using software which allows you to send an SMS message ?

[Heinz W Genhart]

Hi Thomas

I wrote a Paging/SMS Software jears ago. We are still using it in a large environment with more than 100 OpenVMS Servers.
It's a Client-Server Model, what means you have one ore more Pager Servers. All the clients sends their message to the Pager Server and the Server sends them then to a provider.
The Server can send its messages over X25 PVC or SVC and over TCPIP as well.

Regards

Geni

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

For Australia you can also use
http://www.directsms.com.au/info/services.php
to convert emails to sms.

Wim

[David Jones_21]

I wrote my own utility that lets you specify the target as an alias (e.g. username), looks up the phone number and provider for that alias, and sends the message via that provider's SMTP gateway. If the SMTP connection fails, then it is retried in 15 minutes. Each alias also has a quota of the number of messages that can be sent to that target in a 32 day period.

Web-based gateways are more likely to change their interface than email gateways. The program makes a direct SMTP connection rather than using the mailer software since one of it's uses in reporting a backlog in the mail queues.

[Heinz W Genhart]

Hi Thomas

I did not describe the whole specification of our Pager/SMS Gateway. Here just some additinal important things:

- The client knows several Pager Servers. The first server reached will handle the message.

- The client is using DECnet or DECnet over Ip to send a message to the server

- The Server tries to send the message to the provider for a adjustable time. If the provider can't be reached the original sender (on the client) will be informed by mail.

- We are using something what we call a pager Group. A group can contain several recipient adresses. So we can send a message to multiple receivers, by addressing the group. If several Pager servers are in use, this group databes will be replicated from one pager Server to the anothers.

- It's also possibel to send a file to the pager server. The file contains the message and a list of recipients. (May be used to send things like soccer results to hundreds of people)

- We (our Pager Server) is actually sending its message as an SMTP Mail to a provider. We support several message formats, for several providers.

- The Pager Software is tested on all plattforms (VAX, Alpha, Ithanium) and is in use since VMS 5.0. Depending on customers, we can add functionality to the software any time.


Regards

Geni

[John Gillings · Accepted solution]

Thomas,

We have an facility with one of the telephone companies that gives us an email address to send to a group of phones.

That eliminates the need to have special software to send SMS.

[Robert Atkinson]

I agree with John.

We also use a company to handle the SMS/Paging from our Lights-Out solution.

They offer an Email-to-SMS service - http://www.bulletinonline.net/bw/products/bulletin_email2sms.htm - so all we have to do is send a normal VMS Mail out, which also means we can configure any groups within VMS.

Rob.

[Ruslan R. Laishev]

Hello, Thomas!

If you meant "paging" directly to SMSC with SMPP : take a look to SMPP API (this API cover interoperation with SMSC over TCPIP - SMPP).

http://starlet.deltatel.ru/~laishev/delta/smpp/

[Thomas Ritter]

Thanks very much.

[Derek Garson]

Bear in mind that if you are using SMS or paging as some kind of "alert" mechanism then using an external email-to-SMS service can mean that you can't use the service exactly when you want to send the alert e.g. network problem!

If you want to use an external provider for this purpose then you could want good redundancy in your network (e.g. dual NICs and dual internet gateways).

We have also contemplated SMS messages for this purpose. If we do it, I expect that we will put the SMS sending inside our network. There are reasonable solutions around, using either a cellular modem or just connecting a mobile phone (if you want to sacrifice a mobile phone and if you have one that supports the necessary interface).