Tracking group communications

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Author Message
Jeff Axup
New member
Username: Axup

Post Number: 1
Registered: 04-2004
Posted on Friday, April 09, 2004 - 07:14 am:   

Hi,
I'm pretty new to sms gateways and just trying to get an idea of what's possible. It would be very helpful to put in a few basic scenarios on the main site to get people thinking along the right lines.

We're interesting in doing a research study tracking sms communications in a small group of people. The SMS server needs to take incoming SMS traffic, record time sent, message content and source and destination phone numbers, and be able to redirect the message content and sender identity to either a list of numbers or to the recipient specified in the orignal message.

Can Nowsms do this? I have a t68i - can this be done via bluetooth connection to the phone or do I need a GSM modem?

many thanks
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support
Board Administrator
Username: Bryce

Post Number: 2293
Registered: 10-2002
Posted on Saturday, April 17, 2004 - 06:20 am:   

Hi Jeff,

Apologies for the delay in responding back to you.

We are trying to work on putting together some scenario information to help give people more practical ideas of what is possible. Hopefully we'll have some of that information available in the future.

The part that is so overwhelming is that there are so many different potential scenarios. Everyday it seems like I hear of at least one interesting idea that I hadn't thought of before.

For the type of scenario that you describe, NowSMS can facilitate it. But you would need to provide a little web programming, by way of a script file that runs on a web server, in order to make it function to your specific needs.

Basically, when NowSMS receives a message, it can be configured to make a request to a web server, passing it information about the received message. So your script would receive the sender information, and the message text, and based upon that information, you could decide what action to take.

If your script wanted to send a message to another recipient or group of recipients, it could initiate a new HTTP connection to the NowSMS server to send the message out. Or, often a simpler approach for many applications is for the script to return a redirect response which sends a command back to the NowSMS server telling it what to do. (The basic technique for the redirect response is described in http://www.nowsms.com/support/bulletins/tb-nowsms-003.htm)

This web script runs on a web server independent of NowSMS, so you can use whatever scripting language you are most familiar with in order to put it together.

The T68i will work just fine as a GSM modem over Bluetooth.

I have a test NowSMS install on my laptop, and I'm almost always using it with bluetooth connections, frequently to a T68i.

-bn