Sunday, July 27, 2008

Text Message Notification

Nowadays email mailing lists are not nearly as popular or hip as text message lists.  There are service providers out there that charge you an arm and a leg for text messaging.  There are also free services like Twitter but it requires you join the twitter network.  I needed a quick an easy way to notify our technicans and managers of technology issues or outages.  I wrote this simple web application that allows you to send text messages based on subscribed categories. It is built in Dreamweaver using Classic ASP and runs on a Microsoft Access Database.


License: Open Source (GNU General Public License)

Demo Site
username: admin@admin.com
password: password

Note: This demo is intended to display the features and user interface. The ability to update the database has been removed.

Installation: On a windows server, unzip, upload, change permissions on the database to write and you're good to go.

Instructions:
1) Set your Categories
Categories are items that a user may want to be notifed about. 
Example:
  • ITS - You may want to set up your categories as different technology items (servers, phones, email, etc...)
  • Clubs & Services - You may want to set up your categories for different clubs and services services and notify students or users of upcoming events. 
  • Emergency - Categories can be different types of emergency notification.  However, given this is running off of an access database I wouldn't run it with more than 100 users.
2) Create Users

3) Select which users should be notified about which categories.

How it Works:  It's actually very simple.  It uses CDOSYS to send emails to the user's cell phone provider text message service. 

Enjoy and donations to my college fund are welcome =)

1 comment:

  1. While text messages are fine, the reality is that SMS usage has hit a plateau as 3G phones have become more popular. And guess what? People prefer e-mail over SMS because they don't get bombarded with messages they don't want and can check their e-mail at a time of their choosing.

    Regardless, this is a good project as another channel of communication, but not as a replacement for e-mail.

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