Introducing the CTS SMS Gateways

CoralTree has developed its CTS Nokia and TextAnywhere SMS Gateways to provide your customers with a quick and easy way of communicating with any System i application using standard text messaging. Each Gateway consists of the following components:

An MDI (Multiple Document Interface), allowing you to easily manage the Gateway.

A Nokia or TextAnywhere interface: a Windows service which accepts inbound SMS messages from, and places outbound SMS messages on a handset attached to your PC. Each inbound message is automatically assigned a culture, then parsed to determine whether it is a Gateway command, client-side command, or simple message. The interface also picks up outbound messages from the Outbound folder and passes them back to the attached mobile phone for onward transmission.

The Client interface: a Windows service which (i) picks up messages from the Gateway command folder, executes them, and returns the response to the outbound queue in the appropriate language, (ii) picks up client-side commands and passes them to the CTS SMS Gateway Daemon for execution (i.e. to call a program or execute a OS/400 command), (iii) picks up normal messages and passes them to the CTS SMS Gateway Daemon to be delegated to the System i application, (iv) retries any failed inbound or outbound messages, and (v) picks up responses from the CTS SMS Gateway Daemon and places them in an Outbound folder for processing by the Nokia interface.

The CTS SMS Gateway Daemon: a socket server on the System i serving connections from the client interface running on the PC. When a message is sent to the Daemon it acknowledges receipt, then parses the message. If the message is a command it executes it and returns a response. If it is a simple message in places the message on a predefined inbound dataqueue. Your System i application will then take entries from this queue, execute them and place a response on an outbound dataqueue. The Daemon picks up outbound responses from the outbound dataqueue and passes them back to the client interface.

A useful feature of the CTS SMS Gateways is built-in security checking of incoming messages. The originating telephone number for each message can be checked against preconfigured authorisation group lists allowing you to restrict commands to selected numbers only. You can also create a blacklist, from which all messages are to be rejected. Commands can be flagged as requiring a PIN. Telephone numbers can be allocated a unique PIN which must be provided on certain commands.