More than a few users have asked for this: After a SMS Receive Campaign has been created, how do you edit the auto-reply message or the Campaign Expiry date?

With today’s update, simply click on the Campaign Report, the Auto-Reply message as well as the Campaign expiry date both have a Edit link which you can now use to make your changes!

Many users don’t realize that this feature exists perhaps because it’s hidden under an “further options” link. If you happen to have to send a SMS broadcast at a time when you are not going to be physically at your PC or in the office, you can actually create a Campaign and then set the time and date that it will be processed.

To do this, create a SMS broadcast campaign just like you normally would.  At the final step where the “Start Campaign’ button appears, there is a link called “further options”. Click on this and a panel for setting the broadcast date appears. See below:

Choose the desired actual broadcast date and time and then click “Start Campaign”. That’s it, your campaign has been scheduled for broadcast!

One of the most popular uses we see on the portal is that for starting a Campaign to receive SMS messages from the public. Such “Receive Campaigns” can be for promotions, contests or even for receiving subscribe/unsubscribe  requests.

Here is a quick guide on how to start one for your own use.

1) First go to the “Campaign” tab and choose “Start SMS Receive”

2) As with all campaigns, give this one a name you can use to refer to later.

3) Your SMS users will send their SMS to 73333 (Singapore only!)

Since this 73333 shortcode is shared with all our Basic Plan users, you have to choose a keyword to uniquely identify your campaign. SMS users will have to include this keyword in the front of their message before they send the message to 73333.

As an example, I have chosen the keyword “COKE” here.

4) Click the “next” button and you will be prompted to enter a auto-reply message. This is the message that will be replied to any SMS user that had messaged in. You can leave this text box blank if you do not wish to have any auto-replies sent.

5) Lastly, choose when your campaign will start and send. Do note that Receive Campaigns have a finite lifespan, the default is 2 weeks. You can set this to be longer but after the campaign has expired, no further messages will come into your campaign and your chose keyword will be released.

6) To view the progress of your campaign and to view all the messages that have been sent in, go to “Reports”  and select the report for your Receive Campaign. You should see the overall status here. To view all the messages received, click “View Log”. You shall see all the individual messages received and can choose to export these as well if you wish.

For Mobile Inbox Campaign users, you can now configure an auto-reply message of more than 160 characters, up to 800 characters in fact.

i.e. When mobile users send an SMS to your Campaign Inbox, your auto-reply can be as lengthy as up to 800 characters.

Do note that for messages of more than 160 characters, every 140 characters (roman text) will be considered as 1 SMS message and the appropriate number of credits will be deducted from your account accordingly (if you are a Basic Plan users)

You may have noticed that the loading of your data on the Contacts page is now significantly faster.

This is due to back-end optimization work we have carried out on our database cluster over the weekend.

Currently there are more than 5 million contacts in total stored on our portal system by our users, a figure that continues to be growing daily.

We will be doing more for such work to make your user experience as snappy as possible!

When starting a SMS Receive Campaign, you will be expecting SMS messages to come in,  be received and appear in your Campaign report. Such a Campaign can be created for various objectives, such as to receive enquires for your product or service (most popular!), for receiving feedback, or for receiving submissions for a Luck Draw.

You will of course have to tell mobile users that they have to send in SMS message in respond to your Campaign.

You can let mobile users know of your campaign via various means:

• TV adverts (expensive!)
• Newspaper adverts
• Newsletters
• In-Store materials
• SMS Broadcast (you can send this via the Portal!)

When you created the SMS Receive Campaign on the Portal, you would have been prompted to choose a keyword as part of the Campaign setup. You will have to tell the mobile user to place this keyword as the first word in their SMS message before they send the SMS to the Portal shortcode 73333.

Assuming that you have chosen the keyword “Cola” and you are looking to collect a subscription list of people interested in receiving further news about your product, examples of how you can tell your potential mobile users about the Campaign are as follows:

Send <Cola> < “Your Name”> to 73333

Send “Cola”  SPACE “Your Name” to 73333

Send Cola  <Your Name> to 73333

All the above examples will work! The Portal is smart enough to filter out the < symbols and quotes to make sure the SMS message appear in your Campaign report!

Included in the latest update of COMMZGATE Portal today is a feature that allows you to select recipient groups by simply dragging them from your Contacts list, and dropping them into the “Selection Outbox”.
This method allows multiple selection as well and gives users a much improved visualization of the Contacts selection process.

This new feature is found in both the Campaign and QuickSend sections.

Also included in the update today are a host of other minor improvements such as a date range filter for API message logs and improved search capabilities.

New Feature
QuickSend is a great way to send a simple message broadcast to customers and colleagues without having to take into consideration all of the campaign-related features in a normal campaign.
We released a new feature in QuickSend where on submitting each message, you will be able to view the progress of the message submission instantaneously. The progress will appear a yellow alert box as shown by the screenshot on this page.
A nice feature here is that even if there already are existing messages in the message queue waiting to be processed, you can proceed to submit even more messages to the queue without having to wait for the original batch of messages to clear.

Sign-up for a free COMMZGATE Web Portal account

If you are programming an application to interface with an GSM modem hardware device to send and receive SMS Text Messages, you will most likely be communicating with the GSM modem device using AT Commands.

When issuing commands to the GSM modem device, you will get back a series of return codes from the device, which is in turn a result of how the GSM modem device had interacted with the GSM network.

The return codes are in the form of 1 to 3 digit numbers.

Here is the full list of the possible return codes and what they mean:

CMS Error code list  for GSM Modem devices

1 - “Unassigned (unallocated) number”
This cause indicates that the destination requested by the Mobile Station cannot be reached because, although the number is in a valid format, it is not currently assigned (allocated).

8 - “Operator determined barring”
This cause indicates that the MS has tried to send a mobile originating short message when the MS’s network operator or service provider has forbidden such transactions.

10 - “Call barred”
This cause indicates that the outgoing call barred service applies to the short message service for the called destination.

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When sending SMS in English text, the message is actually encoded with a character set that ain’t quite the full set that you see on your computer keyboard.

As SMS messages can only carry 140 bytes worth of data, a new Alphabet was invented  that will only take up 7-bits per character so that more characters can be squeezed into this 140 bytes, resulting in the current 160 character limit for SMS Text Messaging.
(Most mobile handsets will be able to decipher message transmitted in either 7-bit or 8-bit encoding, but the message transmitted in 8 bit encoding will obviously have a smaller character limit )

This new 7-bit Alphabet  ( GSM 03.38) is the default character set that most SMSCs and SMS gateways support. This 7-bit Alphabet also means that there are some characters you should avoid or prevent from sending when designing your SMS sending applications.

The GSM 03.38 7-bit Alphabet set is shown as follows, along with the character’s hexadecimal equivalent representation:

The Letters A to Z and numbers 1 to 10 (plus the symbols in between) corresponds to the ACSII encoding table.

Make sure your browser has UTF-8 encoding turned on to read the table above!

10 extended characters are also supported and they have to be represented through an escape mechanism using the escape character (0×1B). These 10 characters are:

-Form feed FF

-Caret / circumflex ^

-Left curly bracket {

-Right curly bracket }

-Backslash \

-Left square bracket [

-Tilde ~

-Right square bracket ]

-Vertical bar or Pipe |

-Euro sign €

WAP PUSH enables the delivery of multimedia content to mobile devices without the need for the full-fledged MMS delivery protocol. Instead, a hyperlink is delivered to the mobile device of the recipient as a Service Indication message. The recipient mobile device will automatically prompt the recipient to download the content on the hyperlink and display it over a GPRS/WAP connection.

Formatting a proper WAP PUSH message as hexadecimal string has been something of a mystery to many people, as there is close to no useful documentation on the Web on this, and Nokia’s own documentation is very cryptic at best.

Hopefully, the following provides a clear and easy-to-understand guide on how to construct WAP PUSH messages!

Basics: ASCII to Hex Conversion
A WAP Push message essentially consists of the Internet URL containing your multimedia content, and this URL is wrapped by some SMS-specific headers, which we will explain below

Your need to first convert your URL into a hexadecimal string. Use the table found at the following page to convert each character in your URL string into its hexadecimal equivalent:
http://www.commzgate.sg/blog/2007/07/the-gsm-default-alphabet-set-gsm-0338-7-bit/

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ING Private Bank has enhanced their in-house COMMZGATE Setup to a pretty heavy-duty one involving multiple GSM modems and the ever-amazing N-Port IP-based Serial Port Appliance server.

The N-Port application is basically a specialized server appliance with its own IP address and up to 16 RS-232 serial ports extending out of the back of it for connection with serial devices such as GSM modems.

The COMMZGATE Enterprise Server installed on-site communicates with the N-Port using the supplied management program (runs on Windows and Linux).

The enhanced setup  allows for increased message throughput as well as sophisticated message routing based on destination mobile number country codes.

For those who are interested, the mobile number range allocation in Singapore is maintained by IDA, the current range allocation table can be downloaded
HERE.
This table should be obsolete once true mobile number portability is implemented in Singapore
How does this table work? Carry on reading…
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IDA has released new draft guidelines for Premium SMS Content Providers in Singapore. A copy of the draft Code IDA is looking to introduce can be found HERE

The proposed measures looks all for the positive development of the premium content market in Singapore, and should be able weed out some of the rouge service providers giving this industry a bad name.

As IDA is still seeking comments to this draft, let us have your feedback for consolidated inclusion!