ALTONet SMS Services Manual
For Version 1.5

1. About the SMS Service

ALTONet SMS Services provide you with the complete SMS solution. If you are a socialite with many people to SMS or a web developer who needs to send SMS's from a website or a business person who can not miss that important email or a large corporate that needs to stay in contact with it's customers, ALTONet SMS Services has the perfect solution for you.

Features of the service include:

Should you have any problems using the system you can either contact support@altonet.co.za or make a post in the SMS Service forums.

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2. General Information

The interface for the online system is broken into 5 sections (click the image below to see a bigger version):

  1. On the top you have a light purple coloured area which contains the title
  2. Below that is a small dark purple area. This is the notification area. Sometimes after you have performed an action a message will display there detailing if the action was successful or not. At the end of this is a link (Need Help?) which takes you to this manual.
  3. Below that is a grey area which is broken into a left and right half. The left half contains the menu used to move around the SMS backroom, simply click on the buttons to go where you need to go.
  4. The right half is the general area and what is displayed there depends on what section you are in. This is where you would mainly do all your work.
  5. At the bottom is the copyright, a link to the terms and agreements and the version which will take you to the change log (the change log is a complete history of how the service has changed over time).

The online system does make use of cookies and JavaScript, please make sure both is enabled in your browser.

On average SMS's take 10secs to 3mins to be processed and be delivered after being queued. If the system can not deliver the SMS immediately (e.g.: the persons cellphone is off) the system will retry again later

All SMS's have a maximum length of 160 characters, although ALTONet allows you to create SMS messages with a maximum length of up to 8000 characters. This works by breaking the message into multiple SMS's and sending each part. For example a 310 character message would be broken into 2 SMS's (first SMS is 160 characters the second SMS would be 150 characters).

Every system in the SMS Backroom that allows the user to type an SMS has 2 counters below it.

  1. The first one is "SMS Characters Left", this shows you how many of the 8000 characters you have left to type your message.
  2. The other counter is "Number of SMS's Used", this shows you how many SMS's it will take to send your message.

Important: At the bottom of the table of contents is a link to the changelog. The changelog is a web page that details what has been added and what has been updated between versions. It is highly recommend for developers that it be checked with every update and new release of the system. The changelog is also available by clicking on the version number that is displayed at the bottom of every page in the systems backroom.

Note:

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3. SMS 2 Beta

SMS 2 Beta is the next evolution of SMS technology and is available to all ALTONet SMS clients. SMS 2 allows you to do amazing things with ANY cellphone, like send emails, and in the near future you will also be more amazing things.

SMS 2 Beta is also user initiated, meaning that you decided when you want to get the information (the information is not supplied on a schedule) and is compliant with any cellphone that supports normal SMS's.

No emails, or SMS's or replies from the service contain any reference to ALTONet*, so it is also a great service for you to re-sell on to your clients.

To start making use of the SMS 2 Beta functions, you first need to log in to your ALTONet SMS Service backroom and in the menu you will see a link to the SMS 2 Beta. Once you have clicked it you simply need to add your cellphone number and a valid email address. Once added an email will be sent to the email address specified with a link that needs to be clicked to activate your cellphone number. Once you have clicked that link your cellphone number will be activated.

For South African residents the number to send your SMS's to for SMS 2 Beta is: 0823891561

For users outside South Africa the number to send to is: +27823891561

Tip: You can put anyone's number in the signup form and keep the email address as your own so you activate the numbers on there behalf (this is great for reselling the service)!

More details on each of the various functions can be found below in the how to guide section.

Here is a complete listing of all the functions currently in the SMS 2 Beta service:

Notes:

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4. Payment and Purchasing of SMS's

To purchase SMS's you must use the SMS bank in the backroom, which also can be used to show the current rates of purchasing and how many SMS's you have available.

Before you can make a purchase you must first register your credit card with ALTONet. This is done by sending either a fax or email picture of the front and back of your credit card to ALTONet. Once this is done our people will then add this to the system and you will be able to buy and send SMS's.

For South African residents you can fax the pictures to:

For non-South African residents you can fax the pictures to:

For all users you can email the pictures to:

You are billed from the time the SMS is sent by ALTONet, not from the time the SMS is sent through to the network provider.

example: You send an SMS at 10am using the backroom. Your account will be immediately deducted for that SMS, even if the SMS only successfully goes through to the provider at 4pm.

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5. Main Menu Guide

The main menu is visible on all pages on the left hand side.

The main menu contains the following:

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6.1. Updating your details

  1. First click Account Details from the main menu on the left. Once that is done you will be presented with the account admin screen.
  2. Next change any of the fields that need to be changed.
  3. Once that is done, click the Update Details button at the bottom of the page.
  4. The notification area should display "Details Updated"

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6.2 Send an SMS from the web

  1. First click the Send SMS option in the main menu.
  2. Once the page loads  type in the cellphone number in the field provided and the SMS in the field below that.
  3. There is a counter below the SMS field showing you how many characters you can still type in your SMS
  4. Once you have done that click Send SMS
  5. The notification area then should show "SMS Successfully Sent"

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6.3 Send a SMS from your website (HTTP Post)

  1. First click Safe Domain from the main menu.
  2. Once the Safe Domain page loads  type in your domain at the top and click Add New Safe Domain
  3. The page should then reload with your domain in the list below and the notification section should state "Safe Domain Added"
  4. Next to your domain is a thing called a GUIDO. This is a special key that links you, your domain and the SMS system together. Write this GUID down as you will need it later. The GUID is case sensitive.
  5. Next create your form using your favourite web design application. The form action must be: http://beta.idws.com/sms/sms.dll/smsform ***url?

    The form must contain the following 3 fields:

    1. GUID  - Which must contain the GUID you wrote down earlier
    2. REDIRECT - This is the page that will show after the SMS has been sent. You must use the full URL here (e.g.: http://www.ALTONet.com).
    3. CELL_NUMBER - This is the cellphone number the SMS will be sent to.

Below is an example form, just copy the text below on to a web page::

***url?

NOTES:

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6.4. Have a SMS sent to you when you get a new email

  1. First select Email Notification from the menu
  2. Once the page loads  you need to fill in all the fields
    1. The Email Address field contains your ALTONet hosted or ALTONet dialup email address
    2. The Email Password contains your ALTONet hosted or ALTONet dialup email password
    3. The cellphone field contains the cellphone number the  SMS will be sent to
    4. You can now select (new in version 1.1) what you want sent to in the SMS. Options are the email header, the full email or a custom message:
      1. The email header option displays just who the email was from, and the subject of the email. Should the SMS be longer than 160 characters it is trimmed to 160 characters.
      2. The full email option displays who the email was from, the subject and the body of the email. The max length of the message generated is 8000 characters and may be broken into multiple SMS's. See above. ***where must this link to?
      3. The custom message option, allows you to specify a custom message that is sent to the cellphone. A good example for use of this is a message like "You have new email in john@test.com"

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6.5. Have one SMS sent to a list of contacts

  1. First select "SMS List" from the main menu
  2. To add people to the list there is 2 methods.

    Option 1

    1. For adding small numbers or people and/or deleting small numbers of people load click the link at the top which says "SMS List Subscriber Management".
    2. Next type in the first cellphone number you want to send to, and click add. Repeat this step for all the cellphone numbers you want to send to.

    Option 2

    1. For adding large numbers of people place a list of the cellphone numbers (1 per line) into the batch add section and click add.

For sending to the list there are 4 methods available:

  1. Send it using the SMS List Backroom:
    1. Click SMS List in the menu in the backroom
    2. Next type your SMS and click the button "Send To SMS List"
  2. Send it using email (good to use off of a website):
    1. First click Safe Email Management in the email backroom
    2. Type the email address you want to send from in the "New Email Address" field
    3. Select "Send To SMS List"
    4. Click "Add New SafeEmail"
    5. The email address should appear in the list below with a Safe Code. Write the Safe Code down.
    6. Create a new email in your favourite email application.
    7. Make sure the email comes from the same email address as you added earlier
    8. The subject must read <SAFE CODE>: (e.g.: 0A000:). Note: you do not need to fill in a cellphone number after the : as with the normal email to SMS function.
    9. The email must be sent to sms@altonet.co.za
    10. Type your message in the body of the message. The email MUST be in plain text (see your email clients documentation on how to set this)
    11. Send your email
  3. Send it using ASP/COM (good to use from a website):
    1. The ASP/COM object provide by ALTONet (see here) which now has a option to send your message direct to a list.
    2. The method is named SendSMSToList and works very similar to the other ASP/COM functions.
    3. Syntax:
      • SendSMSToList(Username,Password,SMSMessage)
    4. All fields are widestring values.
      • Username = Contains your SMS Service Username
      • Password = Contains your SMS Service Password
      • SMSMessage = Contains the SMS Message that will be delivered.
    5. It returns an integer value
    6. Example:

      Dim SMSObj
      Set SMSObj = Server.CreateObject("IDWS.SMS")***url?
      Result = SMSObj.SendSMSToList("username","password","message")
      Response.Write(Result)
      SMSObj = nil

To clear your list, just use the "Clear your list" button in your backroom.

Once the SMS has been delivered to the list an email will be sent to the account holders email address giving a status of the delivery success or failure.

Notes:

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6.6. Get a copy of any SMS sent on my account emailed or SMS to the account holder

  1. First select Account Details from the main menu
  2. Next you need to select how you want the SMS sent to the account holder:
    1. To have a copy just emailed to you click the tick box labelled Email a copy of any SMS sent
    2. To have a copy just SMS'd to you click the tick box labelled SMS a copy of any SMS sent
    3. To have a copy emailed and SMS'd to you click both tick boxes.
  3. Finally click update details

Notes:

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6.7. Have a SMS reminder sent to you

  1. First click the SMS Reminder Management link on the main menu
  2. Once the page loads you need to fill in all the cellphone number, SMS, and time to send fields.
  3. There are 4 options here
    1. Send Reminder Once. For more information on this option see point 6.5 ***where must this link to?
    2. Send Reminder Weekly:
      • This option allows you to have a reminder sent once a week, on a specific day of the week at a set time.
      • To set which day of the week you must fill in the Day of week to send field. The date to send field can be ignored with this option selected.
    3. Send Reminder Monthly:
      • This option allows you to have a reminder sent once a month, on a specific day of the month.
      • To set which day of the month the select only the day part of the Date To Send. The month and year part of the date to send field and the day of the week field can be ignored.
    4. Send Reminder Yearly:
      • This option allows you to have a reminder sent off once a year, on a specific day of a specific month. This one is great for birthday reminders.
      • To set which day and month the reminder will be sent, fill in the date and month fields of the Date to Send field. The year to send, and day of week to send can be ignored.
  4. Once that is done click Add Reminder

Notes:

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6.8. Have an email sent to a cellphone

  1. First you need to login to the SMS backroom and click Safe Email Management
  2. Next type in your email address, and make sure Send to SMS list is not ticked and click Add New Safe Email.
  3. The email address should appear in the list below, with a 5 character code. Write this code down.
  4. Next open your favourite email application.
  5. Send the email. Should there be any problems, an email will automatically be sent back with details on the problem.

Definition of plain text, rich text emails: Email comes in 2 types HTML and Plaintext. HTML allows colours, fonts etc... Plaintext is just that plain simple text.
A good example is HTML is like Word and Plaintext is like Notepad (also I found these which might explain it better http://fixmypages.com/fix/htmlemail.html and http://www.promotionbase.com/article/516)

Notes:

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6.9. Have a status report on an email address

There are 2 methods available to do this.

1) Have the status sent to you on a regular basis

  1. First you need to select Email Box Status Notification from the menu available in your SMS backroom.
  2. Next fill in your email address, email password, and cellphone number.
  3. Next you need to select how often you want the status report sent. There are 4 options available, all options send off the report on the top of the hour:
  4. Once you have chosen which option best suits your needs, all you need to do is click the Add New Email Status button.

2) Have the status sent to you on a request only basis

  1. First you need to be signed up on the SMS 2 service (see above for more details) with the email address you want to check.
  2. Next all you need to do is send an SMS to the SMS 2 service with the first word being MAILBOX followed by your email password

    Example: mailbox password

  3. The service will then SMS you back the status of your email address.

Notes:

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6.10. Download a copy of the SMS log

All you need to do is go to the SMS log as normal, by selecting the SMS log from the menu. Once there use the next and/or previous months to select the month you wish to download.

Once you have selected the month, click the download log link. The file will then be sent to your web browser. The file is an Adobe Acrobat file and requires Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 or higher. To get Acrobat Reader (which is free) go to http://www.adobe.com/

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6.11. Get the parts of a multipart SMS numbered

  1. First select Account Details from the main menu
  2. Next click the Include Part Numbers tick box
  3. Finally click update details

Notes:

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6.12 Send a SMS using ASP

ALTONet has a component (IDWS.SMS) on all the Windows NT servers, this component allows you to send an SMS using ASP. 

The component has a three methods one called SendSMS which is used to send a single SMS to a single user, another called SendSMSToMany which is used to send to multiple users at once and lastly SendSMSToList which is used to send to a predefined list of users. Details on the SendSMSToList can be found here. Below is the syntax for the SendSMS and SendSMSToMany functions.

SendSMS:

SendSMSToMany:

Notes:

 

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6.13. Send a SMS using SOAP

The SOAP object can be found at http://beta.idws.com/sms/soap/smsservice.dll/wsdl/ISMSService ***url?

The system exposes 4 methods:

  1. Login
  2. Logout
  3. SendSMS
  4. SendSMSToMany
  5. CurrentVersion

Example Soap Requests:

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6.14. Send an email from your cellphone

Sending email from your cellphone requires you first to signup your cellphone number as part of SMS 2 Beta system.

All you need to do to send an email is send an SMS to the SMS 2 Beta number (see the SMS 2 Beta section above). The first word of the SMS must be the word: to

Followed by the email address then the subject and then the message. If you want to send an email to yourself (e.g.: for a reminder or a note) instead of using the email address use the word self

Example:

to support@altonet.co.za SMS2 this is an email from SMS2

If you want more than 1 word in the subject you must enclose it with asterisk's (*)
Example:

to support@altonet.co.za*this is a long subject*this is just another example

If you want the email to go to more than 1 email address, separate the email addresses with comma's (,)
Example:

to support@altonet.co.za,info@altonet.co.za SMS2 what a wonderful service
 

If  you wanted the email to go to yourself (which is great for notes and reminders) just substitute the email address with the word self
Example:
 

to self work this is a reminder 

 

Notes:

 

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7. Usage Log Guide

By clicking SMS Log in the main menu you will be displayed with a log of ALL SMS's sent on our account.

The log is sorted by date and time.

Should you want to see a previous month click the link at the top labelled previous month.

The currently displayed month and year are displayed in the top middle section.

The sent from column contains information where the SMS was sent from and in fine print below it how many SMS's were used to send the message. There are7 possible sections here:

  1. SMS Backroom - This SMS was sent from the SMS Backroom itself
  2. SMS FormMail - This SMS was sent from an outside website using the Safe Domain system. The URL of the form it was sent from is displayed below it.
  3. POP Notification - This SMS was sent because a POP Notification was setup on an email address and a new email arrived in the mail box. The email address is displayed below it.
  4. SMS Reminder Service - This SMS was sent because a reminder was setup and at the specified date and time the SMS was sent.
  5. SMS List Service - This SMS was sent to a person in your SMS list using the function available in the SMS Backroom.
  6. Email to SMS - This SMS was sent because an email from a Safe Email listed email address was sent to the ALTONet SMS email address
  7. SMS Copy Service - This SMS was sent as a copy of another SMS (any of the services above) and was sent to the registered phone number in the SMS backroom.
  8. SMS Soap Interface - This sms was sent using either the ALTONet SOAP interface or the ALTONet ASP (Com) object
  9. SMS 2 System - This sms was sent using one of the SMS 2 functions
  10. SMS sent using the SMS ASP/COM interface
  11. SMS sent using SMS list via the SOAP interface
  12. SMS sent using SMS list via the ASP/COM interface

Information on the date, time, cellphone number and what the SMS contained is also shown in the log files.

The online log has one advantage over the offline (PDF) log and that is the function verify.

Verify connects directly to the GSM modem at ALTONet and will check exactly when the SMS was sent successfully through to the cellular provider. If the SMS goes through successfully on the first attempt it should take approx 10sec-40secs. If it does not go through the system will keep retrying to send the SMS through.

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8. How to get more help

Besides this manual ALTONet also has the ALTONet forums (http://forum.idws.com)***url? where there are many articles on fixing common problems. Also important announcements are made there and normally they are made there first. Anything related to the ALTONet SMS service is also posted in the SMS Forum.

Support can also be obtained by emailing support@altonet.co.za

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9. ASP and SOAP return codes

Return Codes:

Resolution: The system may be under maintenance or there may be a problem. Please try again later or contact support if the problem persists.

Resolution: There was a problem billing your account. This may be related to a database issue, maintenance, not enough SMS's or invalid login details. Please verify that you have enough SMS's and that your login details are correct and try again. If the problem persists, contact support.

Resolution: There was a problem logging the SMS. This may be related to a database issue or maintenance on the systems. Please try again later or contact support for further assistance.

Resolution: Your account does not have enough SMS's to send the message/s. Please purchase more and try again.

Resolution: An unknown error occurred, this may be related to a maintenance issue. Please contact support or try again later.

Resolution: You have attempted to connect from a server or website that is not hosted on the ALTONet network. Certain services (such as the ASP Object) is only open to ALTONet clients.

Resolution: The cellphone number must be at least 7 characters in length.

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