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    Easy front end for text messages?

    Guys, I'm thinking about using hs to send text messages out to my employees for announcements and such. Does anyone know of a plugin that can be used to easily customize who the messages are sent too and the contents?

    Thanks in advance guys and Happy New Year!

    #2
    Not sure if this helps you. My wife hates having apps on her phone so she won't put anything on it for HS. I personally use Pushover to have events sent to me, but did find a way to send her texts via email.

    I am on verizon, so i just create an event to send an email and have it go to 'phonenumber'@vtext.com

    I am sure other carriers do something similar, and this may not work if you have multiple carriers you have to deal with.

    I think google voice can be setup to do SMS as well, so maybe search the net for that.

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      #3
      That email to SMS would be a great solution, but here, Rogers charges .15 cents for each one!

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        #4
        Originally posted by chewie View Post
        Guys, I'm thinking about using hs to send text messages out to my employees for announcements and such. Does anyone know of a plugin that can be used to easily customize who the messages are sent too and the contents?

        Thanks in advance guys and Happy New Year!
        The Pushover plugin can have delivery groups so you can send messages to multiple users however it does rely on them installing the app on their device which comes at a cost and I think would need a bit of thought as to how it would work in practice.

        I'm not sure you will find a solution really, SMS as you say you pay for (which you can use the countless gateway services out there and get a bulk messaging price it might still cost a bit), push messages generally the client costs money or the service does, email but then it depends whether everyone has email on their phones.

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          #5
          using hs to send text messages out to my employees

          Curious why you are not using the basic and included Homeseer 3 email services to send texts.

          I know I can do this with almost every cellular carrier today in the US.

          There is no need really to utilize any 3rd party plugin to do this as stated above.
          - Pete

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            #6
            I think my original post was unclear, I use the built in email functionality in hs3 to send text messages, what I'm looking for is an easy way to change what is being sent each time. This would allow me to hit a web page or something along those lines, punch in the contents of the message and have that piped to an event that sends out the messages.

            Sorry for the confusion guys!

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              #7
              Most (all?) cell phone carriers provide an email-to-text gateway -- you send an email, and it gets converted to text.

              I've subscribed to clickatell, which is $7/month for 500 messages, and goes up from there. I did this because we're an all-Apple house, and when I send texts via the AT&T gateway, they would show up as separate incoming phone numbers on our iPhones and Macs, which was annoying. With clickatell, you're assigned a real phone number.

              Sending a message via clickatell is easy with the "execute immediate script command" in HS3:

              &hs.GetURL("api.clickatell.com","/http/sendmsg?user=USER&password=PASSWORD&api_id=APPID&MO=1&from=C LICKATELLNUM&to=DESTINATIONNUM&text=TEXTMSG",TRUE,80)

              You replace user, password, and appid with the values that clickatell gives you, clickatellnum with your clickatell phone number, destinationnum with the phone you want to send a text to, and textmsg with your message.

              The only bummer with clickatell is that there is not an easy way to send MMS's. You have to have a publicly available URL set up with a .MMS file that references your image URL. I haven't taken the time to figure out how to do this. I was hoping that I could just submit an image URL and have clickatell do the magic.

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                #8
                Originally posted by chewie View Post
                I think my original post was unclear, I use the built in email functionality in hs3 to send text messages, what I'm looking for is an easy way to change what is being sent each time. This would allow me to hit a web page or something along those lines, punch in the contents of the message and have that piped to an event that sends out the messages.

                Sorry for the confusion guys!
                Just a little ASP/ASPX page could do what you are after that submitted the page and when the page was submitted it sent the email by the scripting commands (hs.sendmail). You would need to look at your contacts though as to how you were going to send the email to multiple people as you probably don't want to hard code a list of people into the source code of the page.

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                  #9
                  I would avoid using Google Voice, the back end API has been cut off and you will very likely be identified as a spammer. I know the product very well

                  Something like this for an Android SMS gateway?

                  I know of a service where you can build your own SMS or phone front end application using Ruby, Python, etc and they do not charge for developer accounts if you keep the volume low. They handle all the back end processing so you just have to make a front end. Let me know if this is of interest and I will look it up when I get home.

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                    #10
                    Originally posted by Planetview View Post
                    I know of a service where you can build your own SMS or phone front end application using Ruby, Python, etc and they do not charge for developer accounts if you keep the volume low. They handle all the back end processing so you just have to make a front end. Let me know if this is of interest and I will look it up when I get home.
                    I just remembered and it is called Tropo. Their developer interface is very easy to use and I see they are now owned by Cisco.

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                      #11
                      Originally posted by chewie View Post
                      I think my original post was unclear, I use the built in email functionality in hs3 to send text messages, what I'm looking for is an easy way to change what is being sent each time. This would allow me to hit a web page or something along those lines, punch in the contents of the message and have that piped to an event that sends out the messages.

                      Sorry for the confusion guys!
                      How about using a global variable to store your message content, then in the email event you use the global variable $$GLOBALVAR:email_message_content:

                      see http://homeseer.com/support/homeseer/HS3/HS3Help/using_replacement_variables.htm
                      Len


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