It’s a real shame that even restricted Event Gateways didn’t make it into the professional version of CF7 but it’s something we’re all going to have to deal with.
We’re currently looking at adding two new load balanced CF Enterprise servers (good job we hadn’t bought them a few weeks ago!) to our infrastructure and configuring them with multiple instances etc etc - whilst on our intranet continue to use CFMX 6.1 Pro as (at the moment) we don’t see the benefit against the cost of Enterprise. This gave me a thought….
If we have CF Enterprise 7 setup for sending SMS via the neccessary providers, then if we expose the CFC (with authentication) on the Enterprise server then our CFMX 6.1 Professional can send messages via the Enterprise server and without too much hassle could probably route messages back - saving us the need for Enterprise licenses internally.
This would also make for an interesting hosted service - folk on CF Pro6/7 who want to be able to SMS but can’t afford Enterprise or the neccessary SMS subscriptions nor want to pay for the current overpriced SMS services.
February 9th, 2005 at 10:34 am
hey mate! it is called CF Standard!!!
February 10th, 2005 at 11:54 pm
Hmm, each gateway can only send/receive for a single SMS number and I believe each number requires a separate SMSC / SMPP / whatever contract. It’s an interesting idea tho’…
February 11th, 2005 at 3:16 am
true enough, but a common technique employed over here is to include a sort of ‘account name’ in the text message to enable multiple recipients of the same gateway. Eg, Radio1’s short message number is 81199 to get a message straight to the studio you text something like ‘STUDIO my message here’ to the number, or to vote in polls you text ‘VOTE my vote here’ to the same number. A quick search on Google found me <a href="http://www.fastsms.co.uk>FastSMS</a> so it’s a pretty common practice.
May 11th, 2005 at 1:29 pm
We going though similar pains here. We are US based and there is a requirement for all SMS 2-way applications to have a dedicated common short code ($500/month minimum!). This seems rediculous but there it is. There are some SMS providers that are offering shared code access at much reduced cost. Users then must send a unique keyword in a text message to get routed to the appropriate application. Anyway it all kind of stinks of greed and stupidity but we have to deal with it… for now. I suspect this "brilliant" plan will collapse under its own weight. There are only 79,999 possible combinations and that will certainly run out in the near future.
BTW, I believe one can use plain old CFMX with HTTP access to the SMS provider instead of SMPP. Is this true? If so, what advantage is there to using SMPP? The aggregators also charge more for SMPP access. Thanks.
Bob