Well I was sitting down with my friend Ian Garman this evening helping him to put together a proposal for a client. In it he wanted to send an 'alert' to a mobile phone when an action was overdue in a Notes database.
Simple I said if we can find a service that allows us to send SMS messages via e-mail. Within less than a minute I had found such a service from TextForce. After he left, I registered and sent my first message. It must have taken no more than 15 minutes. Here is the e-mail - the format is in XML.
From: [email protected]Although I wrote this e-mail by hand - it would be extremely easy to create such e-mails programmatically in Lotus Notes or any other system for that matter.
To: [email protected]
Subject: email2sms
<SMSMESSAGE>
<USERNAME>David Gurteen</USERNAME>
<PASSWORD>20TGHUDA</PASSWORD>
<ORIGINATOR>Gurteen</ORIGINATOR>
<MESSAGE>Hello Iggy ... this is a test message via e-mail, and you are not even home yet! Cool! David Gurteen.</MESSAGE>
<NUMBERLIST>447976704756,447774178650</NUMBERLIST>
</SMSMESSAGE>
Now what seems a little more difficult is to send e-mail messages that contain forms encoded in XML from a Palm Pilot to Lotus Notes and have Notes convert them into Notes documents and take action on them - such as sending an SMS alert message. The Notes end is easy as I have figured out how to parse XML - what is needed is a cute Palm Pilot application that will send the forms - so back to Google.
