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Teachers and support staff are increasingly under pressure to keep parents and carers regularly informed of their pupils’ academic progress as well as well as the school’s calendar of events without compromising teaching standards.

The Government has stipulated that by the end of 2012, all schools and colleges will be required to communicate with parents electronically.

Email, however, is not necessarily the most effective way of communicate routine messages to parents and carers, as iSchools, a company that provides online Management and Financial Control Systems to public schools and colleges, is all too aware. In order to add value to its existing system and to offer greater flexibility to schools with regards to communications methods, the company has recently integrated the toText.net online SMS gateway into its overall online management system.

Robert Owen, of iSchools explains the reasons why: “Research has demonstrated that SMS is by far the most popular way of conveying routine information such as school trips, open days, forthcoming events because messages are delivered and read straight away. If parents are out and about or there is no 3G signal they might not pick up their emails until much later. If we need to contact parents, child minders, nannies etc urgently, to inform them that school will be closed due to adverse weather conditions, for example, SMS is the quickest and most effective way to do this”.

The iSchools online management system is modular in design and provides schools with a comprehensive range of services including timetabling, registration and financial management facilities. It is based on the latest Microsoft products and includes a centralised database for managing pupil, staff and supplier information.

In order to make the SMS module completely transparent to system users, toText.net has developed a bespoke interface that connects the iSchools system directly to its SMS gateway. This means that teacher and administration staff can create and send messages directly from the iSchools system, which they are already familiar with.

To send a SMS message users log into the iSchools system as normal via a password-protected interface. They open the message dialogue box, write their message and select a relevant distribution list, the whole school, a particular year group or all, boys in year 7, for example, and press the send button.
The toText.net interface then forwards all messages to its centralised servers where mobile numbers are verified and the messages are converted into appropriate SMS formats for delivery.

System users can quickly see how many messages they have sent and, more importantly, when messages were delivered, using the toText.net system management software.

“When we approached toText .net about integrating their online SMS gateway they were very helpful, continued Owen. All development and testing work was completed within 8 weeks. What’s more, schools are not obliged to commit to a minimum number of messages per month and they are only billed for the messages they send”.

Schools are responsible for their own payments and they can manage their accounts using the toText.net software system, which allows them to top up their account as and when they need to.

Comments Rob Jagger, Managing Director of Totext.net. “We are really pleased to be given the opportunity to work on this project. We pride ourselves in developing services to meet specific applications and we are really pleased with the positive feedback we’ve received so far.”

The online SMS service is currently being piloted by 5 schools including Gemini College in Milton Keynes and Hopelands Prep School in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire.

The online SMS module will be available to all iSchool customers from September.

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LeagueRepublic, a leading provider of online administration systems for managing sports websites, fixture scheduling and results systems, has integrated Slepe Communications’ inbound SMS application (online SMS technology) into its overall system management software.

Their software has been used to manage over 2000 professional and amateur leagues, since 2002. Up until last year, all match information and results could only be updated via the web, so if team secretaries had no access to the Internet or could not get a 3G signal (as is often the case), this information was often not available to the public until much later.

In order to enable clubs to update their results more quickly, LeagueRepublic decided to upgrade its administration software by incorporating SMS functionality into its overall system at no extra cost to its customers. Even the most basic handsets support SMS and this enhancement meant that results could be published within minutes of a game finishing.

The service has been available for just over 12 months and so far more than 15% of all UK leagues are using SMS to update their team’s results.

The service works as follows: fifteen minutes after the start of a game, team secretaries receive an SMS from Slepe Communications’ administration software reminding them to text in their result at the end of the match.

As soon as the match is over, team secretaries simply text a reply to the original message with the final score e.g. 3 2. The virtual numbers used to deliver the service are provided by Slepe Communications as part of the application. Its bespoke management software determines which results belong to which team using the virtual numbers, converts the SMS messages into HTML and delivers them directly to LeagueRepublic’s servers, where they can then be published and posted immediately.

Not only are results made available to the public almost instantaneously, there is also no charge to the end user for the reminder and the reply is the same cost as any standard UK text message and often falls within their contract package. LeagueRepublic has just signed a deal with Timpson.co.uk Trophies who will fund the SMS system and a 10% website discount code will be included within the reminder message.

Comments Dave Hathaway, Managing Director from LeagueRepublic: “when we decided to investigate the possibility of adding SMS to our system we looked at many different providers. We finally chose Slepe because they were competitively priced and took time to listen and understand our exact requirements.

We are pleased to be able to offer the SMS results system with our free service with funding from our SMS sponsor – Timpson.co.uk Trophies.”

Ranjit Singh, a landlord from Willenhall, who has been using LeagueRepublic’s software to manage his pool league for the last three years, decided to add SMS to his website at the end of last season. Now all 18 teams in the league update their results via SMS.

“It’s absolutely brilliant”, he explained. “When running a league like this you have to be able to provide results quickly so you don’t lose the interest of the teams. The administrators text their results as soon as the game is over and once I’ve had a chance to check them, I make them live, usually within 24 hours.

There were a few minor issues in the beginning, with results being posted the wrong way around, but now that everyone is familiar with it, it works really well and saves me a lot of time because I only have to verify the information.”

Comments Rob Jagger from Slepe Communications: “we are really pleased to know that our software is working well and is helping LeagueRepublic better engage with its customers. This type of market is very competitive and our software ensures that teams do not lose interest because results are updated automatically and made available to the public almost immediately.”

The service is proving to be very popular with pub darts and pool leagues and so far this year more than 111 leagues have decided add SMS as an option for updating their results.

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About Slepe Communications

Slepe Communications is a dynamic, growing company based in Cambridge UK. Its staff has many years’ experience in the Internet and telecommunications industries, and are experts in designing, building and operating mobile Internet applications based on text messaging, web and Wi-Fi technologies.

About LeagueRepublic

LeagueRepublic are based in Wolverhampton and provide online sports administration systems to 2000 sports leagues worldwide, their clients include The Football Association Ltd.

It can be challenging for vehicle hire or maintenance companies to operate efficiently and provide high quality after-sales service to their customers. Both factors, however, are vital to their success and in order to achieve this they are willing to invest in sophisticated job management and allocation software systems.

The majority of these systems use email as the primary communications method. All information relating to a particular job or order is uploaded onto the system and this is used to generate a unique job sheet. These are then sent to appropriate personnel (drivers or maintenance engineers, for example), often located in different geographical areas, as emails with PDF attachments.

Everything runs smoothly so long as the recipient has a Smartphone or a Wi-Fi connection. If they don’t, however, they may not receive important job information or updates until much later, and by then it may be too late to take further action.

Slepe Communications Ltd, operators of toText.net and providers of bespoke online SMS applications, has recognised the limitations of these systems and, as a result, has made a number of enhancements to its popular email to SMS service in order to overcome them.

The company’s SMS management software can now detect if a PDF document is attached to an email and if so extract relevant information such as the location and nature of the job from the data file and forward it to the recipient as an SMS.

If job information is included in the email itself, the software simply converts the message into a text format, giving companies the option to send information via SMS as well as email to ensure delivery.

The system has already been integrated with “CoachManager”, an online job management system supplied by Distinctive Systems and will integrate seamlessly with most other system interfaces via a developers API.
 
Coach and private vehicle hire companies have found the enhancement particularly useful because not all drivers have access to a 3G or wireless connection. In addition, they simply do not have the time to look through their emails and download job sheets when they are working.

The ability to send relevant job information via SMS and incorporating a “read receipt” facility means these companies can now be confident that their drivers receive the correct information immediately and are able to respond accordingly, making them more efficient as a result.

Comments Rob Jagger, Managing Director of Slepe Communications. “While Smartphones are growing in popularity, not everybody has one, and if 3G coverage is patchy, drivers might not even receive their job sheets. All drivers do, however carry a mobile phone and all phones support SMS. Furthermore, messages are delivered almost instantaneously even if the signal is poor.”

This enhanced email to SMS service could benefit many other industries, drainage or gas companies, for example, where it is vital that engineers receive their job sheets immediately to avoid problems that could affect public health and safety.

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Slepe Communications Ltd is a dynamic, growing company based in Cambridge UK. Its staff have many years’ experience in the Internet and telecommunications industries, and are experts in designing, building and operating mobile Internet applications based on text messaging, web and Wi-Fi technologies.
 
The company is a member of the Mobile Data Association.

Missed NHS appointments cost the Government and ultimately the taxpayer in excess of £6million per annum, according to industry statistics. Patients believe the blame lies with the NHS – letters not being sent out in time, not being able to cancel or change the appointment because phone lines are busy or never answered, or stuck in an automated loop. The NHS on the other hand believes the blame lies with the general public because they never bother to cancel or reschedule their appointments.

Significant cost savings could be made and time wasting could be avoided if doctors’ surgeries, outpatient departments, dentists and specialist clinics made more use of SMS, as recent trials have demonstrated.

Barts and the London NHS Trust have recently deployed an automated online SMS service in their outpatients department, to remind patients about their forthcoming appointments because reports showed that over 94, 000 appointments were missed in 2009. The first reminder message is sent two weeks in advance and the second reminder is sent three days before the scheduled appointment.

If the appointment is no longer needed or convenient, patients can cancel or reschedule simply by sending a reply to the text.

Aberdeen City Council has also recently adopted a text messaging alert service to remind its social housing tenants about maintenance or repairs due to be carried out on their properties. The Council sends its tenants an SMS the day before so they do not forget and if there is a problem they are requested to get in touch by replying to the message.

Considering that more than 98% of 20 – 29 year olds and 89% of all men in the UK own at least one mobile phone, you would think that more public sector organisations would be making use of automated SMS services.

Health visitors could remind mums about their childrens’ vaccinations, community nurses could remind the over 60s about their flu jabs, housing officers could remind tenants that their rent is due, maintenance staff could remind tenants that their meters need to be read – the possibilities are endless.

The cost of sending an SMS message is significantly cheaper than the cost of a first class stamp or a phone call made during the day, particularly to a mobile number.
Text messages are delivered almost immediately and, unlike other forms of communications, the majority of people do respond to their texts straight away. Not only that, sending a reply essentially costs nothing because most phone contracts include a certain number of free texts as standard.

Automated SMS reminders can also benefit other industries – informing drivers their car is due for a service or MOT, for example. It’s good customer service as far as the owner is concerned and it’s  cost effective for the garage because  they can keep their contact list up to date with minimum effort or resource.

Our online SMS facilities are really easy to set up and, by deploying one of our services, you would benefit from significant cost savings almost immediately. There is no software to download because you manage your account online and no training is required.

You can upload your appointment spreadsheet onto our servers quickly and easily and schedule single or multiple reminder messages to be sent on specific days and times.

Unlike other providers we also offer a “personalised replies” facility as part of our standard package. This service ensures all your replies are delivered directly to the original sender, allowing them to immediately begin private conversations and start building relationships.

Many organisations in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors are saving themselves money by deploying out online texting services.

Click here to find out more about who we are and what we do.

We have spent quite some time recently making improvements to our Frequently Ask Question page. What we did was to go back though our support Inbox, and pulled out all the questions that are genuinely asked most often.

The new FAQ will hopefully allow people to find out much more easily the answers to the questions that they have, without having to wade through reams of other stuff that just gets in the way.

The most common question related to how long it takes for a text message to be delivered. Because of the investment that we’ve made in our system, and by selecting the highest quality suppliers to partner with, a typical SMS delivery time from sending to receiving is about 5 seconds! Any longer than this, and it usually means that the mobile phone is either switched off or out of coverage.

If there are any questions that you think are missing from the FAQ, then just let us know.

toText.net is very pleased to announce that our new affiliates campaign has just gone live.

We are a UK based company that provides an easy-to-use, reliable and fully featured SMS gateway to hundreds of companies worldwide. We deliver Web SMS, Email SMS, SMS API and a range of other communication services to help customers reach their customers and employees.

Main points for affiliates:

* 20% on sales
* 200 day cookie lifetime
* 10 day recall period

For our customers, these are the key features of our service:

* Range of price plans to suit businesses and individuals
* Flat rate SMS cost worldwide
* Easy to use and very reliable service
* Exceptional customer care

Here’s full details of the toText.net affiliates campaign

Today we kicked off a new project to create some reference implementations for our API. We recognise that generally people want to get up and texting as quickly as possible, so we’re creating some worked examples for integrating applications and websites into our systems.

We’ll be creating C#, VB, PHP and Java reference cases, that should shorten the development time in a green-field site dramatically.

The software will all be open-source, so customers are free to slice and dice the code as they see fit. Of course, we’ll be on hand to answer any questions that may arise during the integration process.

toText.net is very pleased to say that customer’s can now remind themselves of their password without having to contact our support department.

The login page now has a ‘Forgotten password?’ link, that shows a form where you can enter your account details. You can enter either your username, or contact email address or mobile phone number. Assuming that we can work out which account you are referring to, we’ll then send your password to you by email. To make it easier for you, we’ll also display the email address that the password has gone to.

If you still can’t find out your password, or have any other problems, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Alison would love to hear from you!

We’re currently developing a feature that allows customers to automatically create a password reminder email. This means that anyone that has trouble remembering what their password was will no longer have to contact us to help them out, although they are perfectly welcome to do so if they wish.

The password reminder will be available on the account login screen. Customers should enter either their username, or the mobile phone number that they used to create the account, and we’ll send a reminder by email.

We very much hope this feature improves the customer experience while using toText.net, and we expect it to be available sometime in the next few days.

toText.net is going to be updating and improving the API that developer’s can use to send and receive text messages.

The API is based on an HTTP Post in either direction, and HTTPS is also supported where required.

What we plan to do in the early stages in to make integration easier for our MS Windows based customers. We’ll release some open source reference implementations, so that customers can take these code samples and either use them directly, or customise them for their own requirements.

These new features will be rolled out over the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for updates. Please get in touch in the meantime if you have any questions or suggestions.