How PageGate Sends Messages Transcript for Video:
In this tutorial, we’ll be going over the delivery methods PageGate supports for sending data. Most commonly, PageGate is used as a messaging platform and most of its protocols deal with message delivery of some variety, whether that’s SMS, pages, email, API calls and similar. However, some supported protocols allow you to connect PageGate to other platforms with innovative approaches that allow for two-way messaging, complex filtering and a high level of both failover and redundancy.
Currently, PageGate supports protocols that allow you to:
- Send SMS with cellular hardware, SMS delivery services, carrier enterprise systems and carrier public gateways
- Send email directly from PageGate’s mail server or relay your email through your SMTP server
- Send pages using internet, modem, serial and TCP-to-Terminal methods
- Use webforms, web APIs, REST APIs and similar
- Use XMPP chat systems
- Send Faxes by modem or Microsoft Fax Server
- Output Raw content to a serial port
- Output Raw content to an IP address via TCP
- Output a file to a local or UNC path
To say that there are numerous ways that you could implement the program would be an understatement.
As a few examples, you could have the program deliver SMS, pages and email all at the same time while also scanning for reply SMS. You could then scan the replies for certain keywords or keyphrases to determine what should happen next; whether that’s delivering the reply to a recipient or group, triggering an update to another system’s API, running a script or potentially all of them at once.
So, let’s talk about how PageGate delivers messages.
First, let’s go over SMS. There are two primary styles of SMS delivery: Internet and Hardware
Of the two, cellular hardware generally tends to be more reliable as it sends SMS just like a cell phone does; there’s no internet-to-sms translation gateway involved.
Cellular hardware comes in two varieties: modem and gateway
Cellular modems are easier to use with physical systems as they connect by USB or RS-232 and cellular gateways are easier to use with virtual systems as they can be reached by TCP from the VM.
PageGate supports many different command sets and interaction methods for cellular hardware and the specific makes and models of device you interact with don’t necessarily matter to the program. What matters is that your hardware supports a method of receiving SMS delivery commands; whether that’s with an AT command set or custom command language via Telnet, SSH or direct connection.
Examples of cellular hardware we’ve seen work well over the years can be found in our documentation. The section you’ll be interested in is How PageGate Sends Messages – SMS Delivery Methods – Cellular Hardware.
On the internet side of things, there are carrier public gateways, carrier enterprise gateways, general SMS delivery services, public safety delivery services and medical industry delivery services.
A detailed breakdown of each service can be found in our ‘How PageGate Sends SMS’ tutorial but to go through a brief overview here:
Many carriers support email-to-SMS as a free method of delivering messages.
However, the public gateways are not always reliable and are volume restricted fairly tightly.
General SMS delivery services, like AWSSNS, Twilio, MessageBird and similar offer some free and generally low cost SMS delivery options.
Senders in the public safety industry have specialized SMS delivery services like Active911, I am Responding and similar.
Senders in the medical industry also have specialized SMS delivery services for HIPAA compliance, like TigerConnect, DocHalo, Voalte and similar.
Again, have a look at our ‘How PageGate Sends SMS’ video tutorial or the How to send Messages – SMS Delivery Methods section of the documentation.
Next, let’s go over email.
SMTP is the protocol used to deliver email and PageGate has a mail server as a core part of the program. This means that you can configure PageGate to deliver email on behalf of your email domain just like any other mail server would. However, you will need to provision PageGate as a mail server in your email domain’s DNS records.
Alternately, PageGate can relay your email traffic through any SMTP server you have access and permission to use, just like an email client.
Next, let’s go over interacting with internet based APIs.
PageGate supports using the HTTP GET and POST methods for interacting with any API you may need. JSON, XML, HTML and any other format may be used when configuring a template to interact with the required APIs.
For detailed information and setup instructions, have a look at the How to Send Messages - Using webforms, Web, REST and SOAP APIs section of our documentation.
For clients need to message pagers, PageGate offers protocols that allow you to communicate with on-site paging hardware as well as pagers hosted through companies like SPOK/USA Mobility and American Messaging. If your pagers are hosted through a company, PageGate supports delivering messages by internet using SNPP, WCTP and SMTP/email as well as using a dial-up modem and connected phone line to use the TAP protocol.
If your pagers are hosted through an on-site paging terminal, PageGate supports serial/RS232, modem and TCP delivery of the TAP protocol.
Now we’re going to get to a few miscellaneous sending methods available in the program.
PageGate has the ability to use XMPP chat systems like Cisco’s Jabber and can use them to send messages to your recipients.
PageGate also offers the ability to send faxes by dial-modem with connected phone line or through a local or network available Microsoft fax server. This allows the program multiple potential pathways to deliver any faxes you may need.
PageGate can also output Raw formatted content to either a serial port or IP address. This can be useful for one-way communication with a heartbeat program or other receiving system that can parse the content output by PageGate.
Last we have a delivery method that isn’t usually used to deliver messages, the File protocol. This protocol gives PageGate the ability to output a message as a file to a local or network share path. To give you a few ideas of how this protocol could be used, you might use it for record keeping; where a copy of every message sent to a particular distribution group is written to a directory that’s potentially monitored by another application. You could have all reply SMS written as a file to a path that PageGate’s GetASCII module was monitoring, which would allow you to configure a filtering system that scans the files generated for certain key words or phrases, then deliver the reply SMS to one distribution group if the keywords or phrases are found and a completely different distribution group if they weren’t.
Effectively, the File protocol is handy for record keeping and for generating content that needs to be processed through one of PageGate’s filtering systems.
This concludes the video tutorial overview of how PageGate sends messages. For more information, including detailed breakdowns of how to send text messages, email and pages, please visit our website, www.notepage.net
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