System Center Guide

Courtesy of Anders Bengtsson at http://contoso.se

Editorial changes included inline. God love him, Anders does a great job but the English is a bit off sometimes.   

With Short Message Service (SMS) you can easily send messages (max. 160 characters) to mobile phones. Messages can be textual (alphanumeric) or binary. The following four steps are required for you to setup notification with SMS:

1. Configure a GSM modem
2. Configure SMS notification channel
3. Configure notification recipients
4. Configure notification subscription

A GSM modem can be any normal mobile phone, as long as your RMS server finds it as a modem within the Operating System. I tried this with a ordinary Sony Ericsson mobile phone, connected to the RMS through a USB cable. Simple connect the phone and install the suitable drivers. When planning this, make sure that there are drivers for your OS platform. For example, I couldn’t find any x64 drivers for my phone. All notification are sent from the RMS. Of course you could build a script that the RMS triggers with a command notification that send SMS from another machine. A tool that might be useful then is Microsoft SMS Sender.

To configure an SMS notification channel you simple click “Enable short message services notifications”, under Administration/Settings/Notification and the Short Message Service tab, in the console.

Create a notification recipient under Administration/Notifications/Recipients. Add a notification device that use the short message service channel.

Create a notification subscription and add your new notification recipient to it. One thing that you might want to modify is the SMS format. Check the “Use custom SMS format” on the Formats page, and then modify the subject line, in the subscription properties wizard.

Plan your SMS notification carefully so you don’t send out hundreds of SMS to all mobile phones. When configure your notification recipients with SMS device you can configure schedule, one idea can be that the SMS device is only available during non-office hours. During office hours you can most probable receive notification with e-mail.

Happy SMSing!

Editorial Note:

Also be sure you’ve estimated your volume of SMS notifications and have appropriated the properly plan with your cellular/SMS provider. While SMS notifications can be useful, it won’t help much if your faced with huge over-usage fees.