Integrating SMS with MCS

Purpose

This tutorial guides you through the steps of integrating SMS services with Mobile Cloud Services.

If you want to engage someone and encourage them to act, SMS is a viable option. If you know your user audience, here are some use cases where SMS is valuable.

- Sales Promotions & Marketing Campaigns: You can use SMS to advertise an upcoming sale or to promote a new marketing campaign

- Confirm an Order & Track Shipments: Once an order is places, SMS can be used to confirm the order and allow for it to be tracked

- Product Launches or Discount Coupons: Notifying users of new products they may be interested in and coupons to entice them can be facilitated with SMS

- Short Surveys and Lottery Chances: You can also use SMS for short surveys on how well the company did and to provide chances to win prizes by registering in a lottery

- HR & Recruitment: Human resources can send short details about upcoming holidays, schedule changes or benefit updates along with potential job offerings that might be of interest

To send an SMS message there are three main players: Oracle MCS, Syniverse, and Your Devices. MCS is responsible for defining the message payload and the conditions for it’s delivery. Syniverse directs the message payload to the device and then the device receives the message and displays it in it’s native messaging application.

In this section, you subscribe to the Syniverse Messaging Service, and create a profile on the Syniverse Developer Community. If you already have a profile, you can skip this step but you will need all of the credentials and channel id when defining the profile in your MBE.

1. Go to the Syniverse Developer Community (developer.syniverse.com). Click Sign Up in the top right corner of the site and enter the requested information.

   

2. After completing the form, a confirmation email will be sent you to.

   When the confirmation email arrives, click the link in the email and verify your user credentials.

   

3. Next, subscribe to the Syniverse Messaging Service.

   To use SMS in your apps using the short code you got from Syniverse, you need to subscribe to the Syniverse Messaging Service. If you’re using a temporary short code from a Syniverse trial to test messages, you also need to add phone numbers to the associated whitelist.

   Log back in to the Syniverse Developer Community (developer.syniverse.com). Then, click your user name in the top right corner and select Company. SDC generates an account automatically and provides a default credit of $5 to all users on sign up.

   

   Verify that your accounts have a billing address associated with them..

   

4. Next, navigate to Service Offerings > Messaging Offering and click Subscriptions. Click the Voice and Messaging Offerings ‘two gears’ in the upper right of the header, then click the Subscriptions option. Click the Subscribe button and select your account from the list.

   

   Read and accept the Terms of Service, click Confirm and verify that your account is listed in Subscriptions.

   

5. If you’re using a temporary short code from a Syniverse trial to test messages, you need to add test phone numbers to the associated whitelist. (This set of steps aren't necessary in production with your provisioned short code.)

   a. Click the Whitelist tab on your Company page.

   b. Click Add phone number and enter your phone number in the ITU-T E.164 format (i.e., +11234567890).

   c. Click Send confirmation code to send a randomly generated number to the phone number in a text message.

   

   d. Retrieve the confirmation code from the text message and enter it in the Confirmation code field. Click Add to confirm the phone number whitelist.

   e. Verify that your phone number is included in the whitelist table with "Validated" status.

   

6. Next, register your app and get credentials.

   In order for MCS to connect over to Syniverse to send the message, you need four credentials. Syniverse will generate three of the credentials you’ll need including a consumer key, consumer secret password and an access token. You also need a channel to deliver the message from Syniverse. For testing purposes, Syniverse provides a public channel you can use but for production applications, you’ll probably wan to create a dedicated channel to communicate with your users. When creating these credentials, you’ll want to save the values as they are needed when specifying the notification definition in MCS.

   Before messages can be sent through the Syniverse Messaging Service, there must be an application configured in the SDC platform. Once your app is registered, you can generate the required credentials.

   Click Applications and then click New application. Name the application and click Save.

   

   Click the gear icon next to your app name and select Edit..

   

   Then, click Account & APIs and select the "Initial account for [Your username]" from the Account drop down. Turn on the following services: Messaging, SDC Gateway Services and Whitelisting Services. Click Save.

   

7. Next, generate the required credentials.

   a. From the Applications page, click the gear icon next to your app name and select Edit.

   b. Click Application permissions.

   c. Click the first check box next to your app name to give your application full entitlements.

   d. Click Auth Keys to generate the credentials.

   e. Copy and store the keys to a safe place on your computer.

   Consumer key = UF199cUrg3QeyVyLWbCFBNnYhXMa

   Consumer secret = XUWZckvLjvpYUG8CUN4a9GuB5Poa

   Access token = 2d6f248d27c09a62d07d39ce9b528dee

   

8. Next retrieve the Channel ID.

   Within Syniverse a "Channel ID" is a code supplied by Syniverse. It represents a code for every country you want to send SMS messages to, where your mobile users reside. Navigate to the Communication Gateway.

   a. Select the Service Offerings tab.

   b. Locate the Voice & Messaging Offerings box, and click the link button in the top right of the box.

   c. This will open the Syniverse Communication Gateway. If it fails to open and you get login error try a different browser. The Gateway shows you information like incoming and outgoing SMS, analytical reports and more.

   d. Select the Messaging Accounts then Public Channels option. This displays all the country channels available to use including the relating channel ID that you need for MCS. For testing purposes identify a channel for the country where you and your mobile device reside, and copy down the Channel ID.

   

You have now completed the necessary steps to set up your Syniverse account.

In this part of the tutorial, setup MCS to use the account information provided by Syniverse to send SMS messages.