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Using UWS from your mobile

Commands can be sent to UWS in text messages, from one or more admin phone numbers. For example, from your mobile, you can send a text message to your Twilio number containing a command to send a message to all members of a UWS group.

The remote commands you can send to the plugin allow:

  • A message to be send to a group or to an individual number.
  • You to retrieve a list of all of the UWS groups you’ve created. The list will be sent to your mobile phone as an SMS message.
  • Get a list of all of the members of a selected group. You’ll receive the group members in an SMS message.

Before you can send commands you need to

  • Configure Twilio to send received messages to UWS.
  • Create and configure an admin group in UWS.

 

Configuring Twilio to send received messages to UWS.

 

To enable remote commands, you must configure Twilio to send SMS messages it has received, to the plugin.

You can do this by going to Messaging-Settings-Twilio Settings and clicking the “Configure URL” button

 

Twilio Settings

 

Alternatively you can log into your Twilio account and select your numbers.

Select a number and in the “Inbound Settings” section, enter www.yoursite.com?inbound into the “A Message Comes In” field. This will route any SMS messages (inbound messages) send to your Twilio number, to the UWS plugin.

 

twilio_message_comes_in

 

Configuring your Admin group.

 

The remote commands you send to UWS, can only be sent from the mobile phone numbers, that are members of a selected admin group.

To setup an admin group

1.  Create a group from the Group Manager tab.

2. Add the mobile numbers for all admin users, who’ll want to send commands from their mobiles to the new admin group.

3. Click on the Messaging link and go into Settings-General Settings and select the admin group you’ve created and press save.

Admin Settings

All members of the selected admin group will be able to issue the commands shown above from their mobile phones.

 

UWS Commands

 

The following commands can be sent from text messages, to your Twilio number. Twilio will forward the text message to UWS, where UWS will process the command. Commands can only be sent from mobile numbers that are members of a selected admin group (see below).

The commands available are:

#(number)(message) – This command will send the message to the specified number. For example #07790532801 Hi there %name% thanks for your message

@(user id)(message) – This command will send the message to the specified member’s phone.

[get groups {search string}]. This command, send from the specified admin number, to the UWS plugin, will retrieve a list of all of the groups configured within the plugin.

Optionally, if the search string is specified, all groups containing the search string in the name of the group, will be returned.

For example [get groups cust] – will return all groups, where the group name contains the string ‘cust’.

The group list is returned to the admin number as an SMS message. The message contains as unique identifier of each group (the groupid) and the group name.

[get group (groupid) {search string}]. If only the groupid is specified, this command will retrieve all members of the group with that groupid.

For example [get group 50] will retrieve all of the member details (name and cell number) of the group number 50.

By specifying the optional {search string} parameter, only the members whose name contains the search string will be returned.

For example [get group 50 john] will return the details of messages whose name contains ‘john’ within group number 50.

[send group (groupid)] (message). This command will send an SMS message to all members of the given group (specified by the groupid). All of the text after the command
is sent in the SMS message.

For example, [send group 50] Hello everyone. Due to the weather, training is cancelled today. This command will send everyone in group 50, a message telling them they have the morning off! Note the space between the right hand bracket and the start of the message.

All command responses are limited to 320 character SMS messages. All responses over 320 characters, will be truncated.

Commands can be enclosed in square brackets [] or forward slashes //, for example

[get groups] or /get groups/

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