How to setup an SMS alert to website owner when a customer fills in a form? - html

Question

Been doing some research on how to setup an SMS alert straight to the website owner's (our customer) phone when a website visitor fills in a form on his website. Obviously we're happy to sign up to a provider and pay a few cents for each message - not expecting this to be a freebie service.
A lot of the google results you get for this deal with bulk texting out to the many recipients which isn't what we're looking at here.
So what's the simplest small-scale way to achieve this via HTML and simple scripting?
This daniweb forum post offers clear and simple instructions using Coldfusion and that's fine but as it's 7 years old we wonder if things have moved on and are there better suggestions?
We'd be happy to script it very simply through ASP.NET or PHP or something else, but hoping to keep it lightweight, since this is a very simple website belonging to a small business.

Answer 1

I am working on a similar thing for my company.
We use a GSM modem such as: ZTE MF668A
It is a USB adapter which you can insert a SIM card into.
We purchased an SMS only plan, which is like $15 a month and you can send unlimited SMS. However the set up might be a bit more complicated than just using a bulk SMS service.
You can set up Diafaan SMS Server (http://www.diafaan.com/) on the computer with the GSM Modem to accept emails for a particular domain. (e.g. ours is #sms.com). Our exchange server forwards email to the Diafan Server. Diafaan will take the email and convert it to an SMS and send it using the GSM modem.
In you php code, you can use PHPMailer (http://phpmailer.worxware.com/) to construct an email and set the mail to address to be #sms.com.
You use it something like this:
ini_set("sendmail_from","user#company.com");
ini_set("SMTP","smtp.company.com");
require("PHPMailer/class.phpmailer.php");
$mail = new PHPMailer();
$mail->IsSMTP(); // set mailer to use SMTP
$mail->Host = "smtp.company.com"; // specify main and backup server
$mail->SMTPAuth = false; // turn on SMTP authentication
//$mail->Username = "name"; // SMTP username
//$mail->Password = "password"; // SMTP password
$mail->From = "user#company.com";
$mail->FromName = $salesPerson;
$mail->AddAddress("user2#company.com", "Pricing");
$mail->AddReplyTo("user#company.com", "User2");
$mail->AddBcc($salesPersonEmail, $salesPerson);
$mail->WordWrap = 50; // set word wrap to 50 characters
$mail->IsHTML(true); // set email format to HTML
$mail->Subject = $subject;
$mail->Body = $body;
if(!$mail->Send())
{
echo "Message could not be sent. <p>";
echo "Mailer Error: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
exit;
}
There are also companies that offer SMS services such as PCSMS where you get 100 SMS per month for a fee. Then you just construct an email and send it to #pcsms.com.au. This is probably the easiest way to do it and is the way we used to do it, but the way we do it now is much cheaper.

Answer 2

Disclaimer, I do developer evangelism part time at Nexmo.
While you can setup a GSM modem to send SMS messages, it's likely easier (and depending on your usage, cheaper) to use a SMS API. Here are a few providers - pricing is in cents per message (depends on the API and destination, but hovers around a cent or two). You may be required to provision a virtual number - pricing there is generally dollars/month (again, depends on API and destination, hovers around a dollar or two).
Nexmo
Twilio
Tropo
If you're sending internationally, I think your best would be Nexmo. Or if you see any need to accept incoming messages in the future, Nexmo's pricing model will help you there.
All three APIs are straight forward REST/HTTP APIs - as long as whatever language you're using server side can make a web request, you should be able to send an SMS.

Answer 3

Eventually we used Esendex. Good support from them, decent code samples and plenty of mileage in the free trial (which in fact they were happy to extend when we asked).