[Web4lib] Automated SMS messaging

[John Fereira]

Thomas Edelblute wrote:
> Cross posted to multiple lists, so sorry for the duplication.  We have a patron suggestion that I am being asked to investigate.
>
> "It would be convenient if the computers at the Internet Desk could send a SMS text message to our phones to tell us when we can use a computer or when a book is due or late."
>
> Does anybody have something in their system that does these functions?
>   
I was one of the developers on a system called Kuali Enterprise 
Notification.  It is one of the services available as part of the Kuali 
Rice suite (http://rice.kuali.org/).  Essentially, Kuali Enterprise 
Notification (KEN) allows "you" to create a Notification (an extendable 
content type) and tell KEN to deliver the notification.  The 
Notification services supports multiple delivery mechanisms (one of the 
parts that I worked on) including email, to a web site, as an SMS 
message, or as an Instant Message (under development).  Basically it 
decouples that delivery and management of notifications from an 
application by exposing a "sendNotification" method as a web service. 

I worked on KEN in collaboration with our central IT department at 
Cornell and since I work in one of the libraries one of the use cases we 
developed tests for was a "Book Overdue" notification.   However, it has 
not been implemented in production (yet) at any of our libraries.