Has anyone successfully sent a applicant/person a text message through a workflow? For example: A job is fulfilled and you want to text all applicants to notify them that the job was filled.
The quick method is to use email, but you must ask them their provider. Every provider has an email monitor box for sending texts.
For example Verizon is @vtext.com.
The alias of the email would be their 10 digit number.
To send a real text which only requires the number, you can use a cloud service for sending texts, and Workflow can hook up to this with the HTTP Post activity.
Would highly recommend the 3rd party service integration route.
Simple SMS messaging is a hard problem that others have spent billions of dollars and years of effort solving for your benefit. Twilio is an excellent option that provides web APIs you can use with the Workflow HTTP Post activity along with a .NET library you can integrate into a Workflow Script activity. All for seven tenths of a cent per SMS message.
We actually do stuff like this with Twilio. As Samuel mentions, Twilio has a .NET SDK and REST API, so WF could send SMS via a Web Request activity or a script.
We ended up building our own Twilio SDK application and Workflow interacts with that instead of calling the Twilio API directly, but it's relatively simple either way.
I'd highly recommend avoiding email-to-text. First, it relies on accurately capturing their service provider. Second, it just looks bad when you get a text like that.
Good morning,
Have any of you done this in Laserfiche Cloud? I'm trying to do this integration with Twilio, but I can't get the whole integration done. Any help?
Thank you,
Hi Luis,
It would be helpful if you could describe any specific issues you ran into trying to integrate with Twilio from Laserfiche Cloud.
It's hard to provide help without knowing what and where the problems are.
Hi Samuel, Thanks for answering.
I think I'm stuck on everything.
Context:
I'm helping implement a process for a school district where they want to handle requests for school buses, where on one side there will be a form with the data related to the bus request, and on the other side there will be another form with the data of who approves it (in addition of course to data such as cell phone number and email of those who would need to receive the notifications), plus another form to update the status of those requests, until the process is finished.
In one of those steps, the members of the school board, due to the accumulation of messages that they usually have in their email inbox and because of the importance of attending to this task as urgently as possible, they also want to receive the notifications by text message to their cell phone to attend to them immediately.
The district is using Laserfiche Cloud.
Right now I think my problem goes through two branches.
The first is that I am trying to better understand the Laserfiche Cloud Workflow environment, since where I usually work the most is On Premise. Activities such as Retrieve Business Process Variables that we have in On Premise, I cannot find them in the cloud version, and it is being a bit tedious for me to find the way to obtain the variables that I want to use from a process, I do not know where to do this part.
Second, I have no idea how to integrate the Twilio script into my Workflow to be able to send SMS notification messages.
Any help and guidance that I can get to address this problem that I am having, I will greatly appreciate.
Any light on this please?
Thank you!
In Cloud, Forms variables get passed to Workflows through input and output parameters. Please see Workflow Parameters and the Workflow Service Tasks documentation.
For the Twilio integration in Cloud, you have two options:
Thank you, Samuel. Let me investigate your suggested links and see what I can achieve with them.
Thank you very much for your response.