Many of our customers have asked how you can use Conductor or Maestro to send text messages for alerts and notifications. Using the email feature in Conductor and Maestro, this is very easy to do.
Every mobile carrier offers a feature called email-to-text, which provides a custom email address for every phone number. For example, if your number is 707-555-1234 on Verizon, you could send an email to 7075551234@vtext.com and Verizon would convert that to a text message and send it to that number.
In the System Options in Conductor, you can trigger an automatic email message to go out to a specific email list when the user presses an Emergency Alert button. This is a great way to keep staff and faculty informed in an emergency, especially if you wanted to trigger a "silent" alarm. By adding the email-to-text addresses to your mailing list, recipients can receive text messages instead of (or in addition to) standard emails!
Below is a list of common carrier addresses for sending texts:
For other carriers, including international carriers, search for "email to text" on the carrier's web site, or try this list: http://www.livejournal.com/tools/textmessage.bml?mode=details
An easy way to find the wireless carrier for a particular phone number is to use a web site such as: www.freecarrierlookup.com.
Remember that text messages have a character limit (120-160 depending on the country) so keep your email name and message short, and be sure to test your message to make sure nothing is truncated.
In Maestro, you could use the same email feature to send text messages when a projector goes offline. The Notifications feature in Maestro (under System Tools) allows you to associate an email trigger with various projector status states. Whether it's a lamp, filter, temperature or power state warning or error, you can get notified immediately of any issues on campus.
