Idea Bin
From MobileHacking.org
Ideas and suggested features for mobile software tools. Please take!
RapidSMS Ideas
- Logging of all messages - read only. With a log sent for every SMS sent to a phone number. Having such a log will be important for auditing and accounting purposes down the road. It will also be useful when the RapidSMS SMS libraries are used in modules of other program.
- Credit System – the ability to assign SMS credits to a user. Many organizations will want to be able to monitor their spending of their staff members using this system. An ideal way would be to assign a SMS or money limit for that user.
- SMS Send Preview – a popup asking you to confirm that you want to send the message. This message will also include a preview of the cost of sending that message. In the settings, you will be able to define the cost of sending an SMS to a particular network/country.
- Modem registration and SMS Costing – build in the ability to support scenarios where multiple modems will be plugged into a single RapidSMS install. Each modem could contain SIMs from different carriers. Since SMS within a carrier network are usually a lower cost, we will want to have the ability to define which SIM is used to send messages to a particular network (you can determine the network by looking at the phone number). Rules will need to be defined to assigned these phone ranges. The ability to register a modem to a RapidSMS user or group would also be very good. Ie, health and education may want to have their own independent numbers.
- Threaded messaging & Labeling – the ability to view all the incoming and outgoing messages in a threaded format like google. Labeling of messages would be useful for organizing data as it comes in.
- Sending to individual users or groups – sending messages should closely mimic the send message feature in facebook. Where you can send to an invididual user or groups. For one time messages, people should be able to simply type in a phone number.
- Autoadding to address book – the ability to click on a phone number on an incoming or outgoing message and rename it (auto add it) to the address book.
- Improved User and Group Management – system that scales better for more users. The gmail address book format is not bad.
- Triggers – ability for incoming SMS to trigger a response. Triggers can be triggered from either a keyword or certain incoming number. Trigger actions could include:
- Autoresponse – canned response for a certain keyword
- Forward – autosend the message (or newly generated message based on some action) to a particular user or group when it is received.
- Parameter Triggers – trigger a response if a particular parameter is =, !=, >, <
- DB/FORM Triggers – ability to send a message when a data threshold has been hit. Ie, 10 people have responded to a form. Or 20 total of 20 births have happened.
- Form queries – ability to query data from a certain form. There will be a need to define permissions for this in the admin.
- Scheduling & Reminders – ability to program messages to be sent at at certain periods of time or when certain
- SMS to Email – ability for a user or group to map a contact code to an outgoing email message. Contact codes will be tied to an incoming phone number. For example, Berg email message text – would work by first looking up the contacts for the sender of the SMS. If Berg is one of the contacts it would send an email to the address connected with Berg. It would be cool if you were able to make email contacts via Unitard.
- Email to SMS – Incoming emails would be forwarded to the SMS user associated with that account. Dynamic email mapping would be ideal. Ie, berg@rapidsms.org would go to the berg handle. Also, it would be good if phone numbers of registered users in RapidSMS where automatically supported ie: 2562334245@rapidsms.org. The 140 char limit provides a challenge. One option would be to send an autoreply to the email user prompting them to go to a webform to send the message. Another idea would be to autoreply to the user saying: “You have emailed a SMS contact. The first 140 characters of your message where sent. The reciepient received the following from your email “first 140 characters of message”. We will also need to figure out a way for users SMS users to respond to an emailer.
- SMS to Group: Realize this is probably supported by Unitard. Would be good if organization leaders could send a message to groups within their org. Ie, MVP Please return to the office. Important staff meeting at 3PM. Perhaps all incoming messages could have a numeric autocode attached. Ie, 546 email message text. A reply back to that address would look like 546 email message reply. This would mean that that incoming message size for email->text may need to be limited to 130 chards.
- Form Properties – ability to define certain behaviors for a form. Form properties include:
- Qualitative Forms - right now it is very difficult to organize qualitative data. Should be able to define a form as Qualitiative. Such an SMS message would look like: FEEDBACK qualitative message here
- Anonymous – anoymous forms will hide the phone number of the incoming phone number. In most cases, anoymous messages will be used to gather qualitative data. A qualitative, anoytmous message could look like: ABUSE help my husband is drinking all my money
- API – ability to send access RapidSMS SMS functionality and user/groups from outside programs.
- Paper Forms - Ability to auto generate a PDF printable version of a form. As data is recorded on the sheet it will clarify how the SMS format should be sent in. Using an HTML->PDF library would probably be the easiest way to do this.
- Improved Form response – currently after submitting a form you receive a text that says whether or not the form has been completed. An improved version could say: You have submitted: School Means - Beans 25, Rice 50KG
- Exporting of Data – this should be supported in two ways
- Incoming SMS data is posted to an external URI. Other applications could then just expose a form to have RapidSMS update itself
- The aggregate data for all RapidSMS data could be exported to a central database / website. It would be great if for example you could view all the data being collected in all the country offices in a central place.
- Thin SMS Modem Client – Ability to host a GRPS modem in a site that posts all data to a centralized RapidSMS install on the Internet.
