The Tentative Development of an Automated Short Message Service - Essay Example

? SEECS Notification System (SNS) An Analytical Report By here Contents Problem ment: 4 Requirement Analysis 7 End Product Description 15 Conclusion: 17 Abstract The paper poses an analytical report about the tentative development and deployment of an automated SMS based system which will notify students about daily classes, emergencies, timetables and many other events in the universitySEECS University lacks automated notification and students, staff and administration has to manually check about any event, class schedule etc. SNS will enable the students, staff and administration to get notifications through SMS about any event, classes, seminar without any manual entity involvement Introduction: The intent is to develop a comprehensive SMS based notification system for SEECS UNIVERSITY to facilitate the students, faculty and staff. The system will generate SMS messages to the subscribed students and faculty about the upcoming events taking place in SEECS UNIVERSITY. It will keep them informed about the class schedules and any activity taking pace in the institute. Messages will be automated and the administration will not have to write the content manually. Our system will be flexible so that the admin of the SEECS UNIVERSITY will be able to send the information of their choice and moderate it accordingly without any problems. The project will also contain a web portal where the students, faculty can interact with the interface. The web portal will maintain all the admin tasks. The students and faculty will have special forums to discuss about any activity, topic and sharing of ideas. Those forums will be accessible both through web and SMS. Problem Statement: SNS will be an automated SMS based notification system that will generate automatic notifications about upcoming events, class schedules, announcements. Our system will also enable the students to interact with each other via SMS and web based discussion forums. Students will also be able to get reminder about the class with location of the classroom. Main challenges in implementation are dissociation between different subscribers. Every subscriber will get message of only his/her related subscribed service. Ensuring security will also be another challenge. Our system will ensure absolutely no spamming. A centralized control is necessary to deploy that will be a major task. Masking the cell number of the sender will also be ensured in our system so that if someone does not want to expose his/her cell number to everyone will be able to do so. Related Work and Literature Survey: SEECS UNIVERSITY is already using NINS, an SMS notification system to notify the students about any activity. But this system lacks automation. There are some defined groups, the operation personnel have to select the groups, write the message manually and send it. There are no concepts of automatic timers, SMS alerts about any emergency, inter communication between students and faculty. There is no integration with “SEECS UNIVERSITY website” and event calendar updates are needed to be sent manually for notification. That means that if someone does not have internet access in a certain situation, He or She is unable to find about the event that is updated in the event calendar. Our proposed project will be automated. It will generate SMS alerts based on timers. A separate web portal will be maintained for the administration for registering, allowing deleting subscribers, student, faculty discussions because there is no user friendly and proper interface of NINS right now. Using our system the faculty will be able to get the reminders of their schedules, which right now is absent in NINS. A Student will be able to interact, using SMS service with the whole class wherever He or She might be even without internet access. Right now there is no such service provided by NINS. All the control is with the admin and a student cannot convey his message, important news or notification regarding any activity if He or She does not have a cell number of any particular person. Such messages can be moderated and only the CR, for example, can allow a particular message to be broadcasted. Intention is to get this system deployed physically in SEECS UNIVERSITY and our flexible system will be open for change and extension so that it can be deployed in any institution including universities, hospitals and offices where collaboration is required. Such a system can be very useful in backward areas where internet access is still a privilege such as in some small towns and African countries. Besides automation, NINS lack the important feature of communication system for students, a discussion forum and idea sharing platform. NINS is a massively centralized system giving all the control to the admin and students cannot communicate. Our system will provide this feature, apart from that we intend to extend this system (if time and resources allow) so that a student can query his/her result through SMS. Requirement Analysis Our system will have mainly three stakeholders 1 Students 2 Faculty 3 Administration The students require getting instant notifications on their mobiles about all the upcoming events taking place in SEECS UNIVERSITY without opening the website every time. If a student wants to interact with the whole class about some important news or announcement she/he cannot do it if the cell number of whole class is not available. There is no working mechanism in SEECS UNIVERSITY that notifies a student/faculty about the class timings, location and other details. A user friendly web interface is also a requirement for students where they can discuss, share and learn. Our project will have the following modules: Establishing SMS server : An SMS server where GSM sim will be located will be established. Messages will be sent and received from this centralized server. This SMS server will interact with web server and database server Design the database schema : Database schema will be designed in which tables will be defined, ERD will be designed and implemented. Database optimization techniques will be used in order to minimize the user query response time Web portal A user friendly web portal will be designed that will interact will both database server and SMS server. Users will be able to take part in discussion forums via both web and mobile (SMS). Read and get the data from the SEECS UNIVERSITY website event Calendar Main task will be this module in which our system will be integrated will SEECS UNIVERSITY website in order to read the events from the event calendar Test the send the read data The read data will be sent to the dummy data and testing will be done Implementing excel sheet parser The excel sheet of the time table will be read through parser and the time and class location will be sent through SMS Flow Chart(Faculty Perspective) Flow chart ( Student’s perspective) USE CASE Diagram (ADMIN and USER Perspective) Modules: SMS Server A server where all the communication will be done will be configured. SMS messages will be sent and received. Messages will be sent to subscribed users. A database will be maintained behind the web portal at the server. A user will be able to subscribe with this system either through SMS or on web portal. Users will be categorized into Faculty, student, staff classes and further there will be subdivisions mainly in the |student| group because our system intends to provide communication for student with his/her class.SMS messages will be sent and received using SMS lib, a C# library. Messages can be sent to any number of users (Ramsey & Byle, 2006). Getting data from event calendar SEECS UNIVERSITY website maintains an event calendar that contains the scheduled events for the whole month. The events are updated by the web team of SEECS UNIVERSITY. On hovering over a specific date, user can see the short event description. We will develop a calendar reader in our system that will read the event calendar and get the date and description of the event. Calendar will be accessed using special API calls that are used in SEECS University website to get the events from the server. This will be done using tags as SEECS UNIVERSITY website uses a lot of “DIV” tags. Once we read the data from the calendar then this will be sent to the subscribers. Or this calendar data can also be taken directly from the SEECS UNIVERSITY database if they allow that. Handling the time of sending the message for example whether the message will be sent to the user before 5 minutes of the event or one day before the event can be implemented on our choice. Using Excel sheet time table: On the start of every semester, the training branch provides an excel sheet of schedule of the whole semester having the time and venue of the classes for all the programs, we will convert this excel sheet into CSV formats and get it into calendar form, then reading data form the calendar will not be a difficult job. We can also get the data from the excel sheet in a specific format by writing a special excel sheet parser and then putting the acquired data in Google calendar. Google calendar will then be used and read by the software to send the SMS alerts (SMSLib, 2013; Conmy et al, 2006) Database Implementation: There will be multiple tables and students will be registered in the database according to his Class, section. Similarly record of the faculty will be maintained in the database. When the message is received the sender’s number will be checked in the database and other proceedings will be done after that. All the database work will be implemented in C# (Rob & Coronal, 2009). Monitoring: All the text messages will go through the server and every text message will be maintained and saved in the database to avoid abuse, spam, and irrelevant content to be communicated. The admin will be able to unregister any subscriber if he/she sends objectionable content. Additional Feature : If time and resources allow, We wish to implement the API feature in our project so that application developers will be able to enhance this system by making new apps like simple quiz games, tic-tac-toe, forums etc. Application developer will upload the XML in a specific format defined by us. The application will be saved in the Database against a specific, known code. The subscribed users can use this app by sending the code through SMS. The SMS processor will process the XML and decide the sequence of tags to be sent via SMS. End Product Description SNS will be a full time working system that will be automated and integrated with SEECS UNIVERSITY website. SMS server will be deployed in a centralized way in SEECS UNIVERSITY so that the maintenance and security can be handled efficiently. Subscribed students, faculty and staff will get benefited from this system. The subscribed user will get only relevant messages, about the services in which he/she has subscribed. Following are some salient features and benefits of our proposed system Benefits for Students A student will be able to Subscribe to the SMS notification service: By sending a simple keyword “sub”, the sender will be prompted for his information that will be necessary to register his in the database, on getting the information, if the data is in the right format it will be saved on it particular location in the database (according to category), if format of the reply is not supported user will be prompted again to send the data in the proper format (format will be specified by us). Send an important message to whole class: If a student wants to inform his/her whole class with some important activity , news, emergency he will be able to send the message to the whole class irrespective of whether he has the cell number of the whole class or not. Send a message to a person who doesn’t wish his number to be disclosed: At times boys are paired with girls in semester projects but most girls won’t like to share their personal numbers with them. In that case they can both subscribe to one of the forums in our system and can use that service to maintain communications between them. All these communications will be saved in a database. So, in a situation when one of them receives an inappropriate message from another person, he or she can raise a flag and the administration can scan the messages and deal with the situation appropriately =>Security issues: (a)to avoid spamming and immoral content to be broadcasted to the whole class, a broadcast message will be first redirected to the “Class representative”. If he sends “OK” to the server then the message will be broadcasted to the whole class otherwise not. (b) Many people especially girls do not want to share their cell number with the whole class, for that we will implement a masking feature that will make sure that the sender’s name appears in the text rather than the cell number, for instance message displayed to the receiver will be like “James” said Receive notification about events A subscribed student will get the event notifications taking place in SEECS UNIVERSITY on his/her mobile. He or she will not need an internet connection to see the event calendar for their information about the upcoming events or to plan his/her schedule (stackoverflow,2012). Receive notification about classes Mostly throughout the semester, the students have to contact the CR continuously to know where and when is the next class, everyone cannot remember the schedule. Our system will generate SMS alert to the subscribed students before some time (we can decide on it) about the next class and venue by using the time table that is provided by the training branch. Discuss ideas, share thoughts on Forum A student will be able to start discussion thread on any topic (if allowed by the moderator) and people can participate in by both SMS and web. All the messages of the discussion will be posted on the web portal. Benefits for Faculty A part from registering, subscribing with our system A Faculty member will be able to Receive notification about events A subscribed faculty member will get the event notifications taking place in SEECS UNIVERSITY on his/her mobile. He or she will not need an internet connection to see the event calendar for their information about the upcoming events or to plan his/her schedule. Receive notification about classes “If a teacher is in a meeting or in car, or busy, he/she can forget about the lecture. Our system will generate SMS alert to the subscribed faculty member before some time (we can decide on it) about the next class and venue by using the time table that is provided by the training branch. Conclusion: SNS will open new platforms for rapid communication between students and need of advanced hardware and internet connectivity for communication will be minimized. Our system will be open for extension so that it can be changed and enhanced according to the future needs. The system will give great benefits to our school SEECS UNIVERSITY and it can be deployed in further schools after its successful performance. References Top of Form Conmy, C., Soucy, A., Hazlett, B., & Jelen, B. (2006). Excel for teachers. Uniontown, OH: Holy Macro! Books. Ramsey, G., & Byle, W. (2006). SMS 2003 recipes: A problem-solution approach. Berkeley, Calif: Apress. Rob, P., & Coronel, C. (2009). Database systems: Design, implementation, and management. Boston, Mass: Course Technology. SMSLib (2013). SMSLib. [online] Retrieved from: http://smslib.org/ [Accessed: 21 Sep 2013]. Stackoverflow (2012). sms gateway - any easy and reliable java API than SMSLib for sending sms? - Stack Overflow. [online] Retrieved from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11594628/any-easy-and-reliable-java-api-than-smslib-for-sending-sms [Accessed: 21 Sep 2013]. Bottom of Form Read More