Term

Description

Address

Either a mobile number or an email address.

Every customer requires certain addresses to act as senders or receivers for messaging applications. You can either have a pool of addresses or can specify them explicitly.

The 'Address Pool' feature allows the user/Administrator to configure the use of a number-pooling system. This allows the client to use a range of fixed addresses like mobile numbers and email-IDs as senders or receivers for messaging applications.

Alarm

A special type of log indicating a system problem.

Alarms are raised for unexpected events like database connection failures etc. Alarms are categorized by their severity (Minor, Major and Critical).

Each alarm record also provides the time and date of the event, a descriptive  message, and any additional information that may help diagnose problems. Alarms may be escalated or dispatched via email and/or SMS.

Application licenses

Products are accessed by purchasing application licenses.

e.g. if a customer wants to use the 'AT&T GSMS StaffMatch' application then they must purchase one or more 'AT&T GSMS StaffMatch' application licenses.

Autolist

This feature allows the user to upload comma-separated variable (CSV) files for various purposes. The source files can be staged on FTP servers. An auto-list can be set to load once (immediate) or daily, weekly or monthly.  

To create an auto-list, go to:

• Setup > Personal Setup > My Lists and select 'New'.

Blacklist

A 'Blacklist' is a list of destinations/recipients/mobiles that are excluded from those you are allowed to send to or accept messages from.

Example #1: Sending - If  you send a broadcast to 15 people of which 10 are in your blacklist, those in the blacklist will not receive the message.

Example #2: Receiving - Inbound - If you assign a blacklist to an Inbound service, those in the blacklist will not be accepted by the service.

Browser

An application that supports the presentation and rendering of web pages.

Official support is for Internet Explorer version 7 and above as well as Firefox. If compatibility issues arise with other browsers (Opera, Mobile Opera, Safari, Chrome etc) then these can be raised with the Support teams, but resolution will be outside of any guaranteed SLA.

Campaign Templates

Templates can be created from existing broadcast campaigns and used to create new campaigns, saving a lot of time for users.

CIQ

Content Provider Incoming Queue.

CGP

Corporate Gateway Platform - the core mobile messaging application.

Client Submit Time

For MT (Mobile Terminated SMS): 'Client Submit Time' is the time the customer request (API) was received or the time the message was created for application orders.

For MO (Mobile Originated SMS): 'Client Submit Time' is the time the message delivered to the client (URL request sent or email sent to SMTP server) regardless of when the response was received.

Connection

As a telecommunications platform, creating and managing ‘Connections' is a core capability.

Clients connect to the platform to send their requests as well as receive data. These are obviously 'Client' connections.

The platform connects to various network elements like SMSCs, and email servers in order to send and receive messages. These are network connections.

Contact

An individual person/entity whose details are stored for use by an application.

Contacts can be customers, employees or users. You can store a variety of information for a contact such as: first and last name; phone number; addresses; titles; local/international time zone.

COQ

Content Provider Outgoing Queue

CP

Content Provider.

CS

Real-time Charging System Queue.

CSC

Common short code, a short 5- or 6- digit numeric code (e.g., 44254) to which text messages can be sent from a mobile phone to an application.

CSQ

Real-time Charging System.

Customer

Typically refers to corporate customers (organizations). Depending on the configuration, customers could also imply distinct cost center.

The SEI supports customer hierarchies across the platform. Resources like licenses, address lists and network connections can be provisioned for customers and shared down the hierarchy.

Each customer can have certain unique attributes and special features of the SEI. Some of them are:

•Customer specific style-sheets to customize the look and feel of the user interface;

•A designated primary user to administer and control the use of the platform;

•Maintain administrative information about the customer like the address etc.

Date

Incident Date.

Filtering

The process of either blocking or passing addresses.

When dealing with large campaigns, certain recipients may need to be excluded. Filtering can be effected using opt-in and opt-out lists. These lists can be populated automatically based on “Unsubscribe” requests from the recipients.

Group

A collection of contacts. Groups can be established so that you are able to send the same messages to the same kinds of people.

Groups make it easier to manage contacts for users as well as customers. Certain applications like WebSMS can set their destinations based on group/s selected by the user. Public end-users may create and use groups like 'Family', 'Friends' etc whereas corporate customers may want department-based groups such as  'Engineering', 'Officers-grade1' etc.

Note: There is an important distinction between groups and lists:

•Groups aggregate contacts that have already been created within the platform;

•Lists contain unrestricted text created by users, e.g. a collection of phone numbers.

Invoices

A record of your purchase.

Invoices are generated by the system for each commercial transaction with the customer. Invoices are emailed to the customer administrator at the time of purchase.

Keyword

Generally the first word of a message.

Keywords are used as 'choices' for triggering particular actions or Inbound campaigns and services.

Keywords can be regular expressions including sets of words, phrases or characters.

In addition to keywords, sub-keywords can be used to provide multiple services/choices from a single Inbound number.

License

Determines how certain permissions are granted within the system, so that users can perform certain tasks or functions.

Lists

A series of phone numbers or email addresses. Lists do not include contacts.

The focus of the entire platform is to enable and manage the process of sending Messages via SMS and/or email to multiple addresses. All of these need to be listed and managed.

The platform follows a very simple format for lists. The simplest list can contain a series of Mobile phone numbers, one per line. More complex lists are comma-separated variable (CSV) files, with one line per record; however the first entry on each line must be a mobile phone number (in international format). Any other entries are determined by users and applications.

E.g. An online voting campaign may want all replies automatically dumped in a List that is in the following format:

...

<mobilenumber>,<voteselection>,<timeanddate>

<mobilenumber>,<voteselection>,<timeanddate>

<mobilenumber>,<voteselection>,<timeanddate>

....

For an email list, the first field should be the email address.

Basically, this list is the outcome of the voting campaign that the customer can use for generating a result or even sending replies.

The most common use of the list would be to broadcast a message to a large number of recipients. In this case, customers may upload a long series of mobile numbers. Once uploaded, the list can be re-used as many times as required.

Log

A record of some system activity.

All sub-systems log certain events to the System Log - e.g. a user logging in, or a message being sent. The log record stores information such as the date and time, as well as any important additional information about the event.

Long Codes

Long codes are international format telephone numbers (e.g. +1 343-334-3929) to which text messages can be sent from a mobile phone to an application, also known as virtual mobile numbers.

Long codes enable international cross-carrier messaging to 200+ countries (note: long codes do not work in U.S. and Canada).

Message Types

The platform supports various message types including:

SMS

MMS

Email

RCS

WhatsApp

Voice

MMS

Multimedia Messaging Service – a MMS message is a mobile message which may contain multimedia content (graphics, video etc).

MNO

Mobile Network Operator

Mobile

The number must be in international format. The leading zero, if any, should be replaced by the country code and there should be no spaces, '+' signs or brackets.

e.g. the Australian mobile number 0414 xxx xxx would be entered as 61414xxxxxx.

MoRa

Mobile Rating System – an FTP interface from EISP used for non real-time billing.

MSISDN

Mobile number.

The number must be in international format. The leading zero, if any, should be replaced by the country code and there should be no spaces, plus signs or brackets.

e.g. the Australian mobile number 0414 xxx xxx would be entered as 61414xxxxxx.

MO / MO SMS

Mobile Originated SMS -  message submission from a mobile phone towards another mobile or application

MT  / MT SMS

Mobile Terminated SMS - message delivery towards a mobile.

Network Submit Time

For MT - The time the SMS was sent to the network (SMSC) regardless of when received.

For MO - The time the SMS was first received by the platform regardless of when the response is sent back.

NIQ

Network Incoming Queue

NOQ

Network Outgoing Queue

Number

The number must be in international format. The leading zero, if any, should be replaced by the country code and there should be no spaces, '+' signs or brackets.

e.g. the Australian mobile number 0414 xxx xxx would be entered as 61414xxxxxx.

NPI

Number Plan Indicator

Order

The basic entity corresponding to campaigns. All campaigns - whether SMS email,  Standard, Broadcast or MailMerge - are essentially orders.  All references to campaign will indirectly refer to the order object.

Primary User

The main user who is set up for a customer/sub-customer account, and has additional privileges.

These privileges include:

- Simple Email2SMS accounts authentication authority

- license expiry email management.

- In a prepaid environment, receives OTP SMS when purchasing licenses.

Product

A collection of URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) provided to a customer on a 'per-user' basis for a defined duration.

A product suite is composed of one or many applications. Each application is defined as a bundle of URIs.

Priority

Refers to the order in which messages are delivered. This function is supported in SMS and email messages. Prioritization is supported both at the message level as well as customer or user level. At the customer or User level, dedicated queues can control the traffic as well as priorities.

Queue

Where messages are stored, awaiting processing.

RCS

Rich Communication Services

Registered Delivery

Registered Delivery refers to the option for users to view a confirmation for the delivery of their messages.

Reply Management

Function which allows recipients to respond to your message or campaign. Replies may then need to be sorted, filtered and responded to.

The address/address pool mechanism enables the destination/receiver to reply to a  specific return address. Additionally, the platform is capable of forwarding the reply to the user's inbox, email address or mobile (as an SMS).

The 'Inbound' product is a powerful extension of the simple reply management above. It allows the User to automatically manage replies by parsing them according to their content and sorting them into separate lists.

Role

Roles enforce the privileges and restrictions for users. The solution allows flexibility in terms of Role creation. On installation it is configured with three default Roles:

•Standard User

•Customer Administrator

•Platform Administrator (responsibility owned by the Mobile Network Operator)

The 'Application Role' concept allows each role to be selectively granted privileges for each application.

RTCS

Real-Time Charging System.

Scheduling

The process of deciding when messages are to be sent. Applications such as SMS, broadcast and email support scheduling messages or campaigns for a specific time or frequency.

SEI

SOPRANO Enterprise Infrastructure - the core software and systems upon which CGP (Corporate Gateway Platform) and other SOPRANO applications are built.

Short Code

Short Code is usually a 3-8 digit number used to identify a service.

SMS

Short Message Service – a short textual/data message sent through the mobile phone network.

TON

Type of Number (Reads more about TON under Technical Concepts).

User

The operator who creates orders using Applications like SMS, Broadcast etc.

'User' also represents the authentication Username/Password credentials a customer can use to log on and interact with the platform.

Each user record will maintain typical information like the address and contact details. Each user is uniquely identified by their email address.

NOTE: There cannot be more than one user with the same email address.

Whitelist

A 'Whitelist' is a list of destinations/recipients/mobiles that you are allowed to send to or accept messages from.

•Sending - If  you send a broadcast to 15 people, of which 10 are in your whitelist, only those in the whitelist will receive the message.

•Receiving - Inbound - If you have a whitelist applied to an Inbound service, only those in the whitelist will be accepted by the service, all others will be rejected.