Write a comment

Why bother with SMS when everyone has a smartphone these days? The point is when a new employee gets a brand new phone of the shelf it's not configured what so ever. Now you do know the phone number but that's it. Therefore, email is not an option and you're left with SMS to onboard the employee using XenMobile. I haven't really seen many companies who have their own SMS-Gateway. This is where email to SMS is a simple and quick option to do the job.

Here a quick how to:

  1. Make sure your text provider has an email to SMS service. I'm using textlocal.co.uk and had to activate the service and set an email alias (what email sender is allowed).
     
  2. Configure your notification server BUT very important WITH authentication of a user. This is required because otherwise you try to relay an unauthenticated email externally and will be denied by your mail server. If you do, you will find the following error in the XenMobile Debug log: SMTPAddressFailedException: 550 5.7.1 Unable to relay.

  3. Make sure that users have in Active Directory the phone number set under telephoneNumber or add a Mobile number within the Telephones tab. The AD objects would be either user.telephoneNumber or user.mobile but in both cases, the number must be without any special character or spaces and also no leading country code sign, the plus (+).   +1234-567-89 is wrong and must be 00123456789



  4. You should create new notification templates (there should be a copy or duplicate function) for instance the Download Link, Enrollment Invitation, and Enrollment PIN.



    Set the SMTP Recipient, in my case, to ${user.mobile}@txtlocal.co.uk and don't forget to copy all other field content from the existing templates!

 

Troubleshooting:

  • From your email client, send an email to your provider to test the SMS conversion
  • Review the XenMobile Debug log for relay issues and that the mobile number gets resolved correctly
  • Enable mail tracking on your mail server to see that emails are sent to your provider
  • The text provider should have a history of received and send messages that you can check

 

Write comments...
or post as a guest
Loading comment... The comment will be refreshed after 00:00.

Be the first to comment.