Additions to USO-AutoText

Couple more features to this service today. You can now ‘opt out’ entire year groups from the texting service – useful with the 14-19 agenda work that is going on.

You can pre-set your school’s option’s, details here in the help files.

Then modify these settings on each occasion you extract data, details of this option are here.

USO-AutoText & imported data

The USO-AutoText system now has added functionality with regard to testing imported parent contact numbers.

Options have been added to the support site interface that allow System Admin’s to identify parent contacts that exist in the schools MIS system that do not have a mobile number listed for them.

In addition the import utility now checks and removes alpha characters from the imported data so when your schools MIS system has ’07887-123456(Mum)’ entered as a mobile number this will be reduced to 07887123456 which will be accepted.

A specific attendance report has also been added to the USO-AutoUpdate software that can be run at a time chosen by the school which extracts data about pupils who are have failed registration on that day.

This data is then used to seed a new tab in the sms section to allow’s the school to easily send a text message to the parent’s of the pupil using a default message with personalisation added for the parent’s name and the pupils name.

More improvements to USO-AutoText

We have now added and attendance tab to the sms texting system. In conjunction with USO-AutoUpdate the system now extracts attendance data from your schools MIS system and allows you to automatically text all the parent contacts for your missing pupils in one go.

You can also now send text messages to groups of pupil contacts based upon class or year data and also select all or just the primary pupil contact from the MIS system.

For further details or to get this service activated for your school or LA please raise a support case.

USO-AutoText additions

 

We have a number of new features in the SMS texting system USO-AutoText released as of today.

All the SMS configuration now exists under one menu from the main page of the support site called ‘SMS’

You can now allocate numbers of SMS messages to schools and also the cost per message at an LA level on the ‘configuration settings’ page.

In addition you can also set the email address for incoming sms messages on a per school basis – an incoming message has it’s CLI number from the sending phone looked up in USO and then the message is forwarded to the configured email address for the school that that user is associated with.

Another page ‘Invalid Mobile Numbers’ looks at the data imported from the MIS system and checks that it is just a number and no alpha characters, it also looks for the correct number of digits and with the correct start sequence for it to be a mobile number – incorrect numbers are listed so the school or LA user can see the accounts that need attention and it’s not possible to send txt messages to them.

The ‘Send Message’ page now tells the user how many message credits the school has remaining and also the cost of sending the presently selected message based upon the LA price per text. This page also allows the user to deselect any number of the pupil recipients from the ‘Pupil Contacts’ list.

We also now have an MIS bit that can be set in USO which allows the user to see sensitive data that’s been imported from an MIS system – this means that an ITcontact, Power or Super user does not automatically get to see contact details for pupils and other MIS data.

For further details or to get this service activated for your school or LA please raise a support case.

USO-AutoText

The USO-AutoText service is presently available for trialing within a USO environment on a school by school basis.

Once integrated with USO-AutoUpdate it’s possible via the Support Site interface for schools to distribute text messages to staff and parent contacts either as bulk messages or as single destination texts.

For more information on the service try clicking on the ‘SMS’ tab on the Atomwide or LGfL support sites, where you can also register your mobile phone by visiting the ‘My Accout’ tab and then following the ‘Account Details’ link.