Set up an SMS account for a standard SMPP provider

Hi, this is Jean Mathieu and welcome to the second SMS setup video. This video will help you setting up your first SMPP external account on Adobe Campaign. In this video, we’ll see how to set up Campaign for sending SMS. We’ll create an external account required to send SMS. And remember that you need a SMPP provider to send SMS, you cannot send SMS with Campaign alone. We’ll create an SMS delivery template, we’ll send it and analyse the results, and we’ll have a quick look at what you have to do to tune SR processing for your specific SMPP provider. So let’s start Campaign and see how this works. So let’s open Adobe Campaign and install our first SMPP external account. During this example, I will use a SMPP simulator so I don’t have to connect to a real operator. When setting up a SMPP connection, always stay in contact with your provider to make sure that you use the right settings. So the first thing to do is to install the SMS package. Let’s go to tools, advanced, import package, install a standard package. Be careful when installing standard packages because they cannot be uninstalled. In that list, we’re gonna select SMS. Click next, and start. When the package is installed, you can close that window and disconnect from the server, and connect back. This step is important to refresh all the objects that can be displayed in the console. So now let’s set up the external account. We go to administration, platform, external accounts, and we will create a new external account. Click new, and now we’re ready to type its name. Let’s say, my SMPP account for example. The type is routing, it must be enabled of course, channel SMS, and bulk delivery. This tutorial does not cover mid-sourcing, it will be done in another video. Let’s save for now, and now we can configure our account. So, mobile, this is the main window where you can set up your SMPP account. As you can see, there are a lot of settings. Most of them must be reviewed with your provider at some point. But let’s see what’s the minimum required to make something work. The first one is smsc implementation name. This is simply the name of your provider. Here I have a simulator, so let’s call it simulator. Here you type the domain name or the IP address of the SMPP server. For me it’s a local installation, so I’ll type localhost, and the port is 2775 for me. These settings will change because they are specific for each provider. Let’s type an account or login name, and a password. We’ll leave the other settings for a different time. So there are two extra settings you must review before connecting. In throughput ndday, check the max empty throughput. That’s the number of SMS per second and per connection that the connector can send. Let’s say we want to send fast and send at 100 SMS per second. Another setting you might want to check in SMS specificity is, you probably want to enable TLS over SMPP. TLS is a way to encrypt the communications. Unfortunately my simulator does not implement TLS, so I’ll leave that unchecked. Now I can save my account and it gets enabled automatically. Let’s send a few messages. So first we’ll create a delivery template that can send messages through this external account. Let’s go to resources, templates, delivery templates. We simply ignore the existing ones and create a new one. Before doing anything else, you must click properties to choose the correct external account. And in routing here, we’ll select our newly created account. Because that account is of the SMS type, the interface was updated to reflect that. As you can see the text content changed and there are less fields here. But before, we will disable tracking because tracking in SMS is a complex topic and we’ll leave that for another video. delivery target works exactly like email or other channels. So I’ll just add one recipient for the example. Of course you’re encouraged to do real targeting and all the power of Ruby campaign can be used here. Let’s send a really quick message. Hello! Of course if you want, you can add personalized fields in SMS. This works exactly like email. Give it a name, my SMS template and save. Confirm that it was correctly created here. And now you can send it exactly like other deliveries. Create a new delivery and we’ll select our template. Continue. And we’ll send it right now. Confirm. Yes. Now let’s close this and save. And we can see the status has been updated to finished. Of course in my example I’m using a simulator so we cannot actually receive an SMS. But when you do that with a real provider you should have received an SMS at some point. Let’s review the status of each message. We can see that the status has been sent to sent, which means that the SMS was successfully submitted to the SMPP provider. There’s also a SMS process running in the background to update this list when a status report has been received from the SMPP provider. It can take between a few minutes to several hours for the status to be switched to received because it has to go through the whole mobile network and back. So this can take a long time. And by the magic of montage, 10 minutes have passed. Let’s check if the SMS was received. OK. Click delivery again. And here it worked. There is a very high probability that your setup does not work right away. Don’t worry about that. We’ll check why in a moment. Here you can see what was written by the provider. The provider return a SR. The name of the provider here was simulator. This is the first field we put in the external account. And the status delivered and error code 0. And after that, you have a message that was omitted. How this string is constructed is detailed in the SMS tech note. But let’s review the settings that allow to change this string into the status received on mobile. Let’s go back in the external account. Mobile and SMAC specificities.

And here we are interested in this regex to catch the ID, the status, and detect whether delivery was successful or rejected. And catch the error code inside the SR. So how does this work exactly? So here I’ve displayed what the simulator sent in the SR. You can get this string by asking your SMS provider. This one is the standard format describing the appendix B of the SMPP protocol specification. How does that work? First, the ID is extracted using that regex. The default regex searches for ID, colon, and between 1 and 10 hexadecimal digits. Here we find ID, colon, and between 1 and 10 hexadecimal digits. We have our ID 0. And then we’ll have to check whether the SMS was delivered or not. In the standard, this is done by checking the stat field. You can see here the regex used to extract the stat field. So we have STAT, colon, and then between 5 and 15 alphanumeric characters. We have STAT, colon, and then a word. So now we know the status. But how do we know whether delivered means success or failure? These two regexes are applied against that word. So here we have a regex that determines whether sending was successful. And basically it’s anything starting with DELIVE. That’s the case here. So success. Now, what if we received, for example, say, UNDELIVE and ERR1? That’s just an example. Of course, this may vary. Always work with your provider to determine the correct values. So we have UNDELIVE. We use the extraction regex of the status here. And so we capture what’s after the colon here. So the status is UNDELIVE. And now how do we know whether it worked or not? Of course, it does not match that regex. So we are sure now that something went wrong with that message. And now we have a second regex which says, if the message starts with expired, deleted, UNDELIVE, unknown, or reject, we know it failed. And here it starts with UNDELIVE. So this failed, unfortunately. And in that case, well, in every case, we also want to extract the error code here. And this one is simply extracted by the regex. So the default is ERR colon. And you capture exactly three alphanumeric characters. ERR will be 001. You might say, why do I have to go through all these? Well, the problem is this string here is not defined by the SMPP standard. The format is only a recommended format. So it varies between different providers. And unfortunately, most providers do not use that standard format. So we will have to work with them to find the correct regex. If you don’t know how regex work, there are many good tutorials to find how they work and how to write them. There are also websites that allow checking your regex and be sure that they match exactly what you want. And finally, what if the stats part does not match either successful or error status? Let’s say we have something like this. Well, let’s do it again. Extraction regex is between 5 and 15. So we have status in progress. No problem. But it does not match either this or that one. In that case, this SR is completely ignored. That way, we can ignore SR just stating that delivery is in progress because we don’t have a status matching in campaign. We only have success or failure. So if you receive SR and they seem to be ignored or if your messages seem to be stuck in the sent status, you will have to check these regexes. And this concludes that video. If you need more information, you can still have a look at the Adobe campaign documentation online, including the SMS tech note. And as always, thanks for watching.