Serco CMIS Facility and Groupcall

[nigelp]

Does anyone out there have any experience of running these two together. If anyone wants to make more generic comments the situation is this. Groupcall run a jolly good mobile text messaging service with a nice easy to use desktop interface and excellent reporting built-in. Facility's SMS faciilities seem more geared to attendance texting rather than the bulk emergency texting that we use Groupcall for. First, is this impression actually correct? Second, the way the connection seems to be managed by the Groupcall app is through a .cdb file pointing to the CMIS database. I'm used to sql queries so can anyone point me to anything that might explain a bit more about what a .cdb file does and how they are made and how we can make one that grabs just the fields that we need?

Thanks muchly for any help that anyone can offer.

[Jonno]

I'm used to sql queries so can anyone point me to anything that might explain a bit more about what a .cdb file does and how they are made and how we can make one that grabs just the fields that we need?

If you're talking about the .CDB file that the Facility Administration software uses, that's a binary config file that tells the administration program (amongst other things) the connection string to use to connect to the DB. They're created by the administration program, and they don't really tell it what fields to use; rather where the database server actually is and how to connect to it and so on.

I don't know how Groupcall integrates with other products (I assume it gathers data like name, telephone number, year group etc, attendance information etc?) - but the option of pulling data directly from the SQL database is always open to you, if Groupcall allows you to do some kind of manual import. (Alternatively, surely Facility allows you to export data in some known format like CSV?)

[nigelp]

If you're talking about the .CDB file that the Facility Administration software uses, that's a binary config file that tells the administration program (amongst other things) the connection string to use to connect to the DB. They're created by the administration program, and they don't really tell it what fields to use; rather where the database server actually is and how to connect to it and so on.

Jonno, thanks for that - I'm now in a much better position to ask Groupcall exactly how they get stuff back from the database and how we can select the fields we need.

I don't know how Groupcall integrates with other products (I assume it gathers data like name, telephone number, year group etc, attendance information etc?) - but the option of pulling data directly from the SQL database is always open to you, if Groupcall allows you to do some kind of manual import.

This is exactly what I was able to do with Group Mail - an excellent bulk emailer that we use. I've since heard that Facility will use SQL queries with SIMS - so why not with Facility is the question I am going to be asking Groupcall tomorrow.

[Kained]

Group call have written another application that interacts with CMIS so i see no reason why they shouldnt be able to get their sms program working with it