VODAFONE G-CLOUD SMS-SERVICE

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Last Saved: 10/09/2013 13:43 Last Saved By: Hotchkiss, Robert

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VODAFONE

G-CLOUD SMS-SERVICE

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1. The G-Cloud SMS-Service

1.1 Overview of the G-Cloud SMS-Service

The SMS-Service allows organisations to seamlessly integrate outbound and inbound SMS functionality into their email messaging applications. The SMS-Service is available through the UK Government G-Cloud Programme.

The combination of low cost with high user read and respond rates means that SMS is an essential and cost-effective tool for appointment reminders and confirmations, staff communications, notifications of shift covers, duty

management, crisis alerts, improving customer service, and information and marketing campaigns.

The SMS-Service provides a secure, carrier-grade, high availability messaging gateway designed for easy integration to your existing email applications. The SMS-Service is rapidly provisioned, with minimal management effort and offers competitive pricing.

A 7–year message archiving supports your regulatory and compliance requirements.

1.2 Outbound SMS-Service

The SMS-Service allows users to send SMS messages from their browser or thick client email applications. By integrating the SMS-Service with email applications, users can access their normal address books, directory services, and

distribution lists.

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The SMS-Service can be connected to both the Internet and the N3 networks

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The SMS-Service can be optionally configured to:

 limit the size of SMS messages

 block numbers to which SMS can be sent (e.g. Premium rate or non-UK)

 append the user’s email address to the SMS

 appear to come from a named sender (e.g. “your-domain”)

 provide delivery and non-delivery reports to the user’s email

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Your organisation’s email platform is typically configured so that any email sent to a special address of your choice (e.g. @sms.your-domain.org.uk) is forwarded to the SMS-Service.

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A user email of the form 07891234567@sms.your-domain.org.uk is forwarded to the SMS-Service where the body of the email is converted to an SMS message and sent to the number specified by the email address (e.g. 07891234567).

1.3 How a user sends a SMS message from a browser

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A user logs into the Organisation’s email client

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The User writes a short message (as though it were an SMS)

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The user sends the email to [nn]@sms.your-domain.org.uk

Organisation email platform

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Emails sent to @sms.your-domain.org.uk are forwarded by your organisation’s email platform to the SMS-Service

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SMS-Service

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The SMS-Service processes each message as follows:

 The email is converted to SMS format

 The SMS To: field is set to the number [nn] in the message

 The SMS Reply To field is set so that the Recipient cannot reply

 The user’s email address is appended to the message (optionally)

 The size of the message is limited (optionally)

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The SMS-Service validates messages and will only deliver to permitted numbers

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The SMS-Service sends the SMS to the Recipient’s mobile [nn]

Recipient

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The Recipient receives the SMS

1.4 2-way SMS-Service

The SMS-Service also provides a 2-way SMS-Service which allows reply-back and message routing based on keywords, providing a valuable tool for obtaining feedback and confirmation from clients and customers. The 2-way SMS-Service can be used to automatically direct routine messages to the appropriate staff members.

The Organisation’s administrators can authorise and manage an unlimited number of special user email accounts and keywords for use in the 2-way SMS service. The 2-way SMS service allows these authorised users to send SMS messages to which the recipients of the messages can send an SMS in reply. If the recipient replies, the first word of the SMS message is regarded as a keyword which is used to route the reply message to the email address that has been associated with the keyword.

1.5 SMS Management Information

Local administrators can access the SMS-Service Management Information web portal to track the delivery of messages in near real-time, and monitor SMS usage in their organisation. Reports can be downloaded or scheduled for automatic delivery by email. Administrators can also assign and manage the accounts and keywords involved in the 2-way SMS functionality.

The SMS-Service may be configured (optionally) to associate each SMS message with a sub-organisation or department in your organisation. This helps with administration and billing of SMS messages.

1.6 SMS-Service support

The SMS-Service is supported by

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24*7 Helpdesk available to all users

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24*7 monitoring performance of the SMS-Service Gateway

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Service Levels that offer 99.9% availability and reliable SMS delivery

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Incident Management

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A Continuous Service Improvement Programme

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Continuous Security Management and monitoring

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ISO20000 and ISO27001 accreditation

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A professional team to support organisations during the on-boarding and off-boarding process

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1.7 Message archiving

The SMS-Service operates a 7–year message archiving policy to provide a full audit trail to satisfy regulatory and compliance requirements for your organisation.

All user SMS messages are stored on the live Production platform for 7 days, allowing your organisation administrators to check delivery of recent messages. After 7 days, messages are transferred to the archive server located in one of the two data centres. After 18 months the message metadata data (to, from, date, subject, etc.) is encrypted and backed up to tape and stored at an offsite secure facility. After 7 years the data is destroyed.

Our administrators do not have access to the content of your organisation’s messages.

1.8 Our heritage and credentials

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Vodafone are one of the world's leading communications providers, delivering a range of mission-critical, high-quality managed voice, data and IP-based services and applications to Government.

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We have extensive knowledge of the needs and practices of the UK health sector and provide one of the world’s largest secure, resilient messaging platforms.

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We have 12 years’ experience of delivering large-scale hosting and more than 7 years’ experience providing SMS and Fax messaging services

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We are trusted to reliably deliver secure managed data and connectivity services to all Police Forces, over 400 Local Authorities, 130 central government bodies and major financial and utility companies.

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All our data centres are on the UK mainland.

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We have existing IL2 and IL3-accredited data centres.

2. Features of the SMS-Service

2.1 Connecting to the SMS-Service

During the on-boarding process, the SMS-Service Operations Team will advise and work co-operatively with your email platform administrators to configure and link your email platform to the SMS-Service.

In summary:

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Your organisation’s administrators register a special domain for SMS message (e.g.

@sms.your-domain.org.uk).

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Your organisation’s administrators configure your email platform so that all email messages sent by your users to the SMS domain are automatically forwarded to the SMS-Service.

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A link is established to send data from your organisation’s email platform to the SMS-Service.

Options to link your organisation’s email platform to the SMS-Service include:

 Dedicated lease lines which can be installed to directly link your data centres with the SMS-Service

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 Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) can be used as a flexible cost-effective solution in conjunction with dedicated lease lines or Internet VPN as a backup

 ISDN can be used as a backup for low bandwidth connections.

2.2 Note on SMS fragments

SMS messages are sent in fragments of 160 characters. If an SMS message exceeds that number of characters, then it is split and sent in more than one fragment to the mobile device where the fragments are re-combined to recreate the original message. Each fragment in multipart messages has a 7-character header so reducing the message length to 153 characters. Thus a SMS messages with two fragments has 306 characters.

The SMS-Service can be configured to limit the number of fragments in each message and messages that exceed the permitted maximum fragments are truncated before delivery.

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2.3 How the Outbound SMS-Service works

In summary, the process of sending an SMS is:

1. Users send SMS message using email client

2. Your organisation’s email platform forwards the message to the SMS-Service 3. SMS-Service converts email message to SMS

4. SMS-Service sends the SMS message to the Recipient

SMS-Service

Recipient

This is explained below in more detail.

2.4 Users send SMS message using email client

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Users log in to their normal email clients to create messages to be delivered as SMS messages.

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Users send their messages to an email address that is made by concatenating the SMS recipient’s mobile number and the SMS domain.

A typical SMS address format: 07891234567@sms.your-domain.org.uk.

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The SMS-Service is compatible with any email client that is supported by your email

platform. There are a number of email clients for desktop, browser, mobile including Outlook Web App, MS Outlook, Opera, and Thunderbird.

By using your organisation’s email platform, users have access to the organisation’s address books and distribution lists.

2.5 Email platform forwards the email message to SMS-Service

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Emails sent to your organisation’s SMS domain @sms.your-domain.org.uk are automatically forwarded by your email platform to the SMS-Service.

2.6 SMS-Service converts email message to SMS

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The SMS-Service converts email messages to SMS messages as follows:

 The body of the email becomes the text of SMS message

 The SMS To field is the number specified in the email address (e.g. 07891234567)

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 The SMS From field is set as configured – for example, 'Message from Organisation'

 The SMS is configured so that recipients cannot reply

 The sender’s email address is appended to the SMS (optionally).

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To keep costs in check, the SMS-Service can be configured to restrict SMS messages to have a maximum character limit (say, 306 characters).

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The SMS-Service can be configured to ensure that the same SMS message is not sent to more than a specified number of recipients.

2.7 SMS message delivery and notification

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The first attempt to deliver an SMS message will be made within a few seconds of it being sent by the user

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There is an automated delivery retry for up to 2 hours, and if unsuccessful a non-delivery notification is sent by email to the sender

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The SMS-Service can be configured to send non-delivery and/or delivery reports for each message to the user via email.

2.8 Permitted SMS numbers

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The SMS-Service allows you to specify the mobile number ranges to which SMS messages can be sent. SMS messages will only be delivered to permitted numbers. Messages to all other number ranges (e.g. Premium rate or non-UK numbers) will be blocked.

An example of permitted number ranges:

Send SMS if number starts with Service Type

01 UK Geographic

02 UK Geographic

03 UK Geographic

055 Corporate numbering

071 to 075 inclusive Mobile Services 077 to 079 inclusive Mobile Services

2.9 The 2-way SMS-Service

The 2-way SMS service allows authorised email accounts (known as Senders) to send SMS messages to which the recipients can reply. The first word of a reply SMS message is matched with user-defined keywords and is used to route the reply message to a designated email address.

The 2-way SMS-Service is most useful for getting confirmation or feedback from your clients and customers. The service can be used to send appointment reminders and get confirmation of the recipient’s intention to attend. It can also be used to get confirmation that staff have received a message, perhaps relating to their duty rota. Some organisations might integrate this functionality into automated appointment or scheduling applications.

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Sender sends SMS by email

Recipient replies using keyword

Receiver

SMS to recipient

Sender

SMS-Service

Recipient

Keyword used to route the reply email sent to Receiver

To use the 2-way SMS-Service, an organisation will need one or more special phone numbers, known as long numbers. SMS messages are sent from and received via these long numbers. The cost of the long numbers is listed in the Pricing section.

The 2-way SMS-Service is managed by your administrators via the MI portal. Administrators create privileged email accounts (Senders). Any message sent by a Sender will be sent by the 2-way SMS-Service from a long number. (Senders can share the same ling number.) Administrators also create keywords (of their choice) and associate each keyword with the email address of a Receiver. The same email address can be used for many keywords.

As an example, consider an appointment reminder sent by a Sender:

From: “ABC appointments (ABC)” <abc.appointments@your-domain.org.uk> To: 07123456789@sms.your-domian.org.uk

Subject: XRAY appointment Message body:

Your x-ray appointment is at 09:30 on 27 January, Cottage Hospital, XRAY department, Clinic XR2. Please reply to this message with the word XRAY34YES if you can attend, or XRAY34NO if you cannot attend the appointment. You can contact us on 0845 12345678. Thank you.

The SMS is sent to the Recipient (07123456789). There 2 keywords are: XRAY34YES and XRAY34NO.

The Recipient can reply to the SMS with a keyword:

From: 07123456789 To: 0777777713

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Message body:

XRAY34YES

When the reply SMS is received by the SMS-Service, the SMS is converted to an email and sent to the Receiver at the email address associated with the keyword.

2.10 SMS-Service Management Information portal

The SMS-Service Management Information (MI) portal gives your organisation’s administrators access to reports and near real-time data on SMS usage.

The MI portal also allows administrators to manage the special accounts (Senders and Receivers) and keywords for the 2-way SMS-Service.

3. Service management

3.1 On-boarding and off-boarding

A professional team will support your organisation during the on-boarding and off-boarding processes. The on-boarding process starts with discussions between your organisation’s representatives and us concerning your organisation’s requirements, and results in an agreement on the optimum solution which includes the following:

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Contracts and legal agreements, Service Level Agreement, pricing

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Change Management and Incident Management

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Service components (outbound SMS-Service, 2-way SMS-Service, MI portal)

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Data connectivity, firewalls, security, data archiving

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The Management Information portal, reports, administrator accounts

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Training and support material

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Go-live planning to integrate your email service with the SMS-Service. Once the service solution has been agreed, we will bring your organisation on-board as fast as possible.

We will also provide professional support to your organisation at the end of the contract or should your organisation wish to terminate the Service during the lifetime of the contract. A termination of the SMS-Service before the end of the contract can incur charges.

3.2 Security accreditation

Customer security requirements are vitally important to us and the security team includes specialists in technical security, information risk management and data protection.

Security is a driving principle in the design of the solution. Dual resilience is built in by hosting the SMS-Service platform in two geographically remote UK-based secure data centres with 24/7 manned security and logged access. Each site has its own independent internet connections from different providers.

The SMS-Service is accredited with ISO20000 and ISO27001 (ISMS).

3.3 Helpdesk

The SMS-Service Helpdesk operates 24x7 and is manned by fully trained staff based in the UK. Users and administrators can contact the Helpdesk by phone or email.

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3.4 Service Level Agreement (SLA)

The SMS-Service includes comprehensive monitoring and high-quality SLAs, including

SLA Operating Service Level FL1

SMS-Service

Availability >= 99.90% < 99.90%, >=98.00% Delivery time for

messages

90% delivered within 5 minutes 95% delivered within 1 hour 99.8% delivered within 2 hours

85% delivered within 5 minutes 90% delivered within 1 hour 94.8% delivered within 2 hours The SMS-Service is an SMS Gateway which offers two main services:

(a) The outbound SMS-Service receives email (SMTP) messages from an Organisation and converts the messages for transmission as short mobile phone text messages (SMS) to the GSM mobile phone network.

(b) The 2-way SMS-Service receives inbound SMS messages on long numbers from the GSM network and converts them to email messages which can be routed by mechanisms that use keywords. The boundary of the Service Provider’s responsibility in relation to the SMS Gateway extends from the point where the email message is received at the SMS Gateway to the point where the SMS is submitted or attempted to be submitted to or received or attempted to be received from the GSM mobile phone network. For the avoidance of doubt, Service Response Times in relation to the SMS Gateway do not include delays solely attributable to the relevant mobile phone network, the non-availability or otherwise of the destination mobile phone or other device or functionality constraints within the receiving or sending mobile phone’s network architecture arising other than as a result of any action or inaction of the Service Provider or any Service Provider Party.

4. Pricing

4.1 Outbound SMS-Service

Outbound SMS is charged per SMS fragment delivered. The pricing is dependent on the volume of SMS fragments sent per year.

Different pricing models are available on request. These can be beneficial for larger organisations and include different price bands for larger SMS volumes per year.

There will be no charge for failed SMS delivery.

Quantity of SMS fragments per month Price per fragment

0 – 10,000,000 £0.05

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4.2 2-way SMS-Service

An Organisation will need at least 1 long number to use the 2-way SMS-Service. The number of long numbers required by an organisation is dependent on expected traffic volumes. The SMS-Service on-boarding team will advise on how many long numbers an organisation may need.

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There is a one-off charge for the set-up and provision of each long number.

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There is a monthly recurring charge for each long number.

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There is no charge for receiving inbound SMS messages.

General terms for pricing:

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All prices quoted are in Pounds Sterling (GBP) and are subject to contract.

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All prices exclude applicable taxes.

Quantity of long numbers One-off set-up charge

per long number per long number Monthly charge

1 to 100 £25.00 £10.00

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© (April 2013). Vodafone Limited. Vodafone and the Vodafone logo are trademarks of the Vodafone Group. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

The information contained in this publication is correct at the time of going to print. Such information may be subject to change and services may be modified, supplemented or withdrawn by Vodafone without prior notice. All services are subject to terms and conditions, copies of which may be obtained upon request.

Vodafone Limited. Vodafone House, The Connection, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2FN Registered in England No. 1471587

Last Saved: 10/09/2013 13:43

Last Saved By: Hotchkiss, Robert

5. About this Document

Changes since last version

Reformatted using the current Vodafone template.

VODAFONE G-CLOUD SMS-SERVICE

VODAFONE

G-CLOUD SMS-SERVICE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.

The G-Cloud SMS-Service

1.1 Overview of the G-Cloud SMS-Service

1.2 Outbound SMS-Service

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1.3 How a user sends a SMS message from a browser

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1.4 2-way SMS-Service

1.5 SMS Management Information

1.6 SMS-Service support

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1.7 Message archiving

1.8 Our heritage and credentials

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2.

Features of the SMS-Service

2.1 Connecting to the SMS-Service

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2.2 Note on SMS fragments

2.3 How the Outbound SMS-Service works

2.4 Users send SMS message using email client

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2.5 Email platform forwards the email message to SMS-Service

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2.6 SMS-Service converts email message to SMS

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2.7 SMS message delivery and notification

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2.8 Permitted SMS numbers

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2.9 The 2-way SMS-Service

2.10 SMS-Service Management Information portal

3.

Service management

3.1 On-boarding and off-boarding

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3.2 Security accreditation

3.3 Helpdesk

3.4 Service Level Agreement (SLA)

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