InDash: Incoming SMS Dashboard
What is Incoming Text Dashboard, Processor & Responder (InDash)?
InDash is a small AJAX script (completely javascript-based) to manage and process your incoming text messages. It lets you quickly setup a dashboard for your Nexmo incoming numbers. Optionally, you can configure SMS forwards to email / URLs or setup keyword-based auto-responders. Furthermore, you can configure different settings for each of your number individually.
Behind the javascript facade it is powered by Cloudmine and supports Nexmo SMS Gateway.
Dashboard for your incoming messages
InDash allows you to quickly (within a few seconds) setup a dashboard for your incoming numbers.
To get started, simply use your Nexmo credentials to view your dashboard. InDash fetches your incoming numbers from Nexmo automatically and can automagically configure your Nexmo account (callback URL) with a click of a button from the dashboard.
Keyword-based Auto-responders
InDash processes your incoming messages and enables you to trigger an action based on your specified keywords. Various operations are supported as actions:
- Forward to an email or URL (i.e. post to a URL) - Auto-respond using a pre-composed reply or fetching reply from a remote URL
Multiple configuration for your numbers
InDash allows each of your incoming number to have it's own configuration and keywords. InDash intelligently picks up the correct configuration based on the number the message was sent to.
Nexmo offers a single global callback URL for all your incoming numbers. With InDash you can break-away from this limitation.
Reply to your incoming messages
InDash helps you keep the conversation going by allowing you to quickly reply to an incoming message from the Dashboard.
Google Chrome Browser Extension
Access your incoming messages using InDash Extension for Google Chrome. Supports real-time desktop
notifications for incoming messages and delivery reports. Also features a quick panel to view your
latest incoming messages.
Click here to Download the
Chrome Extension.
Why and When to use InDash?
While working on various SMS-based applications over the years, I've often encountered the need to have small (but good-to-have) add-on features to address a few use-cases like:
- Quickly peek at your incoming messages / delivery reports without setting up a callback handler (script, database for storing messages, etc. etc.)
- Call a different callback URL for each incoming number (I have multiple numbers in my account but they aren't used in / for the same application)
- SMS based voting application
- Forward specific incoming message to an email / mailing list (e.g. to a dev team, "ALERT: System down")
- Globally acknowledge a few keywords in text message replies like STOP, ABUSE, SPAM and take some action
- Query a remote service for data / SMS reply (e.g. asking for the remaining balance in your account)
- The general-purpose forwarding of an SMS to a URL / Email address allows you to hook into other systems (like ZenDesk, Wordpress, etc.)
- Deliver info-services via SMS (weather, traffic, etc.)
How does it work?
- Completely javascript-based standalone dashboard. Access it from anywhere using a browser!
- Uses Cloudmine's infrastructure:
- to store your configuration
- a stand-alone script to process incoming messages (in the cloud) and store them
- a stand-alone script to fetch numbers for your nexmo account
- a stand-alone script to update callback URL for your nexmo account
- Uses Nexmo's SMS gateway and API (via Cloudmine's stand-alone code execution platform) to:
- to send / receive SMS
- to fetch incoming numbers in your account
- to auto-magically configure the callback URL in your account to point to InDash's processing script
- Security:
- For security purposes, this app never stores your Nexmo credentials. It only uses it to fetch incoming numbers from Nexmo.
- The incoming text messages are stored in Cloudmine, keyed on the number they were sent to.
- If you change your Nexmo's API secret key, you will have to update the callback URL to InDash (which you can do so with just a click from Your Dashboard).
This is because InDash never stores your Nexmo credentials, and the auto-responder script gets it as a callback parameter directly from Nexmo.
Contact & Feedback
Some upcoming features planned for InDash (given I get enough free time):
Data Encryption: HTTPS access only.- Basic Address Book (quickly pick a contact to send an SMS). It will also be used for "Sender number -> name" translation for incoming messages.
- Firefox Add-on.
If you would like to see a feature in InDash, please feel free to get in touch with me on Twitter or use this contact form.