By @mhawksey

[FREE] Receive SMS messages in a Google Spreadsheet for a textwall, voting and more (UK only)

This method uses a UK based SMS gateway and most likely not suitable for international use

Two years ago I wrote how you could have a  free SMS voting using intelliSoftware SMS Gateway service. This recipe automatically forwarded text messages from the IntelliSoftware SMS gateway to a blogger account using posting via email. Votes were then extracted from messages from the blogs RSS feed using some PHP code on my server.
Last year a modified version of this was used to collect votes for the poster competition at eAssessment Scotland 2011. I was recently asked if the recipe would still work for this year’s conference. It does but I thought I could make it better.
The main change is to directly ingest SMS messages into a Google Spreadsheet (using 30 lines of code) which makes it easier for manipulation and presentation. The method for doing this is relatively simple because the IntelliSoftware gateway has a HTTP interface and you can also use Google Spreadsheets as a Database – INSERT with Apps Script form POST/GET submit method.
If you would like to do this yourself here’s how:

  1. Signup for an account at intelliSoftware (it’s free!)
    Note: the username you select is also used to direct texts so you might want to use a class or course name)
  2. Open a copy of this Google Spreadsheet template (also free)
  3. Open Tools > Script editor…
  4. Select Run > setup and okay, then Publish > Deploy as web app.. and:
    – enter Project Version name and click ‘Save New Version’
    – set execute web app ‘as me’
    – security level as ‘anyone, even anonymously’
  5. Click Update and copy the service url you are given (it will look like https://script.google.com/macros/s/[random_characters]/exec
  6. Now open your IntelliSoftware control panel
  7. Click on Forwarding and change, tick ‘Enable incoming message forwarding’ and change forwarding type to http
  8. Copy the web app url into the address field and click Save

To receive messages tell users to send a text message to 07786 XXX XXX with ‘xyz and their message’ (where 07786 XXX XXX is the mobile number found in the Trial Service section and xyz is your username created with intelliSoftware).
In the example template I show how you can parse messages to generate a response graph. You might also want to look at how I’ve used a Google Form for Hacking stuff together with Google Spreadsheets: A simple electronic voting system, at the very basic level you’ve got a free SMS textwall to play with. If you do come up with any interesting mashups please leave a note in the comments 🙂

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