Date:         Mon, 10 Dec 2007 03:53:07 -0500
Reply-To:     David Johnson <d@DKVJ.BIZ>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         David Johnson <d@DKVJ.BIZ>
Subject:      Re: Can SAS send text messages to cell phones?

In the spirit of debate being good, and Robin and I having chewed the
virtual fat in two centuries now, I shall express a slightly contradictory
point of view.

I don't consider using a second SAS session to be a sledgehammer if it is
part of a process to parse and error check a log, record a SAS table of job
runs and outcomes (including log sizes and statistics) and report an
outcome.

When I first explored that idea last century under V6.12 for monitoring and
scheduling of very long running jobs (also on Unix as it happens), the
outcome was emailed through mailx to Lotus Notes and multiple web pages
made the log and its analyses available for non SAS persons to observe and
interpret.

Adding an email address for an SMS message would have assisted if such had
been possible at that time.  Sadly, in England, it took a little longer for
the telephone companies to assist.  Indeed, I participated in a CSIRO trial
in Australia in about 2003 where email interfaces to SMS were being
investigated.

To my knowledge, Telstra still has not provided, nor have T-Mobile as far
as I know, the phone#@telephone.company.com solution that the US have.  It
took quite a while before I could finally tie in the video capture computer
with a means to send a text message.

Before our trans Atlantic cousins start to feel too complacent though, I
might point out that after three years of fighting a company with a name
starting with V, whose vision is of their boots, and not the horizon, there
remain many problems in running a mail server that sends to their
subscribers.  Many emails, and phone calls from local people remain
unanswered, and the problems persist.

Kind regards

David