FingerTec Newsletter Vol: 09 Year: 2012 | Combining SMS with TimeTec Cloud

Application Series

Combining SMS with TimeTec Cloud

by Mr. Vincent Chan, Technical Support, FingerTec Worldwide

TimeTec Cloud is FingerTec’s latest software development featuring a cloud-based attendance management solution. With TimeTec Cloud, attendance data management becomes hassle-less and seamless, as everything is stored and managed online, without our customers ever having to worry about setting up and maintaining their own servers. Headquarters and branch management is also made easy as up to 999 terminals from anywhere in the world can be connected to one TimeTec Cloud account with just an internet connection.

With the upcoming release of TimeTec Cloud just around the corner, FingerTec is pleased to share with you some useful tips on how TimeTec Cloud can be applied in different scenarios. In this article, we highlight the use of the common Short-Messaging-Service (SMS) with the TimeTec Cloud system.

Setting Up SMS Notifications Using MySQL Database

The TimeTec Cloud system is able to integrate with the SMS Gateway to send SMSes to a person in charge, such as a head of department, to indicate the attendance status of their employees. This can be set up and developed by any IT programming expert. The person who develops the SMS Gateway must design the software to integrate into the MySQL database. The software should be able to read the relevant information from the MySQL table by itself. The developer will then use the information to send SMS to the person in charge.

The SMS Gateway will need to be able to connect to the MySQL database to read the data inside it. For example, the employee is 30 minutes late due to traffic congestion, the SMS Gateway will then read the IN time and Remarks for the employee to process the information and send it to the person in charge via SMS.

So, once TimeTec Cloud is set up, and a user reports to work for the day, the transaction will be captured by the FingerTec terminal, passed to the TimeTec Cloud attendance management system to be processed, and the data will then be sent as a text message to the head of department, or whoever is put in charge, according to the SMS Gateway settings done by the IT programmer.

With this feature, head of departments, especially those who are frequently off-site and unable to check up on their employees, will be able to maintain their authority by keeping track of their staff’s attendance and tardiness easily while on-the-go.

For more information on SMS Gateway setup, kindly email support@fingertec.com .