The system allows you to send SMS and other messages to anyone in your contacts list or by specifying the number directly. You will have access to the shared company contacts lists and you can also create and maintain your own private contacts list. All of this without needing your mobile device, making it ideal for messaging in an industrial environment where not everyone may have access to a mobile device.

Recipients can also reply to messages, enabling two-way chat communication between users, without any of them requiring a mobile device. Messages can also be sent to shared company-wide groups containing multiple recipients. You can also create and maintain your own set of private or shared groups.

The system can be readily integrated with other business systems, allowing automated messages to be sent to any recipient or recipient group on a scheduled basis, or in response to an external event. In this way, production summary reports, downtime status reports, alarm messages based on predefined conditions, etc can be fully automated. Such automated status messages can also be remotely initiated by anyone from their mobile device by sending specially formatted requests.

The system makes use of a high performance bulk SMS gateway to ensure reliable and timely delivery of messages and has can be configured with backup message delivery options if and when the main gateway is down.

Ad-hoc messaging

Users can easily send and receive ad-hoc SMS messages directly from any workstation on the company network. This makes it an ideal solution for plant control rooms, for example, without them having to have access to mobile phones or a cellular network signal.

Automated reports and alarm messages

The primary benefit of Vidal Messenger is its ability to be used to send automated messages from any other business system. It is abile to initiate and send plant or equipment status alerts based on smart triggers that are not limited to pre-determined fixed time intervals. These can be triggered based on certain rules, or based on a PLC signal from any of your process historians.

Group management

Shared or private groups can be created and maintained by any user, who becomes the initial group administrator. Group administrators can also assign administrator rights to other users, enabling shared administration of groups.

Groups can be created to easily manage the target recipients of automated messages generated from other business systems.

As users are removed from the company contacts list, through resignation or otherwise, they automatically fall out of any groups that they belong to and will no longer receive any of system generated messages that may at times contain commercially sensitive information.

User and contacts administration

System administrators have the ability to make changes, if required, to the company recipients list that is automatically updated in the background from the corporate master people data.

All users have the ability to create and maintain their own contacts, which are then merged into their single merged recipient list that is available to them.

In order to respect the data privacy of employees, contractors and other recipients, no contact information, such as mobile numbers and email addresses, is ever visible to non- administrator users of the system.

Users can be configured as hidden from the public recipients lists, in which case they will only be able to receive system generated messages or messages from other user’s private contacts lists.

Vidal Software Solutions (Pty) Ltd

Company registration number: 2013/031746/07

VAT registration number: 4520278567

70 Umvumvu Drive, Umhlali, 4399, South Africa

PO Box 1289, Umhlali, 4390, South Africa

+27 83 265 7127 (mobile) +27 32 946 0756 (office)

support@vidalsoft.com enquiries@vidalsoft.com