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I’ve been seeing a lot of questions on just how to enable the sending of SMS inside of SCOM. The ‘configuration’ inside OpsMgr is very simple; just a little check box that says "Enable short message service notifications".

To figure this all out, I talked to my friends up the street at MultiTech and had them send me a few of their SMS modems so I could figure it all out. They sent me 3 GPRS modems¹. This article will focus on the USB and RS-232 versions, which are almost completely identical in setup, and the same in operations. The MultiTech MultiModem GPRS² is a small (4 inches long, 2.5 inches wide, 1 inch high) device that accepts a SIM³ card and talks to your computer (Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008) via USB or RS-232 Serial (They have an additional model which uses Ethernet, that will be in part 2). Here’s the Cliff’s Notes Version:

1. Open the modem
2. Install SIM card into modem
3. Plug in antenna, plug in USB, plug into your server
4. Download and install the drivers
5. Open the OpsMgr admin console, and place a check in the box to enable SMS

Now, if you want a more indepth step by step via, with plenty of pretty pictures to look at read on after the jump! How To Setup System Center Operations Manager 2007 (And Windows!) to use native SMS Note: The example pictures are from Windows Server 2008, 64bit. This has also been tested on Server 2003 32bit & 64bit, as well as VIsta (Which didn’t work – the drivers arent certified and as such Vista refuses to use them!) What You’ll Need

• MultiTech MultiModem GPRS Model #MCTBA-G-U-F4 (USB version, though the serial version will work as well)
• An AT&T PrePaid "GoPhone" – though an prepaid cellular phone that provides a SIM card will work; this means AT&T or T-Mobile in the USA – Sprint & Verizon will not work sadly!
• Some time

What We’ll Do

1. Get your AT&T GoPhone. I went to my local big box store and bought the Nokia 2610 model for $19.99. As a phone, it’s not much, but we don’t care about that.
2. Rip open the phone, rifle through all of the documents and find the SIM card. This is what we care about. Go online, activate and fill it with some minutes. I put $25 on the phone, which gave me an additional $10 in credit.
3. The plan you choose doesn’t really matter, we’re just using this setup to test. I’m only planning on using this a limited amount of time, so the plan I chose has a fee of .20¢ per SMS. If you’d rather, you can pay a flat fee of $20.00 for unlimited messages.
4. Break out the SIM card from the little packaging it’s in, and remove the rubber cover on the front of the modem. Then slide your SIM card into the modem – pay attention to the orientation as is shown in the picture. It doesn’t go in the intuitive way!
5. Turn it around and connect the USB cable and the supplied antenna. The antenna uses a standard SMA connector, so if you can’t get a signal, you’re free to extend it or use a higher quality antenna. You’ll also notice a "handset" jack – and your guess is right. It’s a standard RJ-11 jack for your defacto-standard telephone. So yes, you can actually still make calls, too.
6. Now, before you plug this into your server, go to MultiTech’s website and download the drivers for your particular operating system. For you conveinence, I’ve linked to a few of them below, but they can be updated at any time so it’s a good idea to get them right from the source!
   • Windows Server 2003 & Windows XP – 32bit drivers – 64bit drivers
   • Windows Server 2008 – 32bit drivers – 64bit drivers
   • Windows VIsta – 32bit drivers - 64bit drivers⁴
7. Now plug the modem into your server. You’ll get the usual "Found new hardware" dialog. If you forgot to download the drivers, you’ll receive the "We can’t find it" message and it will show up in device manager with an exclamation point. The device identifies to Windows as a TUSB3410 Serial Port
8. When you install the driver, you’ll receive a Windows security warning that it can’t verify the publisher of this driver. Go ahead and click on "Install this driver anyway"
9. It will crunch away and then you’ll receive the "Successfull" dialog. You can also look in the device manager to see that it’s installed and now identified as a "GSM Modem"
10. Success! You did it! Now turn it on in OpsMgr and bask in the glow of your awesomene.. hrmm. Wait.

So maybe we’re not really done. Especially if you received one of these: Error 16009, DTR Call Failed. You might also receive error 16011, Baud Rate Test Failed. What are these? As it turns out, it’s nothing too serious. By default Windows talks to our GPRS modem at 115,200 baud. But OpsMgr is trying to communicate with it at 9600 baud. So we need to change the rate on the modem. No problem! While we’re there, we can test our modem manually and look at some of it’s settings. Since this SMS device is a real, actual factual modem, we can talk to it just like we’d talk to any modem, in the same way we’ve been doing for the past 30 years. In Windows XP and below, we can use the builtin Hyperterm. In Vista however, we don’t have Hyperterm any more, so we’ll need to use something else – and I’ll go ahead and recommend everyone’s favorite all in one telnet/ssh/terminal client PuTTY. It’s free and open source and works great. Go ahead and download it (Direct link to the all-in-one Windows installer version), I’ll wait. Done? Good. Now, open up PuTTY. It will default to the SSH connection type, go ahead and click on "Serial". For the serial line, change this from COM1 to whatever COM your modem installed on, for me it’s COM4. Also change the speed from it’s default of 9600 to 115200. Now click "Open". Your terminal will open up and you’ll be greeted with the following. You won’t receive any kind of welcome banner to show you’re connected. All you get is a little prompt. If you don’t get that, well then you’re not connected. This modem uses the same "AT" based Hayes Command Set that has been in use for the last 29 years. In fact, MultiTech has a huge PDF of the complete set of AT commands that this modem supports. It quite a read, and it really took me back. Anyway. Let’s start with something simple and practical. Lets see how good our signal is. Type AT+CSQ and hit enter. This returns our RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) and channel bit error rate. You can see, my signal strength is a medium one, somewhere between -109 to -53 dBm and no error rate. SPECIAL NOTE: If you received nothing but odd characters when you started typing, like below, that means you’re communicating to the modem at the wrong speed – disconnect, fix it, and connect again. This is essentially what Operations Manager is seeing when it tried to send a message: If you’d like to check the network status, enter "AT+CREG?" and hit enter. For me this returns: +CREG: 0,1 That means the modem is registered (Communicating with the cell towers properly) and that it’s on the home network (not roaming). Now, let’s see what rate we’re communicating to the modem at. We know it’s 115,200 but lets verify. Enter "AT+IPR?" and hit enter. This should return: +IPR: 115200 Excellent, now we need to change this. Enter "AT+IPR=9600" and hit enter.It will return +IPR: 9600 OK And then immediately appear to freeze. It hasn’t! We’re just not talking to it at the correct speed. So close out of PuTTY, and reconnect to the same COM port, but this time at 9600. Enter "AT+IPR?" at the prompt, and it should return: +IPR: 9600 OK Excellent! That means it’s set. We only have one more thing to do to the modem, and that’s to save this configuration. Right now it’s in volatile memory, meaning if the modem loses power that it will go back to 115200 when it starts up again. To save this configuration to the EEPROM, type in "AT&W" (W for Write) and hit enter. It will return OK And now you’re set there. Go ahead and disconnect. Or you can even play around some more if you want. If you want to send yourself a text message, enter ‘AT+CMGS="651MYPHONE" and hit enter. You’ll be given a ">", type your message and hit "CTRL+Z". When you get your message and respond to it, you can view that in the terminal too, with "AT+CMGR=<Message number>". If you haven’t sent it anything else, your message number is probably 1. Only one more thing left! Now all we need to do is configure Windows to talk to the modem at 9600 baud. You can either open up "Phone and Modem Options" in the control panel, hit "Properties" for your modem, "Change Settings" and change the maximum port speed to 9600 or you can open up the device in Device Manager and change the Bits Per Second under "Port Settings". Now, you really are done! Does it work? You bet your sweet ass!

1. GPRS, or General Packet Radio Service, is one of the most popular data standards in use in the US. They also make modems that talk to EDGE and CDMA systems though [↩]
2. USB Model: MTCBA-G-U-F4, RS-232 Model: MTCBA-G-F4 [↩]
3. Subscriber Identity Module – See Wikipedia [↩]
4. Note: I was unable to get Vista drivers to work. They are not digitally signed, and as such Vista refuses to use them. [↩]