The Public SMS Gateway (GAP) is a central technology platform that enables mobile messaging between Portuguese public entities from different sectors and citizens. Created with the focus of interlinking and streamlining communications between Public Administrations and citizens, it enables informational and transactional services.
Managed by the Administrative Modernization Agency (AMA), GAP is available for public entities that wish to reuse it for their communication services with citizens, as it is the case of the Ministries of Health, Internal Affairs, and Transportation, among others.
Through technologies and languages fit for the mobile world, GAP provides the scalability, reliability and performance needed by the
most demanding organizations.
Its main strengths are:
1) Modularity: high flexibility to choose the modules that best fit the service in question;
2) Multi-channel & bi-directional: It supports SMS and MMS, as a mobile recipient or with a mobile origin. GAP allows the creation of mobile services using solely a number and a keyword
3) Multi-carrier: It enables connectivity to national and international operators, using standard communication protocols, and allows the management of shortcodes by application and service;
4) Reliability, Scalability & Performance: developed in Erlang, the same language used in core operations of the telecommunications operators, it guarantees full compatibility with multi-core architectures/multi-server;
5) Full Control: Centralized management and monitoring through a web application back office. Ability to create
profile-based routing application, shortcode, contents, Operator, etc.
What makes this system unique is its simplicity: simple services for simple tasks. Its major advantages are the simplicity, the number and diversity of available services and its shared nature.
