I was cleaning up one of our spaces in assembla.com after the completion of one big milestone recently. Somehow I landed on Webhook tab and I thought: “Hey, why not integrate assembla with AlertGrid…?”.

5 minutes later I was enjoying sms and phone alerts triggered by actions in my assembla space. I am going to tell you what steps are required to enhance your teamwork with instant phone and sms notifications for projects hosted in assembla.

This might be interesting especially if:

1. You have a lot of projects
2. Your projects generate a lot of email alerts
3. You want to hear nice women voice saying “Milestone X was successfully completed, boss”

OK, so all hands on desk – we will quickly add SMS notifications to your assembla events:

(feel free to contact us at support@alert-grid.com in case of any questions)

1. I assume that you already have assembla account and you own a space there (you can create new account also: http://assembla.com). If you didn’t set up Webhok tool so far, you can do this in Admin->Tools in your space.
2. I also assume that you have an AlertGrid account – you can do everything covered in this tutorial using our FREE account, so go and grab it right now at http://alert-grid.com
3. Login to AlertGrid when you receive confirmation email.
4. Assembla’s webhook can send information when an event occurs in your space. We are going to receive some of these data (action, space and object – you can read about them on Webhook tab in assembla). To do this we need to create three Custom Variables in AlertGrid. Please go to Workflows tab, then click Custom Variables in the left hand side menu. Use the Add Custom Variable button to create the following variables: ASSEMBLA_ACTION, ASSEMBLA_SPACE and ASSEMBLA_OBJECT. All of these variables need to be of a String type.
5. Click the Receiver tab and then click “Add new Receiver” button. Receiver is a logical object that receives events sent to AlertGrid. Do not confuse it with a contact person. I suggest calling this receiver “assembla”. Creating custom variables and receiver were the hardest part. The rest is going to be a piece of cake.
6. Go to Contact tab and click the “Add new Contact” button. Fill out this form with your name and your valid cell phone number (country code required, use digits only, so no + (, – and other characters). This is quite obvious I think. Please change SMS gateway to correct one depending whether you stay in USA or not. Of course you can define more Contacts if you want.
7. Now we need to create a SMS template required to send SMS messages. To do this click SMS Templates in Contact tab and then “Add new SMS Template” button. Give it a name (e.g. “Assembla SMS template”) and Message you want to receive, we will use previously created custom variables to provide verbose information in SMS, like “{{ASSEMBLA_OBJECT}} was {{ASSEMBLA_ACTION}} in space {{ASSEMBLA_SPACE}}”.
8. Now we are ready to create rules telling AlertGrid when SMS message should be sent. Go to Workflows tab and click “Add new Workflow” button. Enter the Workflow name (e.g. “Milestone created”). Select “Triggered by Signal” option and connect this Workflow with receiver you created earlier by clicking connect button. Click “continue to Workflow designer” when you’re done.
9. In workflow designer create the following rule “If variable ASSEMBLA_OBJECT == ‘milestone’ AND variable ASSEMBLA_ACTION == ‘created’ then Send SMS to your Contact using template “Assembla template”. Click save!
10. We’re almost done. Now you need to get your AlertGrid api_id. This can be found in Administration-> Account Settings.
11. Once you have the api_id please navigate to your assembla space and click Webhook tab. We will need to use following data to configure the webhook tool

1. Send to this external URL – http://hq.alert-grid.com/save-signal/
2. Method – POST
3. Content type – application/x-www-form-urlencoded
4. Post updates about: Tickets and Milestones
5. Make sure that Webhook enabled checkbox is checked
6. Content, with merge codes:

api_id=YOUR_API_ID&receiver_name=YOUR_RECEIVER_NAME&ASSEMBLA_ACTION=%{action}&ASSEMBLA_OBJECT=%{object}&ASSEMBLA_SPACE=%{space}

Please remember to change placeholders YOUR_API_ID and YOUR_RECEIVER_NAME with real values.

Now we can test it. You can go to Milestones tab and create a new milestone. If everything was configured properly you should receive an SMS shortly after creating the milestone.

Let’s sum up what we’ve done.

We’ve just added instant SMS notifications for important events in your project without writing a single line of code! Even more, AlertGrid allows you to:

1. Use different notifications (phone, email, sms messages and more to come soon)
2. Notify different people, all over the world (over 170  countries covered)
3. You can easily add new rules for other assembla events
4. Easily manage everything from one place

Last but not least, as you might have noticed – Although the AlertGrid can easily integrate with Assembla it was not created only for this purpose. You can easily integrate AlertGrid with any service that can send events over HTTP, or with your own software, just by writing a few lines of code. Check out the AlertGrid integration API at http://alert-grid.com/documentation/. Bet you never seen such extremely simple API: 1 method with only 2 required parameters!

Please feel free to let us know about other integrations you made (support@alert-grid.com).