Pandora: An SMS-oriented m-informational system for educational realms

e-Informational systems based on the Internet infrastructure and services like e-mail, WWW, etc., are a de-facto option for various educational realms, in order to enhance the quality and diversity of services offered to their educators and students. On the other hand, despite the fact that pure mobile services like short message service (SMS) or multimedia message service (MMS) have managed to highly penetrate the wireless market to a great degree and gain users’ wide acceptance, are rarely employed to support or offer informational services in the context of education. In this paper, we describe in detail a fully functional SMS-oriented mobile-informational (m-informational) system named Pandora that was designed and developed from the onset to specifically support a plethora of services obtainable mainly by the students of our university. The analysis and our contribution are two-fold starting from the theoretical background and continuing to the technical part of the Pandora system. We present and discuss several issues, including the different services that Pandora supports, system architecture, Pandora's box, core, Web services, security, etc. We demonstrate that the proposed system is practical to implement, flexible, effective, secure, affordable and above all scalable and potentially extensible.