Sending notifications to devices from NowSMS

Sending notifications to devices from NowSMS SearchSearch
Author Message
Rob
Posted on Tuesday, November 12, 2002 - 03:23 pm:   

Hi,
From my understanding of the NowSMS application, it is possible to send MMS notification messages from the web interface to the MMSC.

I was wondering if there is a method to generate a MMS notification from the MMSC to a device?

Thanks,
Rob
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support (Bryce)
Posted on Tuesday, November 12, 2002 - 07:30 pm:   

Rob,

The API that we support for doing this is the web interface.

From an application development perspective, you don't have to go through the menus, you just have to issue the appropriate HTTP GET command. (We actually added the menus to the product later, originally there was just had a web-based API.)

We're planning to extend the SMTP e-mail interface in the next release as another flexible means for submitting MMS. (Right now the SMTP interface only lets you send MMS to users defined to the MMSC. We did this for spam control reasons, but we're putting security controls that allow that interface to send MMS to any address with the appropriate authentication in the next release.)

We're open to suggestions on additional interfaces/approaches that people would find useful.

-bn
Steve Bennett
Posted on Thursday, November 14, 2002 - 03:37 pm:   

Is there a way of sending the mms notifications out as text SMS messasages iso Binary WAP Pushes (so we can support legacy phones/PDA's)and also 2 piece PDA/Phone combinations?
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support (Bryce)
Posted on Thursday, November 14, 2002 - 05:13 pm:   

No. This is a tricky issue.

Most of the operator services will only send an MMS to phones on their network that are provisioned for MMS.

If you send MMS to some other phone, then the recipient gets an SMS telling them to go to some web site and login with some randomly generated username and password to view the message.

Basically, that approach, while it provides some support for legacy handsets (although I can't imagine going to a web browser and wasting the time myself) ... causes much frustration and grief for handsets that do support MMS but aren't registered on that particular operator's system.

What happens in our setup is that the recipient is going to get a binary SMS that isn't going to be meaningful on a legacy handset.

We've been thinking about ways to handle this in a generic fashion, but no good solutions yet.

We're open to advice/suggestions.

(We've been thinking about maybe waiting some configurable period of time ... where after the first time we send an MMS notification to a particular phone number ... if the user doesn't connect back in within this timeout period, we follow-up with an SMS.)

-bn