Now SMS/MMS 2007 Edition
New Release June 27, 2007
NowSMS 2007 Highlights
MMS 1.3 and Application ID
Windows Vista
MMSC Performance
Delayed SMS Sending
New Admin Interface
Large Bulk SMS
SMPP Receipt Performance
MM7 Receipt Tracking
WAP Push and MMS Headers
2-Way MMS
MMS 1.3 and Application ID Addressing 

The NowSMS MMSC now supports MMS 1.3, including support for source and destination application IDs, allowing MMS messages to be sent directly to registered applications residing on the phone.  Application ID support designed to be backward compatible with JSR-205 which defines an alternative technique for application ID encoding which supports earlier versions of MMS.  For more information on MMS application IDs, see the article titled Send an MMS to a Java app/MIDlet in our Tech Support Files.  We also made it easier to send SMS messages to Java applications residing on the phone, which is described in more detail in a separate article titled Send an SMS to a Java app/MIDlet.
Windows Vista
Compatibility

NowSMS 2007 now offers full compatibility with Windows Vista, as well as continued support for Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server, and Windows 2000.
 
MMSC Performance

The MMSC User Database has been migrated to a new format, providing significant performance enhancements for mid-size (100,000+) and large (1,000,000+) operator MMSC configurations, especially in configurations where automatic user provisioning is deployed. 
 

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+44 1883 621100 (UK)
Dear Customer,
 
A major new release of the Now SMS/MMS Gateway is now available for download.  This newsletter will describe some of the major new features of NowSMS 2007.  More details are available in the What's New section of the NowSMS Web Site.
 
We'd also encourage you to check out the new NowSMS Tech Support Files blog, where we will occasionally highlight in-depth technical details about interesting topics relating to NowSMS and/or SMS, WAP, MMS and mobile technologies.  This blog site is available for subscription via newsreaders, e-mail, or you can just drop by the web site periodically to see what's new.
Delayed SMS Sending
 
Delayed SMS Sending allows messages to be queued by NowSMS for delivery at a later date or time.  When submitting an SMS message, an additional "DelayUntil=" URL parameter is supported to specify that message delivery should not be attempted until the specified date and time has come.  The format of this parameter is to specify the date and time as follows:  "&DelayUntil=yyyymmddhhmm" (yyyy = year, mm = month, dd = day, hh = hour, mm = minute).  To aid in readability, it is allowed to use separators between the parameters (e.g., "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm").  A field for this parameter has been added to the "Send Text Message" web form, but it is available for all other SMS message types when performing direct URL submission.  (Delayed sending is not currently available for MMS messages.)
 
 
Improved Administrative User Interface
 
The NowSMS configuration program now displays real-time statistical information about the number of messages sent and received.  Additional dialogs display the contents of the outbound SMS message queue and connected SMPP clients.  The "2-way" configuration dialog now includes a dialog that will display received SMS and MMS messages. Additionally, the administrative web interface has also been enhanced to display statistical information about messages and and received, information about connected SMPP clients, and to provide access to NowSMS log files. 
 
Large Bulk SMS Submissions
 
Performance optimisations have been applied to make NowSMS more efficient when processing large bulk SMS message submissions (1,000,000+) via HTTP. 
 

Improved SMPP Receipt Performance 

Requesting a delivery receipt when sending a message has traditionally caused performance problems for high volume NowSMS sites, due to the overhead of receipt message id tracking, making it difficult to achieve speeds of greater than 10 messages per second.  Delivery receipt message id tracking has now been optimised to allow for configurations of greater than 200 messages per second.
 
MM7 Receipt Tracking
 
MM7 message id tracking has been implemented to provide support for delivery notification and read receipt correlation for applications that are interfacing with NowSMS via MM7.  MM7 applications can even receive delivery reports and read receipts when NowSMS is configured to route messages to an operator MMSC over a GPRS modem, where  the operator MMSC supports these capabilities.
Custom WAP Push and MMS Headers 
 
Additional flexibility for generating custom WAP push and MMS messages with non-standard headers for testing and experimentation purposes.  The "Send WAP Push" web form has a new "Advanced" option which provides flexible support for other content types, and allowing for custom WSP headers to be inserted into the push.  The "Send MMS Notification" and "Send MMS Message" web forms allow the insertion of custom MMS Encapsulation headers.
2-Way MMS with PHP 
 
Last fall, we added a feature to NowSMS that allows received MMS messages to be routed to a PHP script.  If you missed this, you can read the full details in the following PDF file:  http://www.nowsms.com/download/php2waymms.pdf