Whilst there are many convenient ways of using SMS, for me, I think the best way of using SMS is to integrate the service into existing applications using the SDK's or API's.

For me, it's because using the API's allow you to have the functionality that you want to use, and it automates the usage, like with clinic or salon software where you enter in appointments, it makes it easy to automate every appointment gets a SMS sent out, rather than having to leave it to the user to send.

What that means is that it's consistent - every appointment gets an SMS and there's nothing more to think about.

I remember back in the day when I used to sell bearings for a living, the company that I worked for still had the old green screen, and probably still do to be fair, and along the back wall of the office were folders upon folders containing part numbers and price lists in case the computers ever went down, and there were still many employees that remember having to use those folders full time, good grieve! And when orders for pick up came in, we'd have to ring people - sometime it got missed, or messages were left and never followed up because it had been so long.

Whilst it's not OK that it happened, it did happen and that was consistent throughout the group - why because people get busy, they get side tracked and they ultimately end up forgetting until it's reached a point where they don't feel comfortable making the call because that's out of their comfort zone.

This is a great argument for automatising procedures that can be vastly improved through the use of SMS.

So for example within the sales and accounting package they are using, once someone books in the goods to the local store, an SMS alert is sent to the respective customer to let them know it's in, and if the goods aren't booked out then it can continue to send messages until the goods are collected.

Is it more expensive than what they are doing now, well no it's not, because everything on premises has a cost assigned to it, and in many cases the goods haven't been paid for either, so while they sit there in limbo in fact it's costing month - and when you think of it an SMS is greatly cheaper than a phone call anyway, so half a dozen messages to someone that's not picking the goods up, you're still out in front because you haven't apportioned a cost of labour yet either.

So back to the API's and SDK's - an API is an Application Programming Interface, basically it's a bit of code that allows one application to talk to another application and acts like a bridge for data to cross between the two.

Say for SMS, it means that you are able to install certain features, like batch messaging - i.e. sending bulk SMS by bundling a whole bunch of them up into one ball and sending it across as a job lot, and the reason you would do this is because it speeds up the processing time - instead of messages being treated as individual events, they're treated as one big event and so there is less to process and is ultimately a quicker way of doing it.

If you look at Web SMS, there are plenty of features in there that you might or might not use, but you have them all available for you anyway - if you were to add them to an application, then really you are only going to want to use the functions that, well, you want to use, the rest is just noise, and you're not going to get that - so when it's put into the application, it's clean this does this and that does that.

When we talk about SDK's, it's an acronym for Software Development Kit, which basically the API's bundled up in to various coding environments - I've also remembered it as it's the starting place for a developer to get them going, and as they go on they would then use the API's straight out themselves. They generally contain the DLL libraries, and documentation pertaining to the coding environment they are using, like PHP, Perl, .NET, Delphi and so on.

So to sum it up, why is integration the premium method? Because it allows the application to do what it does without having to rely on users to think about it - after all, consistency is king when it comes to procedures!

Enjoy
C

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