The company blog

Recent improvements to our blog

We’ve recently started categorising our blog posts (see right) to both aid navigation and to allow visitors to read about the topic area they’re most interest in. One of the new categories is a technical category which will include support updates, product improvements and anything developer/API related.

We know some customers use the blog to receive support posts or technical updates (such as info on our API, or product improvements) only. Consequently, we’ve created a technical category with its own RSS feed so you can just subscribe to these types of posts if you’d prefer. Simply click on the RSS icon on the right to subscribe.

All our blog posts will also go out via Twitter automatically too so if this is your preferred communication method, make sure you are following us!

We hope you find these improvements useful and if you have any further recommendations, send us an email to marketing@esendex.com.au.

Esendex launches NEW SMS API – THE Esendex API

Our new SMS API – named the Esendex API – is now live. This new SMS API offers a powerful, yet simple, interface to send and receive SMS messages, manage contacts and contact groups, and your accounts.

The Esendex API is built on simple and established standards following ‘REST’ (REpresentational State Transfer) principles based on HTTP and using XML. XML is widely implemented in programming languages and reduces the need for additional libraries - which can be necessary with SOAP services for example.

The ‘REST’ style forms the basis of how the Internet works in general. A client makes a request on a page (resource) to perform an operation and gets a response back. E.g you are viewing this blog post because your web browser formed an HTTP GET request for this web page (resource) and the server returned you a HTML representation of the web page.

Instead of providing services with a list of commands, our new SMS API provides a set of resources that you can interact with. These resources are identified by different URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). Resources represent the different types of data for Esendex. E.g. contacts, message headers and contact groups.

To perform an operation on these resources, create an authenticated HTTP Request with an appropriate HTTP Method. The HTTP Method verbs of GET, POST, PUT and DELETE open up opportunities to retrieve, create, update and remove resources respectively.

One of the key advantages of the Esendex API is that you can start exploring the data you can get from it straight away using only your web browser. Just navigate to http://api.esendex.com/v1.0/inbox/messages and provide your Esendex username and password when prompted by your browser. You will receive a paged XML response of your inbox messages.

The Esendex API is fully documented, and available to download as a pdf file now from our Esendex API page. Our confidence in the reliability and flexibility in our new SMS API is such that our new Web SMS application, named “Echo”, is based entirely upon the Esendex API.

Chris Bartlett is February’s employee of the month

Congratulations to Chris, Commercial Manager AsiaPac Region, who is February’s Employee of the Month. Luckily enough, Adam our CTO was visiting the Esendex Australia office this week so he could hand over the (very heavy) award in person. Note – a patriotic pic the left of Adam.

Chris was nominated by the Management Team as despite being many thousands of miles from Head Office he has always sought to challenge the status quo: particularly in looking at new pricing models and sales initiatives.

He’s always interested in the business’ performance and profitability and has a keen eye for detail. This keen eye was fundamental in resolving some business process issues at the start of the month, so thanks Chris! Enjoy the award!

Are you using an SMS service to build customer loyalty? If not, why not!

Esendex launches Business SMS services in Germany