MessagePlus/Open – an ideal tool for SMS-applications

In December 1992 the first text message in history was sent to a mobile phone in the UK wishing Richard Jarvis a „Merry Christmas“. Some 20 years later it is estimated that some 2,5 billion phone subscribers worldwide use the Short Messaging Service (SMS) as a means of interpersonal communication and an increasing amount of SMS messages is processed by computer systems.

The latest soccer results, political news, weather reports or financial data are just a few examples of computer generated information you may receive on your (mobile) phone. If you want to be informed when the stock price of a share drops below a certain value you may subscribe to a service to notify you of this event, you may use the SMS service to vote for your favourite song, your bank may send you information about new products or changes in terms and conditions, and you can order your favourite book by SMS.

MessagePlus/Open is mainly perceived as an enterprise fax server solution and it is much less commonly known that you also can easily exploit the system to implement SMS based services. For MessagePlus/Open SMS is simply another communications channel which can be accessed by applications using any of the existing integration options.

If you want notify users when a fax or email message has been received, alert people to an exceptional event requiring immediate attention or run a marketing campaign you simply have to configure SMS communication channels connected either to local modems or more typically to a Short Message Service Centre (SMSC) and MPO will do the rest. In addition the flexible workflow facilities of MessagePlus/Open allow to easily implement more complex SMS applications including database lookups and various interactive scenarios.