Clickatell is a
worldwide mobile messaging company that just released a Small Business API, which
allows you to integrate SMS functionality into your small business
applications. Their target audience is small businesses that want to integrate
SMS into their business model. For example, appointment reminders or delivery
notifications are perfect scenarios for this API. Clickatell asked me to try it
out and give them feedback so they can continue to improve the product.
API RESEARCH
Before I sat
down to look at the API I came up with the following list of questions I would
ask of any SMS API provider.
- Reliability – Do they guarantee message delivery? Can I get notified when
messages are successfully sent?
- Usability – Can I quickly get what I need from the API? Is it easy to
use?
- Networks
and Countries – Do they support the mobile
networks that the majority of my customers are on? Only US or entire
world?
- Performance – What is the typical response time of the endpoint?
- Platform
Support – Do they support .NET and JavaScript
calls?
- Technical
Support – What is response time for technical
support inquires? Is there a phone number to call if needed?
- Availability – How many nines? Do they have downtime notifications?
- Pricing – How much does it cost per message?
- Rate
Limiting – How much do they throttle messages?
- Media – Does it support MMS?
Find out more on the analysis I did into
Clickatell’s Small Business API at A
high-level look into Clickatell's new SMS Small Business API.
In part II of my review ‘How
to integrate Clickatell’s SMS Small Business API into a .NET application’, I focus on the options available and technical details for integrating
the API into your application.
There are many
options available for integrating Clickatell’s
Small Business API into your application and
Clickatell’s APIs & Scripts page has all the info you need to get started. All of the
specifications for all the protocols are available on their "Developer’s
Central" page.
The protocols
available are: HTTP/S, XML, SOAP and COM object. There are other protocols
listed on that page, like FTP and SMTP, but they don’t apply to the Small
Business API. They have sample scripts available for PhP, VBScript, C#, VB.NET,
Cold Fusion and Oracle and there are third party libraries available for Java,
Perl, Ruby and Applescript.
The review also
explores different protocols are available as well as which protocols should I
choose.
