fmSMS . . . Coming Soon

We’ve been hard at work finalising a new product of ours – fmSMS – which is the combination of over 7 years of experience integrating FileMaker Pro with SMS (Short Message Service/TXT) gateways to allow you to send single/bulk SMS messages at the click of a button from a FileMaker Pro database. I can still remember the excitement when I sent my first SMS message from a FileMaker Pro v5 database to my mobile phone and seeing it arrive within seconds. That same “wow factor” is also seen by all of our clients when they first implement SMS with their FileMaker solutions and see how easy it is to sent short messages to their customers.

We’ve decided to start from scratch and combine all the great features of FileMaker Pro 9 with the power of SMS communication. With fmSMS you will be able to:

send an SMS message to a single Contact which is typically received in under 10 seconds
send a bulk SMS to a group of Contacts using templates and merge fields so each message is personalised
check on the delivery status of each message that you have sent
schedule a message to be sent up to 7 days in advance (for example you could send an SMS today and have it delivered on the weekend or holidays. Make it look like you’re in the office on XMas!)
check your available SMS credits
purchase additional SMS credits

There’s a stack of other great features that we’re finalising now. You will be able to access over 700 mobile networks in over 200 countries with SMS prices around AUD 6-8 cents each.

We’d love to hear about any must have features that you’d like to see in fmSMS in case we’ve missed anything – just leave us a comment below. If you’d like to be added to the notification list when we release fmSMS just leave a comment with your name and email address and we’ll take care of the rest.

UPDATE: fmSMS has now been released and you can get all the details at www.fmsms.com. A trial version is available to download.

David Wikström says:

December 17, 2008 at 9:10 am

What character sets do you support? Accentuated characters? UNICODE? As you know, there are different standards in different parts of the world for this.

Andrew Duncan says:

December 19, 2008 at 9:11 am

Hi David,

That’s a good question. I haven’t done any testing so far on accentuated characters yet but will add this to the list. I think the issue of character sets will ultimately be controlled the the specific SMS gateway that is used, I’ve seen Unicode references in some of the API docs so hopefully it won’t be an issue. I will post back when I’ve done some tests.

Andrew