Message Center

Xpand IT Message Center is an application that provides a centralized way of sending messages, regardless of their format and transport mechanism. It is a message processing platform that provides a unified interface of communication with contacts or recipients, abstracting users and external systems from the complexity of building and sending messages for different message types, using different delivery mechanisms. It provides a campaign management processor, allowing the management of bulks of messages and support for message templates to create a unified customer experience.

Xpand IT Message Center is capable of sending messages to recipients using the following delivery mechanisms:

• SMS: Short Messages delivered through a SMSC (directly or middleware adapter)
• MMS: Short Messages delivered through a MMSC (directly or via middleware adapter)
• USSD: Messages delivered through a MMSC (via middleware adapter)
• FAX: Faxes delivered through a Rightfax Server
• EMAIL: Emails sent through a SMTP Server

Xpand IT Message Center is able to process individual requests, batches of requests and campaigns. Individual requests are single messages that are sent using a one by one policy. A batch of requests is a grouping of requests that is performed inside Xpand Message Center and that guarantees that the messages are sent all at the same time. A campaign is commonly used to publish information about marketing campaigns to the company contacts: It defines a set of requests that can be internally divided in several batches. Using campaigns, sets of requests that are spare across different batches can be managed together.

Xpand IT Message Center is able to deal with two types of message requests:

• Requests performed via GUI: From the GUI, users can create and manage requests and campaigns. It is using the GUI that the Bulk Management is done. The GUI is also the application management and configuration interface;
• Requests performed via API: CRM, Billing, IVR and other systems generate requests that are can be sent to Xpand Message in order to be redirected to the SMSC or MMSC. Message Center is responsible for accepting those requests, store them in the database and manage the request to message flow - building the message, deliver the message to its final recipient and notify back the originator system (and other systems) of the message delivery status.

Xpand IT Message Center provides the following functionalities to the external systems:

• Removes the complexity of implementing transport mechanism and message formats from other systems;
• Auto-retries message delivery failures;
• Allows messages to be built from templates;
• Requests are stored in the database, all the messages sent are audited and their information is accessible from the application GUI;
• It is possible to guarantees the delivery of the request within a pre-configured time window and / or using a specific throughput.

Feature List

• Supported Channels:
  • SMS, MMS, SMTP and FAX messages;
• Supported Formats:
  • Plain Text, SMIL, HTML and RTF messages.
• Support for Binary Content
  • Ring Tones
  • Logos

• Support for Messages with Attachments
• Delivery Report Capabilities:
  • Ability to Process delivery reports for SMS and MMS
  • Ability to Process delivery failure of SMTP messages

• Campaign/Bulk Processing:
  • Upload contact list from CSV file (custom separator and delimiter)
  • Ability to deal with Siebel Campaigns CSV format
  • Ability to automatically split a campaign in batches that are delivered independently (ex: delayed 1 hour from each one another)
  • Ability to define delivery time window (ex: only deliver messages from 09.00 to 18:00 – otherwise wait for the next day) and dates (ex: only deliver messages from 15/10/2006 to 20/10/2006 – otherwise fail)
  • Calculates campaign statistics: Displays number of messages sent, number of messages failed, number of messages delivered, number of messages expired, campaign/batch processing start date and campaign/batch processing end date. Statistics can be calculated at campaign and at batch level
  • Ability to send messages with fields: merge a message template with custom fields that are provided in the CSV file. This way, the application can generate personalized messages (ex: “Dear John, your account balance has run out.”
  • Ability to reprocess only the failed messages of a campaign or batch
  • Ability to stop/pause and resume the campaign processing
• Integration Capabilities
  • Web Services and JMS (Java Messaging Service) support
  • Java API (RMI based) that can be used to integrate the application with external applications
  • Allows the implementation and integration of new message channels without recompilation of the application
  • Allows the implementation and integration of build new internal services (Ex: Build a Tibco EMS listener) without recompilation of the application
  • Allows the implementation and integration of notifiers of external systems (ex: Create a new entry in the CRM System informing that a specific message was sent to the customer) without recompilation of the application
• GUI
  • Web Based, HTML Compliant (works with IE, Firefox and other browsers)
  • Multi-Language (English and Portuguese versions currently available)
  • Can be integrated in SSO technologies (LDAP / Database Authentication)
  • Customizable look and feel (optional)
  • All operations are logged to database
  • Provides administration and status console to manage the behavior of the application
  • Role based security – Users of different roles cannot see messages and campaigns created by users of other roles (except admin user, which can see everything)
  • Capable of exporting campaign results to excel and CSV
  • Provides built-in MMS Composer
  • Direct Connectivity
  • SMSC (UCP, SMPP, CIMD)
  • MMSC (MM7)
  • SMTP Server (SMTP)
  • Logging
  • Logs Informative, Warnings and Errors to Database. Logs Debug Information to file
  • GUI allows to view log entries
  • Logs performance profiling information to file, in order to detect possible performance bottlenecks