SMS Marketing Solution

Business Case

Founded in 2003, the customer's company was created with the goal of bringing valuable localized content to the mobile handset of consumers. The company is committed to developing self-service text message marketing solutions that enable businesses of all sizes to enhance their marketing and business objectives. The customer's focus is on helping clients to use text message marketing to enhance their business objectives and on creating application for mobile test message marketing to provide businesses the ability to deliver localized mobile content to people by providing easy to use text message marketing tools.

Business Need

The customer intends to expand the functionality of mobile text message marketing tools and add new Ad Server features to place ads with community/social networks, inside text messages and in WAP-based sites by developing a standalone internal admin application for reviewing published content inside customer communities, managing client accounts, importing phone numbers and reporting across all client/communities or for individual clients.

Technical Need

Internal customer staff will use the new internal admin application; speed and efficiency is of greatest importance. This application should be built from the ground up, reusing as much of the existing code base as possible. This application should not use any of the hibernate DAO, but rather use JDBC DAO directly. It should be standalone so it can be deployed on separate hardware if needed.

Solution

The Mobile Messaging Admin System Solution contains 4 layers:

• View
• Servlet Controllers
• Business logic objects
• DB access

The Mobile Messaging Admin System supports several key roles to provide different levels of user's privileges: reports only; import phone numbers and review and approve content; manage accounts; and full administrative access.

The System key features:

• Review Content
  The user can review content that is not yet approved. The user interface allows content to be approved at a rapid pace. The user can speed through thousands of posts / photos and mark approved in bulk. The assumption is that 95% will be approved, so defaults should be set to "approved". The user is able to easily click on the content to mark it as not approved and no longer published and then save his changes. The user interface was designed using AJAX libraries. The oldest content that has not been reviewed is displayed first. To reiterate - user sees 50 photos and click on certain ones to disapprove and clicks save. UI has paging to speed through entries.

• Search and Filtering Content
  The application can search content based on the user-by-user name, company, name, community and/or keyword. A list of results is displayed and user can drill down into the content he wants to review for that entity. The search results display all content approved or not approved. The filters catch the majority of offensive text, but since the images are allowed, users might include flash objects and images with offensive content. When content is displayed to be reviewed the user sees:
          - date updated
          - user name or provider name
          - approved, not approved, or review
          - if approved - user name who approved it
  

• Content type
          - Photos - Any photo uploaded by either a user or a provider
          - Comments - all comments posted on a profile page or on a community page
          - Forum posts - All new or updated forum posts.
          - Profile pages - new or updated content in the about us sections, etc.
• Managing Client Accounts
  The feature allows managing the client accounts; adding, editing and deleting the client's profile information; and editing client's community and groups.
• Importing Phone Numbers
  Included import phone number functionality that has already been developed
• Report Engine
  The report engine allows generating different types of reports for a specified period and/or with specified parameters/keywords. Reports can be formatted using XML, XLS and CSV formats.

Project Benefits

SolveITLabs has extensive experience in Mobile and Web application development including Social Network Portal and Mobile System development expertise. The Agile project methodology provides early and continuous delivery of valuable software together with quick positive response to changing requirements. Based on this project the customer started a new project to extend the functionality and spread the technology and expertise to another audience.

Tools and Technologies

• Java: SUN Java 1.6 (jdk1.6.0_05)
• Additional Java Libs: apache-commons, JDBC , JNDI, JSP, Servlets, Memcached, Apache MMQ
• Application server: Apache Tomcat 6 (6.0.18)
• Web: JavaScript, Mootools, Ajax, HTML, XML, CSS
• Database: MySQL 5
• Host platform: Linux 2.6 (Debian Lenny (dev), Fedora Core 5 (production))

List of third-party products and development tools used for the solution:

• Mootools JavaScript framework
• Apache commons: file_upload
• Apache commons: commons-IO
• Apache commons: POI (MS Office import/export layer)
• JDBC: MySQL-connector