Coming Soon – fmMMS

It’s been almost 20 years since we first started integrating the FileMaker Platform with SMS Gateways, allowing our customers to send and receive SMS (Short Message Service) messages from their FileMaker solutions to their contacts all around the world. In that time we’ve released four versions of fmSMS, our FileMaker solution that works with over 70 SMS Gateways internationally reaching over 1,000 mobile networks in more than 220 countries.

During that time we’ve had a number of requests to implement MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) functionality as well as SMS, and have done a number of custom integrations over the years allowing customers to extend fmSMS to both send MMS messages and receive MMS messages. MMS has a number of benefits over the text based SMS service, including:

• MMS allows you to add any kind of multimedia content to your messages, such as images, QR codes, audio and video directly to a phone
• MMS also increases the amount of text you can send in a single message (SMS is limited to 160 characters per segment)
• MMS includes an additional Subject line which acts like a headline to your message
• MMS messages appear more visually appealing to the recipient and can lead to higher engagement with your customers

MMS messages also benefit from the well documented advantages of SMS compared to email, including:

• The open rate for an SMS is nearly 98% while it’s 20 to 30% for email
• Over 95% of SMS messages received are opened and read
• 90% of all text messages are read within 3 seconds

We’ve been hard at work on creating a sister product to fmSMS called, naturally, fmMMS, that is almost ready to be released. We’re in the final stages of testing and documentation and plan to release fmMMS later this month.

The main features of fmMMS include:

• send an MMS to a single contact
• send a bulk MMS to multiple contacts
• check the status of sent messages
• works with the FileMaker v16 Platform or later
• Webhooks support for automatically receiving incoming MMS messages for both the FileMaker Data API and the PHP API

fmMMS uses all native FileMaker scripts and functions (no plug-ins required) and like our other products it will be 100% unlocked for you to integrate into your own FileMaker solution.

We’ve put together a short preview video showing fmMMS in action sending and receiving a picture message. You can watch this below or via this link on YouTube:

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