Congratulations to Chris Bartlett, Commercial Manager AsiaPac Region, who is February’s Employee of the Month. Adam, Esendex CTO, presented Chris with the award earlier this week.

Chris was nominated by the Management Team as despite being many thousands of miles from Head Office, (and managing with a 9-11 hour time difference too) he has always sought to challenge the status quo: especially in looking at new sales initiatives and pricing models.

He’s always interested in the business’ performance and profitability and has a keen eye for detail. This keen eye was fundamental in resolving some business process issues at the start of the month, so thanks Chris!

We have made some changes to our blog today, to help users to navigate around more easily. Essentially, we’ve merged the UK blog, Support blog and Developer blog into one “Esendex UK” blog. We’ve also created categories so you can choose to read posts relevant to a particular area of interest.

We know that many of our customers use our blog to receive support posts or technical updates only. Consequently, we’ve created a technical category within the blog which will cover support, infrastructure improvements, product updates and all things Developer/API related.

Those of you that currently subscribe to the Support and Developer blogs don’t need to take any action as you’ll continue to receive updates from the technical category RSS feed. We’ll also continue posting all new blog entries to Twitter.

For all newbies, you can choose to receive an RSS feed of our blog in its entirety or from the Technical category only. It’s up to you!

If you’ve got any feedback on this change or have any ideas on how we can improve our blog, send an email to marketing@esendex.com

We’ve just added a new way for our customers and their development teams to interact with the wide range of messaging services provided by Esendex.

The NEW Esendex API offers a powerful, yet simple, interface to send and receive messages; manage contacts and contact groups; and your accounts. We’ve built it on simple and established standards following ‘REST’ (REpresentational State Transfer) principles based on HTTP and using XML. XML is widely implemented in programming languages and reduces the need for additional libraries which can be necessary, for instance, with SOAP services.

You will be familiar with the ‘REST’ style as it is the basis of the way the Internet works in general. A client makes a request on a resource to perform an operation and gets a response. For example, you are viewing this web page because your web browser formed an HTTP GET request for this page (resource) and the server returned you a HTML representation of the web page.

Instead of Services with a list of commands, the Esendex API provides a set of resources that you can interact with. These resources are identified by different URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). Resources represent the different types of data for Esendex. E.g. message headers, contacts, contact groups etc.

To perform an operation on these resources, you simply create an authenticated HTTP Request with an appropriate HTTP Method. The HTTP Method verbs of GET, POST, PUT and DELETE open up opportunities to retrieve, create, update and remove resources respectively.

One of the key advantages of the Esendex API is that you can start exploring the data you can get from it straight away using only your web browser. For example, if you navigate to http://api.esendex.com/v1.0/inbox/messages(and provide your Esendex username and password when prompted by your browser), you will get a paged XML response of your inbox messages.

There’s comprehensive documentation for the Esendex API within the developer area of our website which will explain all of the resources you can interact with in detail.

Our confidence in the reliability and flexibility in our new API is such that our Web to SMS application front-end, “Echo”, is based entirely upon the Esendex API.

We were delighted to accept the 2010 High Growth Award at last night’s High Growth East Midlands Event.

The awards are the culmination of the East Midlands Development Agency’s (emda) business support programme.

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