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StrongMail has two sets of APIs for managing mailings--the Web Services SOAP API, which controls batch mailings and the Transactional Mailings API, which controls transactional mailings. The Web Services API is included with all EAS installations, but the Transactional Mailings API is only available for those users who have purchased either the Transactional Server or Transactional Mailings module for EAS.

Today, we will be looking at just the Web Services API, which incidentally has two main components of its own. The first is the ClientInfo API, which provides detailed information on a specific mailing or can provide summary-level status information. The other type of Web Services API is the mailing API, which actually handles the creation/modification of mailings. We'll discuss how this information can be used in a bit.

Now if you are a business user, you may be saying to yourself, "That's great, but what do I need to know about APIs? I'm not an engineer...I need a UI." Well, that depends. StrongMail already provides Message Studio a full-featured campaign management and reporting system for business users and for most email marketers, that probably meets 90-100% of your needs with regard to email marketing.

But if you have unique business requirements that may take a while to make it into Message Studio, you can utilize the APIs to control the StrongMail Server and build a solution that is 100% focused on what you need. In fact, several StrongMail customers have done exactly that. They recognized the power and flexibility provided by the StrongMail infrastructure, but needed something that would address a specific business requirement. You can read about some of their stories here and here.

Now, let's take a closer look at each of the StrongMail Web Services APIs. The ClientInfo API is useful for determining and reporting on the current or historical status of a mailing. It provides information such as a complete list of mailings by type (e.g., all completed mailings) or information about any specific mailing specified by either mailing id or config file. (NOTE to business users: the next section gets a bit technical, but hang in there, you'll like the ending.)

Here's an example of how to use the ClientInfo API:

A request is made to the StrongMail Server which asks the server to provide a list of all of the active mailings--

The StrongMail server responds with the following information--

Now for you business users, this looks like a bunch of gobbledygook, but the example above is what your application development team could use to build a UI that displays what mailings are currently active and their status. And there are a variety of other options for collecting other mailing-related information. Using a combination of this example and other API parameters, they could easily build a dashboard that lets you monitor the mailings on the StrongMail Server in whatever way you like.

Similarly, using the Mailings API, your application development team could build a campaign management system, similar to Message Studio, but tailored specifically to your business and user requirements. And the good news is that in the coming months, we are enhancing the APIs to include even more features, as well as making them more robust and simple to use.