Chapter 12. Using Windows Live Alerts

Microsoft's Windows Live Alerts provides a quick, easy, and free means of integrating SMS into your service, depending on your needs. Windows Live Alerts will poll any RSS feed and generate SMS messages (as well as IM and email) for all subscribers whenever new content is generated.

To build a Windows Live Alert SMS feed, simply visit http://signup.alerts.live.com/ and follow the instructions there. You will fill out a short form, including your contact information, the URL of your RSS feed, and some configuration information (e.g., whether you want headlines delivered or just notification of new content). The Alerts service will produce a widget for you to embed in your web page that looks something like this:

When one of your users clicks on the link, Windows Live will guide them through a process of validating and configuring their phone to receive your alerts. A web-based Message Manager application allows you to monitor subscriptions, view the outgoing queue, and produce usage reports.

The service was designed for blog updates, but any information that you wish to publish as an RSS feed will be digested and sent to your users, making this an ideal means for producing a pure broadcast service.

Some important notes on implementing a Windows Live Alerts mashup:

• As of May 2007, Alerts supports RSS 0.9x, 1.0 and 2.0 as well as Atom formats.

• Alerts is a free, ad-supported service. As of today, that means that alerts delivered via email and IM may be accompanied by an advertisement. In the future, this may extend to SMS, as well. An ad-free version of the service is also available, however. Contact [e-mail] for more information.

• A richer, SOAP-based API is also available for driving the Alerts service. More information on this service is available through MSDN.