2013 is going to be all about being Responsive, so expect priorities to be very fluid to meet the ever evolving needs of the Affino community. One overwhelming priority we will have for 2013 will be Responsive Design. We’re going to be introducing Responsive Skins which means that pages will transform to fit any device, however they are turned.

 

The second Responsive element is that in 2013 we are going to turbo-charge Affino’s evolution. The past years have required a great deal of effort to evolve Affino to work on mobile and tablet devices; to become super-scalable and reliable; to run on the latest cloud-based architectures; and to have a new 21st Century management interface. All of those are now at highly evolved states.

 

It means that the Comrz team can now focus on rounding out Affino Social and Commercial platforms; do much deeper integration with the leading Social communities; evolve key communication and promotion aspects such as direct and real-time messaging, and a new approach to A/B and Multi-variate testing.

 

Below are many of the key challenges we will be tackling during the course of 2013. Expect the most productive Social Commerce platform to become even more so.

 

Responsive Design

 

We will be introducing Responsive Skins to Affino in the first half of 2013. Responsive Skins will mean that Affino pages will automatically re-organise themselves to provide the best experience whatever form-factor of device is being used to navigate the pages. This will affect how everything is displayed on Affino sites and is the major undertaking for the year.

 

As part of the process, the new Skins will be light-weight, fully CSS-based and Affino will have built-in code compression to minimise the page size.

 

Usability and Learnability

 

We will continue the major initiative to make Affino as learnable and usable as possible. This was what we spent most of 2012 on, and Affino is now much more usable than ever before. Key initiatives include new Setup Wizards, Control Centre Zone filters, and the new Media v3 management interfaces.

 

Continuing from last year we expect to make hundreds of further usability improvements throughout the course of the year and have already wrapped up some great ones for Affino 7.1.

 

Publishing

 

Relating content becomes dramatically easier in Affino 7.1 with one-click relating, direct access from the App Bar, two-way relationships, and new search and sort options on related items. We will be doing similar big improvements throughout Affino’s publishing interfaces so that the publishing experience will be second to none.

 

Media

 

We’re going to introduce the Media Centre v3 during 2013 which will be fully browser native. it means all the media management, players and Design Elements can be used on any device.

 

Promotion

 

Affino’s Promotion Centre will see big updates to the key Messaging and Customer Ladder elements. These will dramatically improve your Sales and Marketing Automation effectiveness. It’s hard to understate just how significant the improvements will be since they will absolutley market leading in their scope.

 

SEO will be greatly improved with deeper Google Webmaster Tools integration, as well as the roll-out of Schema Org support. We will also be rolling out a great new approach to A/B testing.

 

Social

 

Affino invites will make a big step forward with deep integrations to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Gmail for highly Social engagement. New Real-time chat interfaces will greatly improve the direct-sales and support abilities in Affino and bring you closer to your customers.

 

2013 also sees the introduction of Newsfeeds and the new Social Profiles in Affino which will be dramatically improved on what is there today.

 

Commerce

 

Our biggest focus commercially in 2013 will be on Mobile Optimised Stores. Our aim will be to make Affino a market leading platform form mobile selling, and we’re already a long way down the road with this.

 

We will be doing a great deal to round out Affino’s other ecommerce capabilities with new Store Credits, Gift Wrapping, Coupon options and Bulk Catalogue item editor. Expect your online store management to take another big leap forward.

 

Integration

 

We’ll continue to broaden and deepen Affino’s integration with the leading communities and platforms. 2013 will see a major focus on deeper Social and Commerce integration. The aim will be to improve Affino’s ability to act as a Social Hub, whilst making for much more engaging communities.

 

We will also be greatly improving the ecommerce integration with the leading online ecommerce hubs, including Amazon and eBay. Of course we will maintain Affino’s existing 60+ integrations with many becoming more vital and useful over the course of the year.

 

Analysis

 

2013 sees the introduction of Affino’s Dashboard v2. This will be a fully native dashboard, and will do everything that the v1 Flash dashboard did, but at scale, and with great new export / import / reporting capabilities to match.

 

We will continue to evolve all the existing Analysis Centres and adding compelling new ones such as Message Campaign Analysis.

 

Enterprise

 

Finally, there will be a big push to make Affino more Enterprise grade with powerful Auto-scaling capabilities for the High Performance sites. We will also be introducing new management and security systems so that you will have more insight into exactly what’s happening on your Affino site.

 

A big push will also come with making the most of the new Affino Cloud Architecture which will allow us to optimise and evolve many core systems for greatly improved scale and performance. It means we will be able to reap the benefits of all the work we did last year to make Affino work on the latest generation software and hardware.

 

It’s going to be another exciting year, and as an Affino user you can expect your day-to-day experience to get a whole lot better with every release during the course of the year. For those selling, expect big improvements in your conversion rates, and for the commercial community builders expect far more engaged and vibrant communities.