Affino 5.5.13 eCommunity Updates in Pictures

The social and community aspects of Affino have had significant updates, in particular Groups and Messaging. There are a lot of general usability enhancments which you can see on the official release notes.

Below are the key eCommunity enhancements:

Messaging

My Messages has had a complete overhaul. We’ve looked at every aspect of the user experience and have updated all the interfaces to be more immediate, simpler and faster.

Whereas most of the functionality was hidden behind various buttons and options, almost everything is now available directly on the screen. We’ve also made extensive use of dynamic interfaces such as looking up members as you type their names and dynamically being able to star messages you want to keep.

Everything has also been re-worked to make the best use of the available space and to allow users to immediately scan the messages.

Overall, we’ve halved the number of buttons and options present without losing any functionality.

Groups

Groups have finally come of age. Three key enhancements in this release make them much more effective for group working. These are: the Dynamic Wall with instant real-time updates; the Message Board search which allows you to search just those messages posted within the group; and the new Group Notifications which notify users of all the group activity.

Message Boards

We’ve rolled out Message Board searches universally to allow users to either search all the Message Boards or just individual ones.

Live Commentary

The Microblogs / Status Updates have been extended considerably in this release and can now be used for live commentary on specific events or content. The commentary can be provided by specific groups or individuals, or by the community at large.

The addition hash tag meta tagging and topic filters mean that status updates can now be highly targeted and work seamlessly when syndicated to Twitter.

Updated My Home Page

We haven’t rolled out any new components as such for creating personalised home pages. What we have done is update almost every personalised element to work better.

The key changes are: improved formatting; improved header menus; empty menus are no longer displayed; recommendations are greatly improved; new invites option displays invites on the personal navigation; and the media highlights can now be multi-column allowing you to create a grid.