Affino 8.0.28 - the Superior Service Release

The Affino 8.0.28 release is a broad release with improvements across many of Affino’s modules, the unifying theme is Superior Service. Whether it is the new self service product directory, the new Newsletter Templates where creating your custom templates is now far easier by simply starting with one of the ready-made ones, or the new enhanced My Account and My Profile which make it easier to see your purchases and smarter on what profile information you have to update.

 

As with all recent releases: messaging, subscriptions, commerce, and directories take centre stage, with a host of improvements in each area. Also improved are imports and exports with multiple enhancements, and an all new Section Import.

 

Reporting and Insight is raised further in Affino with the new Subscription Member Report, enhanced Subscription Expiry Report,  and many refinements throughout Affino’s Control Centre to better drill down to the data you need.

 

Self Service in Affino is greatly refined with a smarter ’My Account’ showcasing a user’s events that much better. Users now can be asked for address data only when they have free print subscriptions (and not when they are digital only). They can better manage their favourites, with the ability to favourite events, directory entries and directory products for the first time, as well as all the great self service directory enhancements (see below).

 

Another great example of enhanced self service is the new image cropping tool which users can use to best crop their images when uploading their directory entries. Simply select an aspect ratio for the cropping and the tool will be available for the respective image type.

 

As with all releases there are important security enhancements here, some significant performance optimisation, and a great number of improvements to make sure all the ecommerce transactions run as smoothly as possible.

 

Key Enhancements

 

Self Service Product Directory (new)

This release sees a great extension to Affino’s self service directory with the introduction of Directory Products. This is a new product directory type focused on making it possible for suppliers to upload their product catalogue, which is easy to manage from the same place clients manage their company profile and media assets. 

 

The product directory is intended as a product showcase, rather than ecommerce platform (at this stage). It has the ability to showcase thousands of products in a stylish listing that features special offers and has advanced search and drill-down capabilities and nice lightweight detail pages.

 

The audience can easily search by brand or one of a number of product attributes, and quickly navigate between the products and directory entries. The products themselves have all of Affino’s great SEO, social sharing, and bookmarking features, so that users can now bookmark the directory products as well as the directory entries to their ’My Library’.

 

We have rolled out a great new image cropping tool for directory images, the aspect ratio and dimensions are defined in the Media Upload profile, and when uploading an image the user is immediately able to crop it down to showcase the products as well as possible. We will look to roll this  feature out more generally in Affino in the future. On the product video side, users can either upload a video file or URL.

 

Behind the scenes we have added a new Directory Messaging Report (exportable) which provides insight into all the leads generated through the direct messaging. It is possible to filter all the lead generation messages by Account, Contact and date range, and listed are the key details for the Lead Account and Contact, and the recipient Account as well as to the direction of communication. 

 

The Directory Products are presented in their own dedicated Channel using the new Directory Products listing and detail templates, with the full capabilities of Affino’s smart design framework.

 

We have also enhanced the Online Directory itself with more detailed in-context help text for each self service media type, e.g. for videos, documents and other assets.The directory itself is more configurable with multiple options on filters, media sizes, help text, image sizing and aspect ratios, use of the image cropping tool and much more.

 

Message Template Builder - Default Templates (new)

This release sees the introduction of the new Default Message Templates. These will be very useful to quickly get up to speed with building out message campaigns as it is possible to restyle all elements and drag in any ones you might like to ad including banners, promotional text, social sharing icons and much more. The new templates are: Breaking News, Latest Jobs, Latest News, Latest Products, and Subscription Offers.

 

We have greatly extended the content support within Affino’s automated message templates, not least to include new message elements for products and jobs with the associated meta data and buy / apply buttons, both with flexible styling. These can then be fed in automatically from Affino’s content repository, meaning that you set up your message campaigns once, and all the messages can then automatically have the latest / priority content fed in and mailed out regularly.

 

The two article selectors on each message means that two sets of articles, or indeed the header article and highlights can also simply be selected from the article list and sent through with no template amends required.

 

Affino still supports the code editor and dropping in 3rd party template code as before, and it is now possible to filter message templates by type for easier management. Behind the scenes we have resolved all the issues reported by the early adopters, and made a host of further nice enhancements for an even smoother and better looking experience.

 

Tax - Reverse Charging and VAT Number Capture (new)

We have been making a number of tax handling enhancements in Affino this year and this release sees a host of major improvements for capturing Tax (VAT) numbers on ecommerce orders as well as Pro Forma orders, also for looking up and validating UK and EU VAT numbers both on the ecommerce checkout (to pre-validate them), and as an optional validation on Pro Formas. This release also sees a powerful new approach to handling tax on international transactions, especially where the setup needs to cover multiple tax jurisdictions and scenarios, i.e. selling from multiple tax jurisdictions to multiple tax jurisdictions.

 

We are introducing a Reverse Charge Mechanism on each Tax Rule and have added the following attributes to the Tax Rules to facilitate this: Show Company VAT no. Tax Rule Summary, Tax Rule Notice, a new Reverse Charge Trading Zone selector. Note that at this point the Stripe and Pay360 payment gateways support the new mechanism for subscriptions. We have updated all the messaging and ecommerce interfaces to include / display the VAT number as appropriate.

 

Email Logs (new)

We have added a great new Email Log to Affino. This lets you search through all non message campaign emails sent through Affino for the past sixty days. Initially we’re making the logs available and searchable (email and subject), in the future we will add more smarts to them and join them up directly to contact and account records, as well as provide more detailed stats on the volume of system based email being sent.

 

We know from all the support requests over the years that this feature alone will be incredibly useful for dozens of support incidents each month.

 

Behind the scenes we have made a major update to how messages are sent from Affino with much more of the process being moved off the application stack to the service cloud. This will will shift much of the performance load off the application stack to the service cloud with clear long term performance benefits.

 

Upgrade Guidance

 

If you have a Staging site, we recommend updating to this release and testing thoroughly prior to updating your main Affino instance. Note that all active scheduled tasks are wiped when you update the site so make sure that any required ones are completed prior to running the update.

 

It is important to liaise with the support team to schedule in an update window where they can be on hand to support with the update. It is essential that you run through the complete update process starting with the Affino Updater, followed by the sequence of the system and design updates laid out on the Control > Update screen.

 

There are no new Beta elements, but quite a few v1 features which may need further refinement.To see the current list of Beta elements you can simply navigate to them on the Support menu to see which Affino elements are in official beta and not yet fully live.

 

Other Enhancements

 

Account Report - it is now optional to include / exclude members from the report who have left the company.

 

Accounts (Control) - we have separated the Account Contacts into a new Contacts tab (away from Communication) as we now have four categories of account-based contacts: Contacts, Pending Contacts, Child Account Contacts and Former Contacts. Affino now also displays more of them right on opening the tab, without the need to further list them out.

 

Accounts (Display) - it is now possible to determine which channel to point associated accounts to (when listed on a display side account page) this is essential if there are multiple account / company directories.

 

Articles - we have added a new Active Status multi-select Control listing filter for smarter article filtering, the options are: Live | Non-Live | Private | Non-Private | Hidden | Not Hidden | Expired | Not Expired. We have also added an Account filter to only list out articles associated to a specific account. We have renamed the Send attribute on articles so it is now called - Send Via Content / Interest Subscription, to reflect that it does both when selected.

 

Article Import / Export - we have updated the column naming for consistency, please ensure you update your import templates accordingly.

 

Article Steps - when listing in the Control Centre, Affino now displays with the Article - each step it is associated with, it is also possible to filter the steps to multiple articles at the same time. We have also updated the presentation to be more refined and smarter when listing lots of steps.

 

Catalogue Items - added a new Payment Method filter, also added new Sale End column, which shows the date in red if the sale end date has expired.

 

Catalogue Item Import - added more resiliency and data validation to minimise import errors. Affino now also has enhanced functions for importing related products, related articles and related goods.

 

Checkout - we have made a host of improvements on the checkout in our ongoing journey to make it as effective and robust for all purchasing scenarios.

 

Contacts - new combined Account / Company search field on the contact listing (Control side), which additionally searches the Company ID and has an account based predictive search. This will make it much easier to find contacts associated with accounts in any way.

 

Contact Lists - we are adding a new List Bio field to each Contact List entry, this can be used both to make notes against each individual on a contact list, specifically within the list, and more importantly it can be used to display additional details when listing contacts on the display side, e.g. Top 100 Leaders lists, as the blurb for each entry is now easy to manage for that specific list. Note that at this point the Control Side is in place and the Display Side updates will be in place in the next release.

 

Content Notification Analysis - renamed from Content Subscription Analysis which combines the ability to report on both the Content and Interest Subscriptions. We have added a new reporting tab for Interest Subscriptions next to the Content Subscriptions one with the equivalent stats as already exist for the Content Subscription Analysis.

 

Converting Articles Report - we have updated the logic here to use the lifetime impressions of an article, note that the actual conversion data will only have been captured since the last release, so figures will improve steadily over the coming months.

 

Conversion Events - it is now possible to assign and remove personal security rights through Conversion Events (excluding System Security Rights). This means that access can be automatically granted and revoked based on the user’s activity. This is in addition to applying / removing Security Groups which is already in place. We have also added an Address Change trigger to conversion events, for address related workflows, e.g. when updating print / delivery addresses.

 

Countries - we have added a new Country Calling Code attribute to Affino’s core country management, to be used for telephone number verification, starting with the checkout for specific payment gateways.

 

Coupons - we are introducing Smart Coupons in the next release, you will see a number of new coupon settings, these will then work from the next release.

 

Demographic Profile - new setting to hide address fields on Demographic screen depending on Member Type (will be extremely useful for capturing print address details for free / controlled subscriptions right from the outset).

 

Design Style - It is now possible to choose your own Favouriting icons by setting them in the Design Style, so if you want your users to Heart your products now they can. We have also added the Audit panel so that it is now possible to see who created and last updated each Design Style, and when.

 

Dynamic Forms - new Form Notification option on Dynamic Forms so that it is now possible to disable notifications to the Message Owner.

 

Ecommerce (Orders) - Affino again tracks the Referrer against each order (where identifiable). Affino tracks the latest referral URL to lead to the actual conversion. This is all visible in the Order Referral Analysis.

 

Help - this release sees a number of help texts updated throughout Affino, and we have published and updated dozens of help guides this past couple of months, steadily transforming the help documentation which is always readily available to you.

 

Jobs - when clicking on a Job from a listing, it now takes you to the Job Detail within Affino rather than straight to the External URL (if there is one). The user can then click to apply using the External URL on the detail page.

 

Media Image Export - renamed from Media Export, as it has always only been possible to export the Images in this way. We have updated the help text to match and have refined the experience.

 

Media Image Profile - added new Image Cropping and Aspect Ratio options on the Media Image Profile (used in the self service directories), along with Minimum Width and Minimum Height to ensure the best quality imagery on self service directories and product directories. The image cropping tool is only available on Directory Media and Directory Products at this point, and is shown for those image types where an aspect ration is set.

 

Media Library - the date picker now dynamically works back to the earliest media item available.

 

Member Type - new Hide Address option for each member type, when selected each user of the relevant member type is no longer shown the address fields on the registration nor when viewing and editing their profile. This is particularly useful for free print subscription / member workflows.

 

Messages - Affino now distinguishes between Order Invoices and Pro Forma Invoices on the message listing. We have changed how all messaging is now sent through Affino, and resolved a series of long-standing issues, if you see anything that looks like an anomaly with the new approach please inform us at the earliest opportunity. Note that we have now removed the classic premium messages entirely from Affino and Responsive Premium messages are now simply referred to as Premium.

 

My Account - we have added much more smarts to the Event Attendance display on the ’My Account’. The link to ’Event Attendance’ is now only displayed if the user has events related to their account in some way, whether it be through a ticket or event credits. On the Event Attendance tab itself the information is now only displayed conditionally based on if the user has active / previous event tickets and active / used event credits.

 

My Information - we have introduce a new Hide Address option depending on the Member Type, and this applies to users viewing and editing their personal information. If set, then the address details are not displayed, nor required.

 

My Library - we are extending My Library to add Events, Directory Entry and Product tabs so that users can browse these distinct content types as well. The search still works as before and users are able to search across all their favourites.

 

My Messages - behind the scenes updates to track direct lead generation messages (for reporting and analysis). We have also updated the notifications to use the Zone name on the Subject line, rather than the System setting. We have further made a major change to My Messages whereby if someone is a designated directory entry owner then they can be messaged by anyone, this is to facilitate lead generation conversations where there is back and forth between the two.

 

Optimisation - we have made a host of further optimisations in Affino, these include message campaigns, personalised content on the design elements (Article Carousel, Article Highlights, Event Listing, Job Listing, Media Listing and Topic Related Content), and subscriptions. We have also optimised Message Analysis and Scheduled Task automations, along with Site Analysis (both the display and the data aggregation).

 

Orders - We have added a new Sub Order Type filter to subscriptions so that it is possible to filter them by type, e.g. All | Complimentary | Corporate | Controlled | Free Trial | Personal | Regular.

 

Order Confirmations / Notifications - we have standardised and enhanced the Order Confirmation screen and corresponding notifications. Not only is the consistency and formatting improved but we are also showing more information than previously across both, along with the Order History screen.

 

Order Export / Import - added Sub Order Type column after Order type. We have also added two new columns, EditionCode and FulfilmentDate, to the OrderLineItemsImport sheet to support linking editions and fulfilment dates to order line items.

 

Order Line Item Report > Export - Added the following columns before BatchReference: SubscriptionPlan, SubscriptionCode, SubscriptionStartDate, SubscriptionEndDate, SubscriptionStatus

 

Payment Gateways - numerous updates to further enhance the smooth operation around purchases and subscriptions, including sending across updated customer email addresses to payment gateways where relevant, along with pre-validating mobile phone numbers.

 

Pro Formas - we now display an Account column on the Pro Forma listing.

 

Registration - great new feature to be able to conditionally display the address fields on registration (demographic step) this way free and controlled circulation print subscribers are required to enter their address (and abc validation question) whilst others are not.

 

Sections (Control) - Affino now shows the number of articles including multi-displayed ones when viewing a section. When clicking the List button it lists out all the multi-displayed articles as well.

 

Section Import (new) - this release sees the introduction of a new Section Import, used for bulk importing sections when migrating to Affino from sites where the data and user experience relies on hundreds or possibly thousands of sections being imported into Affino. 

 

Security - we resolved an issue where bad actors have been able to use Affino’s checkout engine to mass validate (stolen) credit cards. At no point has any data been compromised. We have further tightened security around the Guest User account, minimising the chance of accidentally giving it access rights it should not have. 

 

We have also further locked down security to prevent accidentally giving Control security rights to guest users. We have further tightened up Affino’s host headers to bar more malicious traffic. Affino now tightly integrates with the AbuseDB service to check to see if any IP address accessing Affino sites is already blacklisted, and instantly bars access. This significantly reduces unsolicited traffic on sites. We have also further locked down the possibility of hackers remote executing Affino code.

 

Subscriptions - we are adding Subscription Duration to the Subscriptions Control listing for ease of management. When using the Auto Assign Subscription option on Accounts, no longer requires an email domain to be set on the account. We have also added a new Sub Order Type filter to subscriptions so that it is possible to filter them by type, e.g. All | Complimentary | Corporate | Controlled | Free Trial | Personal | Regular. Affino now automatically sets Renewed status on free subscriptions which have been renewed (previously only available to paid subscriptions).

 

Subscription Expiry Report - we have added a new Sub Order Type filter so that it is possible to filter by type, e.g. All | Complimentary | Corporate | Controlled | Free Trial | Personal | Regular.

 

Subscription Export - we have added a new Sub Order Type filter so that it is possible to filter by type, e.g. All | Complimentary | Corporate | Controlled | Free Trial | Personal | Regular.

 

Subscription Member Report (new) - this release sees the introduction of a new Subscription Member Report. This report shows the number of contacts and active subscriptions for each Product Line by Member Type or Country. It is particularly useful when looking at how the subscription base is segmented and located.

 

Tasks - we have added the ability to assign Tasks to Accounts as well as individuals. This better supports tasks when contacts leave the company, or indeed are removed from the CRM.

 

User Merge - new option in the System Settings on whether or not you want to transfer the Security Groups for the user to the merged account. Once enabled all merges will include all the security group memberships.

 

Fixes and Minor Enhancements

 

Fixes are elements which didn’t work as well as they should, and have now been made to work better. Minor enhancements provide subtle improvements that most people won’t notice (some will love), but which nonetheless improve on the overall Affino experience.

 

Account (Display, Hide Associated Accounts tab)

 

API (User Agent)

 

Articles (changing section, simple event location, event date, relating articles with apostrophes)

 

Article Steps (order, image wrapping, image captions (hiding), control listing, editing, import)

 

Award Entries

 

Checkout (multiple, including Pay360 and location, further tightened security)

 

Campaign (sticky footer)

 

Catalogue Item Import

 

Contact (has left company)

 

Converting Articles into (updated conversion rate calculations)

 

Design Scripts (script protection)

 

Dynamic Forms (Contact Creation Security)

 

Events (Dates, Speaker Bios)

 

Incoming Feeds (improved handling of introduction and teaser)

 

Orders (duplicates, assign attendees, tax)

 

Media File Path Export (notification)

 

Media Library (multi display, deleting media items used in article steps)

 

Members (multi-zone)

 

Menu DE (links, buttons, multiple)

 

Messages (creatives, links, split test, analytics)

 

Message Templates (copying, spacing, links, displaying multiple rows, renaming, styling, and much more)

 

My Account (screen names)

 

My Messages (multi-zone)

 

Orders (tax)

 

Order Export (scheduling)

 

Pro Formas (discount)

 

Products (styling)

 

Product Search (multi-site)

 

Recruitment (email similar jobs, search)

 

Registration (activation link, rejection message)

 

Seminars (dates, add / remove from itinerary)

 

Shopping Basket (conversion event, subscription purchases)

 

Subscriptions (critical Apple Pay, Google Pay and Stripe fixes, BST, auto assignment)

 

Subscriber Export

 

Subscription Expiry Report (previous reports)

 

Removed

 

The following elements were removed from Affino in this release:

 

We have temporarily removed the ability for end users to reassign subscriptions.

 

No elements were removed in this release.

 

Integration Updates

 

The following integrations were updated in this release:

 

Global Payment - Affino now validates the mobile telephone number prior to sending it through (most payment gateways support this themselves, but for Global - Affino has to pass it through pre-validated)

 

GoCardless - we have updated the integration so that if a subscriber changes their email address then that is passed through to GoCardless for continued notifications.

 

Instagram - oEmbed support enhanced

 

Pay360 - enhanced for more robust payment support

 

Stripe - we have updated the integration so that if a subscriber changes their email address then that is passed through to Stripe for continued notifications.

 

Component Changes

 

Affino benefits from using some great frameworks, here are the updates we’ve rolled out for these frameworks in this release:

 

DataTables updated to - no change

 

JQuery updated to - no change

 

JQueryUI updated to - no change

 

FontAwesome updated to - no change

 

HighCharts updated to - no change

 

TinyMCE updated to - v5.8.2

 

Video.js updated to - v7.14.3