Merry Xmas and Happy New Year from Affino

This has been quite a milestone year, with some big choices being made in elections around the world which will make life quite interesting for all of us over the next few years.

Affino has hit a number of milestones in 2016 with nine great releases over the year, and a six month period from May through October where we launched a new release each month. We also tackled many of the most complex Affino projects we’ve had lined up for some time, and what’s been achieve behind the scenes with Affino this year will stand us in good stead for years to come, allowing for an accelerated Affino rollout in 2017.

Speed

It’s the year when Affino’s responsive design delivery really came together with both the Affino team and clients able to roll out entire sites within a week. We started the year by launching the new AOP (UK Association of Online Publishers) site after a very quick turnaround. This was followed a few months later by the Shard Media site and then Ocean Media Group launched a host of wedding sites all in quick succession, the first of which was the London Bridal Show.

We’ve made hundreds of great enhancements to Affino’s display side which make it both easier to roll out new page designs (Skins) and layouts. The latest release was a milestone one whereby we now have more than half of the classic channel types converted to responsive, following the release of the responsive media library channel, and have released some incredibly flexible templates and design elements which replace the majority of what was possible in classic Affino.

Design

Behind the scenes the Design and Build team have taken the lead on the Affino Design Centre, and indeed have become core to how Affino’s evolution. Working alongside the core development team, indeed now very much part of the core team, there has been a quiet revolution going on with Affino’s Design Centre and all the front-end presentation layers.

Fundamentally tough responsive design challenges such as how to efficiently implement responsive design elements in any context; how to make forms look beautifully simple whilst being incredibly stylish and capable; making padding and spacing just work across any resolution and addressing dozes of challenges around pop-ups, design flexibility, and layout capabilities.

We thought that at the start of the year with the advent of the 7th generation Article Listing Design Element we had an amazingly flexible way to lay out content on pages, however the design team went on to create the 8th generation which just blows it away and allows for hundreds of potential listing layouts by simply tweaking the properties.

CRM

The single biggest focus this year though has been the CRM which has had a complete overhaul and has been rolled out by a number of enterprises for managing everything from the sales opportunities, sales administration, production, subscription management (free and paid, digital and and print), marketing automation, flat planning, print management, financial and tax reporting and much more.

We have transformed the client on-boarding process, which greatly improved on-boarding workflows, training, help guides, in-page help, security granularity, and indeed core Affino improvements. We’ve had to work through hundreds of individual projects to deliver on this, and it’s great to see how far Affino has come in this regard.

Single Sourced Sales and Production

The new Pro Forma Orders (order builder) is another transformational element of Affino, which allows you to create structured proposals by selecting Accounts and Contacts, then Catalogue items and tailoring the proposal. It works great both for new business and renewals, and seamlessly works alongside the ecommerce engines, with all the orders from both seamlessly integrated.

We then went on to greatly improve all aspects of the commercial reporting with the greatly improved Order reporting and export, the new Order Line Item Report and Sales Report, all with corresponding export options. Also great is the new live updated Sales Leaderboard designed to be run on a big screen and automatically updated with the latest sales and sales trends.

Bringing it all together has allowed Affino clients to single source Affino to replace their subscription, CRM, sales and marketing automation, messaging, production and publishing platforms.

Messaging

Responsive messages, message templates and improved message scheduling were all great new features we brought to Affino Message Campaigns. We also made it much easier to chain together campaigns by greatly extending Contact Lists, and allowing you to bulk include and exclude lists from campaigns and individual messages.

The last release of the year re-introduced RSS subscriptions with the new Content Subscription channel. It allows users to quickly sign up for both real-time (or summary) email alerts and to subscribe to your key RSS feeds.

Growth

It’s been another year of solid growth with turnover up 30%, and a host of really nice Affino site launches including Drewry, the already mentioned AOP, Exhibition News, Investigo, TSG, Credit Strategy and many more. It’s been great working with you.

We’re also really looking forward to all the great launches that we’re already working on and are lined up for Q1 2017. We have some big new functionality being released in the new year which is an up-coming post, and next year will see the introduction of Affino 8 which will have a host of speed, performance and productivity breakthroughs for all Affino users.

Have a great holiday and look forward to meeting with you all in 2017.