September 2010 Affino Updater - Going Mobile

The Affino releases have been coming thick and fast over the past month. We introduced a lot of ground-breaking functionality in Affino 6, in particular the new Customer Ladder and Gaming Engine. We also introduced a further 300 features.

Affino 6.0 is Wrapped

The past month has seen the extensive roll-out of Affino 6 and the Comrz team has been rapidly evolving Affino as usability issues and real-world problems arose. We’ve pretty much nailed the issues and managed to roll out a fair number of enhancements in the process.

Going Mobile

We will continue to further evolve all the new elements over the coming months, but are now shifting our resources to the next major phase which is the development of Affino as a mobile publishing platform (Affino 6.1). The first step is for us to completely re-work the Media Library and to make it possible to customise media presentations using Media Templates (we need these in place so we can roll out mobile templates on Media). Next we’ll move into the Mobile development phase itself.

eCommerce Hub

We’ve completed the first stage of our ecommerce integration by connecting Affino with eBay, we will now be developing Facebook Commerce and Amazon integrations, most likely starting with Facebook. On the social hub side we’ve extended our level of integration with Facebook by rolling out the Facebook Open Graph integration, as well as tying in with the new OAuth 2 Facebook sign-in, and connecting comments, ratings and likes directly to Facebook. The next stage will be deeper integration with both Twitter and Facebook.

Media Hub

The great work we’ve done integrating with SoundCloud (music), Ooyala (premium video) and Amazon Wowza services is a big leap forward for delivering media. The great leap forward will be when we roll out the Social Media distribution platform later this year. In the meantime the updates to the media library will give us great ability to tailor the media delivery to specific markets and sectors. We’ll continue to develop the Affino HTML 5 video and audio players, with some exciting developments lined up.

Community

We’re doing some solid preparation for the new Content Stream view on the member profiles. We’ll post more on this as it’s rolled out. It will have a major impact on the community engagement side when it arrives.

Usability

On the usability front, we haven’t started the main project but we have done lots of incremental improvements throughout Affino. The stand-out improvements are the updated Blogs and Forums which are rapidly approaching the market leaders in their delivery. On the Control side, the new drag-and-drop method of organising content is going to save a lot of effort and frustration. All the Affino forms are subtly improved and we’ve done a great deal to reduce the number of clicks, entries and ticks required to get things done. The major Control Centre overhaul will come after we’ve done the heavy lifting on the Mobile side.

Other Developments

There are lots of other developments coming to Affino with numerous upcoming projects. All of them are focused around Social Commerce, and will collectively take the Affino experience to a whole new level. We can’t wait to see these projects rolled out.