The new Messaging 2 suite in Affino is not simply an incremental update, it is a complete re-imagining of how messaging should work for businesses online.

It has meant a fundamental re-think of how bulk and targeted messages work, and breakthrough improvements for notifications and auto-responders.

Sales and Marketing Automation

Messaging is at the heart of sales and marketing automation. Typically though it is necessary to integrate with many different systems to achieve even the basics of an effective messaging campaign.

Although Affino’s Messaging doesn’t do everything that tools such as Mail Chimp, Mandrill, Hub Spot, Eloqua, KISSmetrics and Scout do, it does a big part of it, and a whole load more.

It also does it at no additional cost, with easy-to-use tools, and with no code integration required.

Message Campaigns vs Mailing Lists

The first big change with Affino’s new messaging comes with the splitting off of the mailing list from the messages being sent. Affino now has Mailing Lists and Message Campaigns in place of Newsletters. Mailing Lists manage the actual subscribers, whilst Messages are sent out based on your Message Campaigns.

This means you can target your mailing lists in much more creative ways by running multiple messaging campaigns against individual mailing lists.

It also means you can do much more to target your subscribers effectively, whilst maintaining a unified unsubscribe and bounced subscriber list across multiple campaigns.

Premium, Personal and SMS Message Campaigns

You can now run three distinct types of messaging campaigns. Premium messages act the same as the previous Newsletter messages. These are tailored messages which can have high design values and where the message content can be highly targeted, automated and personalised.

It is now also possible to send out bulk SMS messaged and Personal messages. Personal messages are instant messages which appear to be sent individually, but are in fact sent in bulk.

We have also made it much easier to send out individual messages and to test / preview those messages. You can now simply enter in the message content, and Title where they are being sent by email. You can then preview them, send test messages or simply dispatch your message

Affino 7.1 is now out, and it’s a major release in every way. Whilst there are many aspects to this Affino release, the two key threads are improved scaling and greater engagement. Affino 7.1 has been significantly re-architected to scale with new search and analytics engines. With the release of Affino 7.1 we will also be migrating sites to our new super-scaling cloud.

We’ve rolled out big updates to many core Affino services including Messaging, Search, Analysis, Customer Ladder and Relationships. We’ve also introduced great features such as Store Credits for incentivising customers, and Design Panels for creating great popups.

The combined improvements in the Customer Ladder (engagement), Messaging and Analysis add up to a breakthrough for sales and marketing automation. The new Messaging Campaigns for bulk premium, personal and SMS messages, come with advanced targeting, filtering and triggering options and great analytics.

Site Search has been completely re-engineered around Solr which gives Affino greatly improved performance on searches, and allows for much smarter searching. Core management elements such as relating content have also seen big updates focused on making editorial teams much more productive.

Altogether there are nearly 400 great new updates in this release, many of which will be transformative when fully rolled out on existing Affino sites.

We have also fixed most of the identified low-level issues which arose from the Affino 7 launch, and which are inevitable with the introduction of such a significant new platform.

Upgrade Guidance

The Affino 7.1 release is a signifiant update, and unlike most Affino releases, this one takes some time to run as we’re completely restructuring all the analytics data and refreshing the search indices. Given how intense this update is on the infrastructure, and that your site will be moved to the new hosting cloud, it is essential that you co-ordinate your update with your account manager.

Also in this release is a significant change to how most images are presented as you can now set the margins around the main images using Design Styles / CSS. It is essential to review your pages to ensure that the images are presented as expected, and note that you can now optimise the layout.

It is essential that

Our priority for Affino 7 has been to make the most productive platform available for running your business online. The integrated nature of Affino means you only have to manage your community, content, products, design, , promotions and analytics in one place. This is by far the most effective approach for managing an online business. What we have done with Affino 7 is to improve in every way how how you manage your online business.

Affino 7 has a New Control Centre, with the pages delivered by a New Page Generation Engine, and it runs on a New Cloud Architecture, all with the intent to deliver the best Social Commerce platform on the market today.

New Look Affino

We’ve brought together great productivity ideas from the Affino user community and the Comrz team. It has meant re-styling, re-factoring and re-architecting Affino from the ground up to be more productive and easier to learn. Affino 7 also has a great new minimalist look, and now works great on tablets and mobile devices. With Affino 7 we’ve set a new baseline which means that every new element we roll out in Affino will be that much better.

Affino has a brand new Control Centre and Live Edit tools. It is now optimised whether you’re using it on a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile device, so you can use it anywhere any time. We’ve really raised the bar for every management interface in Affino. You fill find almost every task easier to do, with great new short-cuts, lookups, help items, searches, lists, entry forms, and navigation elements.

Affino has been brought right up to the leading edge with it’s platform support. It now runs on the latest technology which means it is faster, more reliable and more scalable than ever before. It also means that the Comrz team will be able to accelerate the development of the Affino platform in the weeks and months ahead.

There’s a great new Design Centre. The Design Objects are now completely managed within native browsers with no Flash requirement. All the Design Control screens have seen significant updates and Affino now has better than ever custom CSS support. We’ve also introduced some much needed enhancements such as padding on Design Cells and full Font styling, along with a breakthrough ability for you to be able to secure each and every Design Element

The Affino 7 Control Centre will build on familiar metaphors. Behind the scenes it’s all change though with every single screen having been updated.

You will be more productive at doing almost any management task, whatever the context.

New Look

Expect a great new look. It’s a natural evolution for Affino, and is better suited to the mix of desktop and mobile environments Affino is used in. It will also be faster.

No Screen Left Behind

We have been on a year-long process of updating every Control screen to be more effective at delivering what is needed. We will complete that process in Affino 7, with dozens of interfaces becoming much more useful.

Frameless

One of the biggest compromises we made with the Affino Control Centre was using frames to display the navigation elements. This was essential at the time to allow for dynamic drill-down navigation, but it meant that the URLs were no longer representative of what you were doing.

Frames are deprecated, they’re on the way out. Although they’re still supported by browsers they are no longer the best way to do things. HTML 5 offers us better alternatives. This will mean though that you will need a modern browser to manage Affino sites. IE7 doesn’t cut it any more.

Control/Promotion

You will be able to directly link through to any management screen using simple URLs. No more clicking around required.

Also when you share a URL, it will be exactly the screen you’re referring to. Something which will be particularly useful for support.

There is a massive benefit for Affino development with this approach in that we can now run a great deal more automated tests on the Control Centre, which should ensure higher quality levels all round.

Security

We’re working through every control screen again to ensure that the highest level of security is in place for each one. Since nothing is more important.

Less Flashy

Since Flash simply doesn’t work on mobile devices any more (and never really did) we’ve been busy removing it for the past year and a half. Affino 7 sees the removal of all but two Flash control elements (Dashboards and the Media Editor) which will be converted to HTML 5 in the following release.

Design Centre

Scale, Speed, being Current and Automation are the driving forces behind the evolution of the Affino 7 cloud architecture.

ColdFusion 10

The major catalyst for the upgraded Affino Cloud Architecture is ColdFusion 10. Affino has a long history as a ColdFusion application, dating back to the original ColdFusion Beta from Allaire.

ColdFusion has come a long way since then, and it is now primarily a RAD application platform built on top of Java. In practice we increasingly code directly to Java where required / beneficial.

It is not a ‘sexy’ platform in that it is commercial rather than open source, it is however an excellent platform for developing web applications, and Adobe has done a great job with the latest release.

In practice many / most of the advantages for Affino in the move to CF10 revolve around it’s tighter integration with Java. Key CF improvements are tighter Adobe and Microsoft platform / document integrations.

Tomcat / Apache

The Java Server evolution for ColdFusion to Tomcat is a big step forward for Affino, and after our initial trials it is clear to us that we need to take the next step and shift to Apache from IIS as well.

We see a lot of benefits coming in terms of automation and scaling from the move to Tomcat / Apache for Affino.

REST and HTML 5 Websockets

We’re going to be able to make big code stack changes with the new native RESTful and HTML 5 capabilities of the ColdFusion platform.

It means clearing out a considerable amount of proprietary code and replacing it with native calls. Something that we’re already well underway with.

Solr

We envisage using Solr as a core search technology in Affino 7, to drive up scale, accuracy and performance significantly.

Image Magick

We will continue using ImageMagick for media processing as we simply can’t find anything which delivers better performance.

Microsoft Servers

We are sticking with Microsoft servers for the time-being both for the application and database servers. They have served us very well, however it is going to be critical that we can automate more aspects, and either Microsoft will need to deliver on these or we will review these in the future as well.

Amazon EC2, S3,

Affino 6.0.16 is the final significant Affino 6 release. It’s the culmination of a greatly improved Affino user experience where almost every interface has been enhanced during the course of the last couple of years. We’ve focused on smoothing out the remaining rough edges in Affino 6 and it’s now a whole level easier than it’s ever been.

This release sees the introduction of Cookie Policies to meet the EU Privacy Directive. These are smart and geo-targeted so that only users from the relevant countries are presented with the policy dialogue. Additionally continued browsing is registered as implied consent so as to minimise any disruption to the user.

Affino ecommerce makes yet another big step forward. In this release we’ve significantly improved shopping baskets which are now editable, can be taken over and handed back to customers, or created from scratch and assigned to customers. The baskets also have greatly improved audit tracking and styling. There are also dozens of significant updates throughout the shopping experience which mean that buying is now more engaging than ever in Affino.

There are some major usability improvements in this release, in particular the new Guest Browsing Mode which allows you to instantly switch to the customer’s point of view when managing the site. It is now much easier to navigate through the Control Centre with better browser tab naming and highlighted drill-down links throughout the Control Centre.

As with all Affino releases, we have upgraded the integrations with a number of 3rd parties to reflect their changed APIs. We also integrate with Broadbean for the first time for incoming job briefs. The integration updates with Facebook, LinkedIn, PayPal, Metacafe and Google Merchant Centre are critical if you integrate with any of them.

The improvements we have also made to: the checkout, publishing workflows, recruitment, funding platform, geo blocking / targeting, and user export make this an essential update if you’re using any of those elements.

This is also going to be the best tested, most polished Affino release to-date, as we further evolve our quality assurance processes and build up our core project management team. We’ve added a whole new layer of QA in this release so that you can have the best possible

Affino 6.0.15 Release - Ecommerce, Usability and Recruitment

This release is the culmination of seven months work on the new Optimised Affino Checkout. During the course of the last six months we have rolled out dozens of incremental improvements (and fixes) to the checkout process to drive higher conversion rates. The checkout experience has been taken to the next level with a complete revamp for simple, fast checkouts. We’ve also rolled out a new ecommerce engine, greatly simplified the ecommerce setup and made many nuanced enhancements to the whole ecommerce experience.

We continue our focus on Usability with in-context Help and Feature guides in each Control Centre. We have also greatly improved the process for setting up and running multiple Affino sites on a single Affino instance. Hundreds more elements have been made more intuitive than they were previously, and a lot of rough edges have been smoothed in this release.

Recruitment also sees a great leap forward with dozens of essential enhancements, including a great new Job Search Design Element, recommended jobs, refined CV handling and much more.

Affino’s style has also subtly improved in this release. Many elements now look better than before, in particular Affino Design Elements, but also the font sizes and proportions, many notifications, most ecommerce and recruitment elements, member search, the funding platform and events.

Upgrade Guidance

This is a Major update which sees amends to everything from registering, logging in, adding to the basket, checking out, member’s profiles, all Design Elements and much more. It is essential that you set aside time to review your site after the update. Ensure that you liaise with your Account Manager prior to the update and update during Comrz support hours to ensure a rapid response to any issues.

Note: you are strongly advised to become familiar with the new checkout on Public Staging prior to updating to this release. It is a complete reworking of how it works and it’s essential that you are prepared for the changes.

It is essential that you run through the complete update process starting with the Affino Updater, followed by the System Update, Re-Initialise Site, Design Element Update, Skin Update and finally Clear Guest Cache; all of which are available on

This project is the culmination of a year’s work (for the Graphics!), in some ways it could be said to be the culmination of Affino’s 15 years of development. We have long wanted an elegant means of showcasing the extensive Affino Features Set - and we have takled it a number of ways previously - trying to do a complete features listing (100’s of individual elements - now archived for being too large), and the much celebrates ’Periodic Table of Affino Elements’ - which has 128 listed features - yet still needs further essential additions.

This time it was going to be simpler, yet more detailed, more illustrative at the same time, and punctuated with some lovely iconographic and obviously meaningful pictures and screencaptures. We hand-picked a list of 50 key features as we saw them; alas ’Affino Messenger’ still remains to be re-developed in HTML5 (some way off), but the other 49 can now be found listed on the pictured Affino Features screen; they are as follows:

The intention is that they serve as a great reference for all of us, customers new and old - in getting a full and proper picture of Affino, and reminding us of useful features, functions and utilities that we were thinking of making use of but never quite got round to implementing on our site/s.

Finger-print scanning is too easy to fake, and iris-scanning can be a little fiddly, and yes, if you really want to - you can probably by-pass that with a glass eye too.

The Security Industry has long been searching for a contactless and non-invasive (i.e. non dna-scraping) foolproof biometric security authentication technique that is quick and easy, and difficult to hack or circumvent.

Largely developed by Fujitsu, and now used mostly by US healthcare centres to ward of fraudulent health-insurance claims - by way of identity theft. Palm Vein Authentication uses an infrared scanner to trace the vein patterns of a human palm. A key advantage of this technology is that the subject must be alive, so a chopped off hand won’t do; it’s also sufficiently detailed and unique to make it very difficult to replicate with other props or even mechanical parts.

The Fujitsu scanner pictured above is a rather large industry strength one, but the scanners can be as small as smartphone dongles - pretty much the same outer dimensions of the phone, and less than a couple of inches in height.

I’ve long blogged about the need for an improved biometric technology to replace pin codes, ID cards and the like. As the smartphone rapidly accelerates on its path to absorb most of your daily transactions and interactions - keyless entry, electronic wallet, ID cards, Tickets etc. - this would really seem to be the perfect solution to the current elevated security need we now have.

What with pincodes and login passwords increasingly becoming liabilities, perhaps Palm Vein Authentication is the one-fits-all solution that really works!

Initially this was going to be a very quick follow-on release to Affino 6.0.7 to resolve any issues that come from the major new Affino release. It has grown a fair bit and includes key new abilities including a great new Lead Generation platform, new Chart content, updated Media Library, greatly improved Comments and Ratings and another set of major improvements in the Control Centre.

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Affino users with large sites and multi-site setups are going to love this release. It greatly improves your ability to manage your sites with improved handling of all key aspects including Zones, Channels, Sections, Articles, Media and Catalogue Items.

There are dozens of additional usability improvements throughout where interfaces are being streamlined, automated and made more contemporary. This release primarily focuses on improving the user experience with Affino and most of the work has gone into this with dozens of fixes and tweaks.

Update

We’ve just bumped up the release to include 50 or so further fixes from the original release. Some of these fixes address new issues, whilst the majority address behind-the-scenes server automation issues which affect performance.

Two other key improvements are a new behind-the-scenes approach to security and a number of anti-hacking / anti-phishing measures. Well worth an update even if you’re running on the latest release.

Now that the British Royal Family is on Facebook (’The British Monarchy ’), I thought it would be opportune to reinforce and expand on some pretty decent Facebook guidelines which appeared in a recent Sun article.

It’s kind of an ironic fail that the British Royal Family is trying to look current and in touch with the ’common people’, when really this exercise just reinforces how distant the Royal Family is from the reality of social networking and the public of this nation. It actually reinforces the upstairs / downstairs class divide, as you cannot be friends with individual family members, but only a shielded PR representation of the Royal Family. There is no reason their PRs could not have used individual characters and done much the same job of publishing pictures of meet-and-greet events. As it is, you cannot really be Facebook friends with the Royals at all - they have no real input in this - this is really just another Royal Follie.

Anyway, most of you will be familar with the dangers of publishing too much personal data online, I just checked and updated my Facebook profile recently and removed my year of birth; otherwise I was in full compliance with the following advice:

Don’t ever give your full Date and Place of Birth - these are the basic essentials required for identity fraud

Don’t use your full name - if you are blessed with one or more middle names, keep these to yourself - this will protect your identity, use forename and surname only, in some cases a nickname or pseudonym might even be appropriate

Don’t ever refer to your mother’s maiden name - most UK banks use the mother’s maiden name as one of the security questions to gain access to a personal account

Never disclose your full current address - if you live in a big city like London, it’s OK to have ’Current City’ listed as London - with 12 million souls, you will be relatively difficult to pick out and target, if you come from a small town, I would name the nearest large city, as people will be less able to trace your name easily - minimise collateral damage by referencing a larger population centre

Don’t broadcast holidays or away da... More