We’re heavily into R & D at the moment in the Comrz Virtual Research and Development Labs. Three projects in particular are going to have a big impact over the coming year.

Affino Messenger v2

One of the things we get asked about the most is "when will the next generation of Affino Messenger come out so that we can re-enable instant messaging on our site". The good news is that it is now well under-way and we are looking to release a Beta version with the next Affino release.

The nature of the Instant Messaging hosting setup is that this will only be offered as a premium service. Not just that, but there will be different levels of service depending on whether it’s just text chat or you want voice and video as well.

You can see from the screen cap above that we’re at the very early discovery phase with a lot of the technology but have got working prototypes for text and voice chat.

We’ve already tried (and discarded) a number of approaches and have ended up deciding to write the core messaging client and server ourselves. We tried hard to work with existing standards such as XMPP, but the problem is that nothing we tried came close to doing what we want to achieve.

The tech we’re going to be using is Adobe Flex 4 and Adobe Air 2.x. We’re also writing our own Java Sockets server; with ColdFusion based webservices which will link together each Affino site and community with our new centralised Affino Messaging Service; which in turn we’ll be hosting on the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Our twin goal priorities are reliability and security, so everything we do will only be released when we have confidence it will perform effectively. The key feature priorities we have are:

Phase One

  Peer to Peer Instant Messaging Group Instant Messaging Chat / Conference Room Messaging Support Chat Sales Chat

Phase Two

  Peer to Peer Voice Chat Peer to Peer File Transfer Peer to Peer Video Chat Status Updates sync with the site, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn News Feed

Phase N

  Android Client (Air)... More

This is another minor point release to follow up on the Affino 6.0 release. There are a number of new features in this release as well as significant bug fixes. This is very much a maintenance release which aims to smooth out the Affino 6 experience.

  Upgrade Guidance

It is recommended that all Affino 6 users update to this release.

We’re not expecting any major issues with this release, but the scale of this release means that issues may arise. We recommend that eCommerce sites wait one to two weeks before updating and check on Comrz.com for any guidance.

It is recommended that you run through the complete update process starting with the Affino Updater, followed by the System Update, Re-Initialise Site, Design Element Update and Skin Update.

  Enhancements

Badge Highlights DE – new display options allow for better presentation

Blogs – Tags and Tag Clouds can now be displayed on Blogs; the Tag Clouds are displayed as part of the Blog Archive DE and are an option; the individual blog posts display the tags assigned to them; the Blog Archive is now always displayed, even at the top level

Comments and Ratings – greatly improved usability of Comments and Ratings so that they now work seamlessly throughout all content element;

Customer Ladder Analysis – new pop-up charts highlight the activity during the timeframe for each user and badge type; updated timeframes so that new 7 day, 30 day and 12 month timeframes can be viewed; fixed graphs to show more accurate data; improved the usability of the real-time activity tracker

Dashboard – updated Dashboard with three new Customer Ladder widgets: Customer Ladder, Customer Ladder Badges, Customer Ladder Members, still in Beta but you can experiment with the widgets

Dynamic Forms – added back button to the Form Entry screen, makes it easier to page through different form entries

Facebook Integration – completely reworked all the connections with Facebook; updated to work with OAuth 2.0 and the new Graph API

Forums – improved for... More