Affino Delivers what Forrester Report says Content Management Professionals are looking for

It’s not often that I read much on Content Management Systems (CMSs) these days, however many people still classify Affino as a CMS, given that Social Commerce is still a fairly new category. When I do look into what’s going on in the industry I invariably go to CMS Wire which provides great coverage of the sector.

I came across a recent article on a Forrester WCM Systems Report about what content management professionals are looking for and 75% of respondents said they would be using content management systems more over the coming year.

The article goes on further to outline what the professionals wanted to see improved in their systems. In practice the areas where CM Pros are looking to see improvements neatly matches up with what the Affino Social Commerce Suite already delivers.

Below are the key elements broken out with an overview of what we already do as well as what’s up-coming in Affino.

Rich Media / DAM (52%)

Affino is highly capable when it comes to handling rich media. The Affino eMedia solution handles natively video, music, images, documents, Flash files and even CAD drawings. It has multiple presentation layouts for presenting the media ranging from basic media listing through to dedicated music and video stores.

The uniquely powerful Social Media Workflows mean that anyone can contribute media, whether it is a core team, contracted 3rd parties or social media. The media workflows tailor the media upload and management and can handle 100,000s of media contributors.

Entire YouTube-like social media directories can be built from staff or member content, whilst Affino can showcase media by creating video walls, highlights scrollers, video browsers, photo stacks and much more. All of the media can be highlighted on members’ profile pages and fully interacted with, e.g. via comments and ratings, embedding, email notifications and sharing.

What sets Affino apart from most solutions is that Affino also handles social media in a structured way so that YouTube videos, SlideShare presentations, iTunes Podcasts, and many more all work seamlessly with Affino and can be used within stand-alone video libraries or as embedded content throughout the site.

Affino also handles the content flows so that YouTube RSS feeds can be used to automatically populate Affino video libraries, or media within Affino can be embedded within 3rd party sites. Affino will generated Podcasts on the fly from uploaded MP3s and handles all the automation to created associated assets wherever required.

The Affino Media Editor extends all this by providing a tool set for doing basic edits, filters and resizing of media. It also takes video stills, PDF pages and looks up Amazon cover art for MP3s.

The DAM solution itself works seamlessly with the leading Content Delivery Networks, which means that the media can be distributed at high volume, in a secure manner.

On top of all of this Affino offers comprehensive audits and analytics. The eBusiness Dashboard gives insight into the popularity of all the media, media sales conversion indicators and much more. Affino media libraries can also be tracked using web analytics solutions such as Google Analytics.

Workflow (29%)

Affino Workflows are built around the principle of the extended enterprise. This means that workflows work for users from within an organisation, for contracted 3rd party professionals, as well as social contributors. To that end Affino has two key workflows for Publishing and Media. These work together to allow for the simplest management experience.

There are three key aspects to the Social Workflows, firstly content routing, filtering and auto-approval, this is kept simple but has a great deal of automation so that content can be separated into different approval streams based on the content itself and how it sits within the existing content flow. It means that moderators are flagged content to review, whereas the vast majority can go straight-to-live. It prevents duplicate content and enforces and automates parts of the content entry process.

The second key aspect is the tailoring of the entry and management screens. These can be streamlined to match the maturity of the content contributing community. Early start communities can have minimal interfaces whilst mature editors have full-featured publishing and media tools.

The commercial nature of Affino means that all of these workflows can be commercialised. That means it is possible to charge for content editing and for access to a publishing workflow. In practice it means you could charge someone to add a job post or a directory listing or an event in a public events calendar. It is also possible to make it more granular so that anyone can publish but premium users can have prioritised content, more media and higher volumes.

Content Targeting (23%)

The fifth generation content tagging available in Affino is equal to any solution on the market. It includes a full Taxonomy management solution for automated content tagging, A to Z directory generation, ’did you mean’ search suggestions and much more. All content can also be tagged with a free-form content tagger which also suggests keywords from a user’s own keyword list as well as recommended Topics.

The content tagging and categorisation is extended to user’s profiles so all site and community members can be automatically targeted according to their interests. There are multiple ways in which this can happen the key ones being: personalised homepages, reccommendations personalised newwsletters and recommended highlights throughout the site.

Affino also provides contact / friends’ content streams. These can be presented at any stage and present users with a personalised experience based on the content and activities of their on-site network. Key elements include friend’s content, media, message board posts, status updates and group activity.

Management of Multiple Web Sites (21%)

A single instance of Affino can handle hundreds of websites and micro-sites. What sets Affino apart is the ability to seamlessly share communities, logins, stores and content across a diverse portfolio of sites. The granularity available means that on a single instance multiple sites could whare logins and a single community, whilst at the same time a dozen other independent communities could exist on other sites.

All the sites function as independent identities, especially for search engine optimisation purposes, with their own navigation hierarchies, site searches and any other aspects which need to be kept unique.

Collaboration and Social Computing (20%)

The Forrester Report has these as separate categories, albeit with exactly the same percentage. We see this as being the one and the same thing. 

Rich Media Support (16%)

See Rich Media / DAM above.

Rapid Microsite or Landing Page Creation (16%)

Affino can be used to create any number of Microsites and does a lot to streamline the process. The ability to re-use or make smart copies of content, designs and entire site structures means that the process of rolling out a new branded microsite is reduced to a minimum. It is possible to set up major new sites in hours, which can then be streamlined and adapted at will.

Affino is uniquely capable when it comes to generating landing pages. The combination of advance design elements, content tagging and automation means that on-topic landing pages can be pulled together in minutes which aggregate all the on-site content, media, products and community and can also pull in social media such as filtered tweets, news and YouTube videos. Affino even integrates with tools such as Google Website Optimizer which alllow the running of multivariate experiments to see which combinations of content and calls to action make for the most successful landing pages.

These are backed up by very powerful analytics capabilities which allow the tracking and evolution of the sites and pages.

Multi-lingual Content Management (12%)

Affino supports any number of language variations (however some have a premium price whilst others are already available). Any number of language variants can be created and rolled out. These sites are managed independently from a unified management interface.

We will be rolling out major improvements for handling multiple language variations of item level content which can then be shared across multiple language sites to minimise the management workload whilst improving the content translation workflows.

Conclusion

It’s great to see that Affino is ahead of the curve when it comes to what professionals are looking for, and the commitment Comrz has to maintaining that lead means that there are a great number of exciting developments lined up for Affino over the coming year.

Anyone looking for more information please get in touch with me (Markus Karlsson) and I will be happy to talk you through what’s possible and how best we can meet your requirements.