Your Illumine.app experience is improving as we work to release new features, enhance existing ones, and squash bugs - cause we’re good buggers who hate bugs (and clearly need to work on our one-liners).
They say the month of August is grand and impressive. Let’s see if the following new features and updates deliver that sense to you :)
Certificate Generator (yeah, finally!) 🆕
Admission Enquiries [Leads] (Oh boy! More than a handful of changes here) 🆙
Other enhancements (Staff Profile UI, Geofencing Setting, Lithuanian Language Support)
Below is a deep dive of the improvements you’ll find with the latest release.
1. Certificate Generator 🆕
Certificates are a big validation for almost everyone. Be it the college degree certificate or the one received after a half-marathon - they serve as a reminder for the effort put in (and also as a sign of reward!)
Which is why starting late August, you now have a Certificates Generator on Illumine.
As part of the latest update, you can now create Certificates for your students, and staff members.
From the left panel, select TOOLS → CERTIFICATES GENERATOR
Next, select who you want to generate the ID Cards for – Student or Staff, and choose from the list of design templates available, and click the “Next” button on top-right of the screen. See snap below.
Every other written content can be customized. AND, You can actually upload actual signatures as images!
You now come to the second step of customizing the data on the certificates - including the selection of text fields, signatures, date, font family, font size, font color, etc.
Please note, that the school/center logo is auto-picked and placed on these templates.
Thereafter, click the “Next” button on the top-right corner, and select the students / staff for whom you want to generate the certificates.
Once done, you get the final screen with all generated certificates, with the option to “Download All” on the top right corner, or to download for individual students (click the three vertical dots against each student).
There you have it!
A well designed certificate, with the information you need to show, and something that students and staff will appreciate too.
2. Student Immunization Tracker 🆕
From the start of human civilization, humans have been known for their inherent drive for record keeping. And there’s one word in the modern dictionary that represents that - Trackers!
And when it comes to children, Immunization Trackers are very important records.
With this release, Illumine now offers Student Immunization Tracker as part of every student’s profile. At the moment, this is only available on the web-version of the platform. The immunization tracker can be mutually filled between parents and teachers.
To set the various vaccines and their doses, from the left panel select
SETTINGS → STUDENT IMMUNIZATION
Click on the ‘Add Vaccine’ button on the top-right corner and add details in the popup that appears. To make this vaccine a mandatory requirement, simply click on the checkbox.
Once a vaccine is added. It will appear in the list of vaccines. Next step is to add ‘Doses’.
To do so, click on the ‘ACTION’ drop down menu against the particular vaccine, and select the ‘Add Dose’ option and add the relevant information in the popup. You also have the checkbox option here to make ‘Proof of vaccine dose mandatory’.
Next,
From the left panel select MANAGEMENT → STUDENTS → Select any student profile, and go to the ‘IMMUNIZATION’ tab.
Here you’ll see a list of all vaccines and their doses listed. There are 3 types of action buttons here -
‘Send Reminder’ button on the top right corner
‘Action’ dropdown button against each vaccine
‘Dose’ status dropdown button under each dose.
The ‘Send Reminder’ button on the top right corner gives us the option to send an email reminder to parents – this sends the information for all pending doses of all the vaccines listed.
The ‘Action’ dropdown button against each vaccine gives the option to ‘Send Reminder’ for the pending dose of that particular vaccine, and another option to ‘ Exempt Vaccine’.
The ‘Dose’ status dropdown button under each dose gives the option to ‘Upload Vaccination Details’ - which is common to both parents and teachers. The two other options - Dose Note and Exempt Note – are options only available to Teachers.
And that’s the Student Immunization tracker for you!
3. Admission Enquiries [Leads]
Do you remember that overachieving-classmate from school who would always do more than needed? Well, here we go again with our tech engineers working to deliver way too much in a single shot.
But it's good for you!
The Leads module has the following upgrades with this sprint -
3.1) Lead Card View
3.2) Lead Progress ordering and coloring
3.3) Emails with attachments (so yes, you can send school brochures now!)
3.4) Email personalization's including student name, parent name
3.5) Lead Ownership Assignment option (‘Assign To’)
3.6) Automations with added Dependency Fields (yeah, it does seem complicated… till you actually implement it).
3.7) Overall UI/UX revamp throughout the Lead Module
Let’s have a quick dive-in into these updates.
3.1 Lead Card View
When you head to the leads section under the LEADS module, you now see the option of a more visually appealing view, called the ‘Card View’. See the snapshot below for reference.
Not only can you customize the various columns (progress ordering) and the colors, you can actually drag each lead-card and move them across the various columns (progression stages).
Besides that, each lead-card gives you a quick-insight-label on when any activity was last done on that lead. This helps to highlight if there are any leads which have no activity from a long time.
Try it!
3.2 Lead progress ordering and coloring
To come to the lead progress ordering and coloring screen, click on the ‘Manage Status’ option next to the search box.
You arrive at the screen with existing lead status, which you can now move up and down to reorder, as well as assign a color to each of them. You can also add new lead statuses as well.
3.3 Emails with attachments
Imagine you had a set of parents who toured your center and have requested for the school brochure to be shared with them over email.
Now you can!
Simply head to the ‘Send Email’ section as usual, and now you’ll see the new option of adding an attachment. Do note, there is a size limit of 5MB to the email attachment.
3.4 Email Personalisations
Apart from attachments, emails now also offer personalisation options – like mentioning the student’s name, the parent’s name and some more.
Believe it or not, some basic personalisation goes a long way in making the parents feel the warmth of your center!
3.5 Lead Ownership (‘Assign To’)
Sometimes having an explicit ownership of things brings a certain higher sense of accountability.
And with that idea in mind, we now have ‘Assign To’ option against each admission lead, which lets you make a particular staff member the owner for that particular lead. While tasks can be shared among different staff members for each of these leads, the overall lead owner will be the person who is assigned this.
Now you ensure that no lead drops in the crack, and each admission team member gets due credit for enquiries that convert into admissions.
3.6 Automations with added Dependency Fields
Previously you could set lead automations that got triggered (ie flow gets initiated) when one of the lead-progress events happened. Example, when you moved a lead from ‘Toured’ to ‘Interested’.
However, there could be cases where you wanted to send a different communication based on nuances like, ‘Send admission form before a particular date’.
That’s what the added ‘Field Dependency’ option enables you to do. You can also choose to ignore this by selecting ‘none’ and continuing to use only the ‘Lead status changes to’ option alone.
From the left panel, go to LEADS → Lead Settings.
On the main screen then select ‘Manage Lead Automations’, and then either create a new automation, or edit an existing one.
On the popup screen that appears, you now see an additional option called ‘Field Dependency’. Select any one field from the drop down, and appropriate ‘Field Operation’ and ‘Field Value’, and click ‘Save’.
If you don’t wish to use a dependent field, simply choose ‘None’ in the dropdown option under ‘Field Dependency’.
Use the ‘Field Dependency’ option to make the communication to parents slightly more well timed, and more personalized!
3.7 Overall UX-UI revamp
And finally, some cosmetic changes – the overall LEAD module now has a refreshed UI that makes the overall look and feel less clunky and faster to interact at various points.
Something can only be explored and felt.. No more words here :p
4. Automated Late Checkin/Checkout Staff Reports 🆕
Now this is a feature which might find itself in the cross hairs. But hey, we gotta do what we gotta do to make your center operations better!
In this release we’ve now enabled tracking and automated labeling of staff timings based on the school working hours – which means late check-ins, early check-outs, and of course staff members who are overworking too can be tracked.
There are three sections of the platform that are to be noted -
First, the School Timings.
From the left panel go to SETTINGS → SCHOOL DETAILS, and on the main screen scroll down to ‘School Timings’ and update your school’s timings (working hours).
Second, defining a threshold for ‘late check-ins’.
Go to SETTINGS → ATTENDANCE, and on the right screen go to ‘Late Threshold’ and enter the allowable time limit you have in mind (it is in minutes) – so it could be 15 mins, or 20 mins - whatever is permissible.
Also note here the checkbox called ‘Disable automatic late-marking for staff’. This will not show the ‘Late’ label that appears when staff members check-in late.
Third, customizations at a staff level.
Let’s say the Academic Head has a workday that starts later than the school start time, and/or ends at a later-than-school time. This would mean in the automated tracking, this staff will end up being always marked ‘Late’. To avoid that, you can define custom timings, and the system will factor that in the attendance tracking system.
Go to MANAGEMENT → STAFF → Select the specific staff member and in their ‘Profile’ section scroll down to the property called ‘SHIFT START TIME’ and ‘SHIFT END TIME’.
That’s it – once you’ve taken care of these 3 aspects, you are ready to track staff late check-ins and early check-outs correctly.
Here’s how the Staff Attendance section will look like once you’ve implemented the work timings and late-check-in threshold.
Now the final part - getting the Attendance Report.
Go to REPORTS → EXCEL REPORTS → On the main screen scroll to ‘Staff Sign In-Out’ section and select the reports to download. Once the report is ready to download, you’ll see it on the right part of the main screen.
The Excel Report now has a column for ‘late check-ins’. See the sample snapshot for reference.
5. Other Enhancements
Staff Profile UI,
Geofencing Setting,
Language added - Lithuanian
Details with snapshot for reference below.
The Staff Profile section has got its new UI. Go to MANAGEMENT → STAFF → Select any staff profile and you’ll get to see a much better UI :)
2. Geo-Fencing
3. Illumine platform now also supports another new language - Lithuanian. From the left panel, scroll down to LANGUAGE, and select ‘Lithuanian’
And that’s it for this round of new features and feature updates from us!
Got feedback?
We’re all ears – simply text us in the chat window.
Bug Fixes
Few technical issues were addressed, and several smaller enhancements were also undertaken at the backend as well to enhance the smoothness of the web portal and the apps. Nothing noteworthy from a user standpoint – except a smoother feel :)
Illumine Version
Version 2.44.0