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).

Green Day were definitely not talking about the product team at illumine when they sang "Wake me up when September ends." Because they’ve been wide awake and working 'round the clock to bring you five new features -

Below is a deep dive of the improvements you’ll find with the latest release.

Back at school,“Present, Ma’am!” echoed through classrooms - sometimes with the actual student present, and other times by friends serving as proxy 😀

That may not be the case at early years centers, but the Attendance Report is a very important report - both from the parents’ perspective, as well as from the management perspective.

Starting now, the Attendance Master Report – for both Student and Staff attendance – lets you get into all possible details in a single report.

From the left panel, select REPORTS → EXCEL REPORTS

Here’s a sample report of how it looks.

There you have it!

Slice and dice the data on the excel as per your requirements, and let us know if you need any further information added to this report.

“A horse with no name” – is a not-so-great situation.

That’s what some of our customers said about the ‘School Attendance QR code (Center-level QR Code)’.

So as part of this release, we now have a School Attendance QR code that is nuanced enough to have instructions mentioned and complete with the school’s logo - so that all you need to do is, download-print-and-use!

To see the enhanced QR code, from the left panel select

ATTENDANCE → STUDENT ATTENDANCE → then click on ‘View QR’ on the main screen.

This is how the enhanced QR now looks like (see image below) -

Notice that it is no longer a square patch of ink, but now has your center’s logo, a headline stating what the QR code is for (ie for ‘Self Check-In/ Check-Out’), and also shares brief instructions.

You can download the QR, print and paste it at designated spots in your center.

Note: At the school level we have a single ‘School Attendance QR code’ that is common across all students and staff members. Apart from this center-level-QR, illumine also has individual-level QR codes for students and teachers that are unique to each student and each staff member. The current enhancement is only for the center-level-QR code.

Every once in a while, each of us have our moments of ‘creative blockage’ where we stare at our blank screens and wonder where to start.

And in such moments, ‘templates’ shine through as a ray of hope (and much needed jumpstart).

With this release, you now get a new user-interface (UI) to Newsletters, as well as the ability to create templates for various types of parent communications via email – be it event invitation, annual day celebration or the graduation day!

Create templates once, and use it the next time you have a blank screen moment!

From the left panel, go to PARENT COMMUNICATION → NEWSLETTER

You now arrive at the familiar yet much smoother than before, drag-and-drop editor.

Here you can either save it as a template, a draft, or send it directly to parents once you’ve completed it.

Newsletter Templates that you create are available on the Newsletter homescreen - simply use the ‘Filter by Status’ option and select ‘Template’.

Do you like the new interface?

Reply and let me know as a feedback.

Many of our current customers once used WhatsApp Groups for their parent communications in the past, before they discovered illumine.

Once they shifted to illumine, the ‘Parent Communication’ enabled them to establish one-to-one communication with each family, however we received the feedback that there needs to be some way of communicating with parents as a group - for one, it is more convenient, and two, it builds a community around the parents.

And likewise, there was the need for confidential communication between a parent and a specific teacher.

Therefore, several weeks ago we launched both Group Messaging and Private Messaging on illumine. These were available as an optional setting, and not quite upfront.

With this release, we now bring Group Messaging and Private Messaging upfront on the left-panel.

From the left panel, select PARENT COMMUNICATION → GROUP MESSAGES (/ PRIVATE MESSAGES)

You can create messaging ‘Groups’ and add parents and staff members to each of them as per need. Some examples include – dedicated groups for each of the programs your center offers, or specific facilities it offers such as Bus pickup and drop.

Yup, lets get chatting as a group ;)

Details with snapshot for reference below.

Please note that illumine app language auto-set basis device language was already rolled out in Parent App.

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.

Version 2.44.9