For many of our clients, senior season is just starting to kick into high gear. (For our international clients, we’re not talking elderly people, we’re talking high school seniors!)  Here at StudioPlus, we’ve been busy creating some exciting new enhancements for Spectra to make your senior season the most productive and profitable as possible.  In fact, we felt these enhancements were so beneficial to our senior studios, that we decided to release these enhancements right away to get them into production before senior season gets into high gear.  So here is a run down on the new senior workflow introduced in StudioPlus Spectra 2012 Volume 1 Service Release 3.

First, we greatly enhanced the amount of information that you can track regarding your schools or organizations, like yearbook advisor and principal contact information, class enrollment size, new deadline fields, yearbook image requirements, plus lots of custom fields.  All this new information is easily viewable from a client or session.

Second, we added a new Student ID field to the Organization tab of the client record.  We added the ability to import the student ID in the Client Import Wizard, plus we added the ability to check for duplicates when importing to ensure you’re not creating a duplicate client record unnecessarily.

Third, we added a new customizable Yearbook Status field to help you better track the status of all your yearbook selections.  Plus we added the ability to automatically create a task and assign it to an individual or department once a yearbook selection has been made.

Fourth, we created a new method to organize all your yearbook images.  Spectra will automatically create a shared folder for each organization.  As your yearbook images are selected, retouched, and produced throughout the year, they are automatically placed into the appropriate organizational folder.

Fifth, we created new tools to help you retouch, crop, and produce each image according to each organization’s yearbook specification.  Once the yearbook selection has been made by the student, a button is available to open that image in Photoshop for retouching.  Next, the image can be placed into a specialized composite template already in the correct aspect ratio with guidelines overlaid to assist in the correct positioning of the image. Once completed, Spectra will render out the final image in the organization folder with the correct size, DPI, and filename for that school.  Cool, huh?

Sixth, all the existing functionality, like Yearbook CDs, Organization reports, and Yearbook reports have all been modified to work in conjunction with these new features.

Finally, even though this feature was introduced earlier this year, don’t forget about the SMS Texting abilities that were added.  SMS texting is a powerful way for you to stay in touch with high school seniors.

If you shoot Seniors, then the following two documents are a MUST read for you!  Read here about all the new features, and changes to existing features, introduced in Service Release 3.  Read here about all the high school senior workflow options in StudioPlus Spectra.

We’re proud that StudioPlus has always been an industry leader when it comes to building effective high school senior workflows.  And we hope that you’ll find these new features to be beneficial to you this upcoming school year!!