Starfish Retention Solutions, Inc. announced the availability of Starfish® 3, an enterprise student success and retention platform. This is the latest release of the company’s software platform that was recognized in December 2012 by University Business as a Readers’ Choice Award Winner. For the last 12 months, the company has collaborated with its client community of more than 150 institutions to develop the new features and functionality that are made available in Starfish 3. The release of Starfish 3 includes new functionality that expands on the company’s commitment to offer solutions that enable the full campus community to help students complete their academic goals. Specifically, the enhancements enable: Optimized Academic Advising. Starfish 3 includes innovative functionality to support the daily activities of academic advisors and advising centers. Features include SpeedNotes to simplify the note-taking process while making this important task more measurable by the institution. The system also includes improved student action plans through plan templates, the ability to support file attachments and virus scanning, advanced filtering and reporting, and kiosk/waiting room management. Intelligent System Integrations. Starfish 3 builds on the company’s history of enabling institutions to leverage the momentum behind their existing third-party systems by reusing both the data generated by the systems and the user community’s training. Starfish 3 has built-in integrations with learning management systems, including single login and data mining of grades, login activity, and participation. New platforms supported with this release include Desire2Learn, Canvas, and Sakai. Starfish 3 also supports comprehensive integrations with Banner, PeopleSoft, and Colleague student information systems. In addition, the platform enables online advising and tutoring with its first ever integration with a Web conferencing and chat system, Blackboard Collaborate. Last, the platform extends its rich attendance tracking and flagging capabilities by making use of data from student response systems (also known as Clickers). Enterprise Usability and Supportability. As a growing number of institutions view their student success and retention programs from a more global, institution-wide perspective, those institutions are seeking solutions that securely integrate with other campus systems while facilitating thorough testing and solid operations. As an enterprise solution, Starfish 3 responds to the needs of IT by offering enhanced functionality to support the scalability, usability, and testability of the platform within the institution’s IT environment.