Likelihood to Recommend As a SIS, Banner Pages is the full meal deal. There are multiple modules that integrate out of the box. Because Banner is all I've ever used as a SIS, I can't contrast it with another program. I can say, it gets the job done for us. I will also say that a tremendous amount of time goes into strategizing how to get new functions to work for us and there always seems to be some catch that requires even more work. In general, the university has been hesitant to build too many modifications into Banner because they take a lot of time to maintain. Inevitably, a new update (of which there are MANY for Banner) will break stuff that isn't "vanilla." This is unfortunate because we've had some great ideas for how to make Banner better for us, but also understandable. If you're looking for a highly modular system, this isn't it. Banner has lots of components, but the components work the way they work and that's that. Also, don't expect very quick responses to bugs or glitches. If the bug is major, yes, it will be addressed. But, little function issues seem to be regularly overlooked.
Read full review Colleague Student is a great solution for smaller schools. I'm not sure it would work well at a large university (10,000 plus students) -- I'm not sure it has capacity to handle that. It is also well suited for universities where departments communicate well with each other. There is so much cross functionality, that if departments don't communicate well, issues could arise if one department makes changes without notifying or talking with other departments about the change
Becky Lambert Dean of Academic Services and Assistant Professor of Higher Education
Read full review Pros I think it's great to use if you are tracking grades for certain classes, especially if you'd like to see how students do, comparing midterm to final grades. If you have the permissions, you can see both. It's also good to track students individually. You can look up a certain semester, and see how they did in that particular time frame, but you can also see their cumulative gpa, or even look up their entire course history. Read full review Colleague offers a single reference point for all student data, which creates consistency and unity across campus and ensures students hear the same information from every source. Colleague recently updated its interface to be more accessible to all people. Previously, it was not accessible through any browser aside from Internet Explorer. Colleague provide helpful user restrictions that prevent departments from altering or erasing data they do not typically use. For example, I cannot change student billing and accidentally wreak havoc for the cashier's office. Read full review Cons One thing I miss from the previous version of Ellucian Banner, is the control + page down. I struggle with alt + page down. I love the Ellucian Banner favorites; however, it is a little difficult to navigate. I can honestly only think of 2 things that could be improved. I use Ellucian Banner daily. Read full review Develop API's that are vendor agnostic rather than selecting specific vendors (Clearinghouse, ImageNow). Colleague tends to be to reactionary to the changing needs in higher education rather than developing the future. Hound clients to pay extra for consulting (consultants are usually bad), rather than helping institutions to use the product. Seems to be the first thing help line personnel jump to rather than working with clients to figure out creative solutions. Rodney Parks University Registrar and Special Assistant to the Provost
Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have no reason not to renew with Ellucian - we are in deep with the ecosystem, and have Ellucian providing us with information technology support. If anything, should the opportunity arise, we'd probably consider adding a different ellucian tools into the suite of applications we already have on board.
Read full review Usability You definitely have to learn it before it becomes easy to use. It's better than it was, but it's still not entirely intuitive. You can't just look at it and play around to figure out how it works
Read full review Reliability and Availability It's pretty much up all the time.
Read full review Performance Has gotten much better due to new hardware.
Read full review Support Rating Our department generally does not contact the support center for Banner but the IT department does. That being said, in the seven years that I have been here, I have not once needed to contact the support center; we have had no glitches on Banner's side that needed to be addressed.
Read full review Implementation Rating very satisfied, along with the IT staff and ellucian support the upgrades do very well and have minimum down time.
Read full review Alternatives Considered PeopleSoft was more user-friendly. It also provided the ability to save and bookmark queries.
PeopleSoft will allow users to use common names to search for queries. Overall, it seemed much more current than Banner.
PeopleSoft provided enrollment data for specific sections which allowed one to spot trends of enrollment in a given class.
Read full review Ellucian Colleague remains the most cost competitive solution for our organization. Alternative solutions, have had ridiculously high migration costs and ongoing maintenance fees which have not been friendly toward a migration of our existing data. Some the features of the other solutions are very nice to "haves" but the reward has to out-weigh the cost of adoption.
Read full review Scalability being able to scale with hardware was easy and not cumbersome. We were allowed to user virtual machines which made things very scalable.
Read full review Return on Investment There is positive ROI on the product overall. It had reduced or allowed us to focus our staff members on something which is very use and it does the job in the background. The application has supported in a lot of ways in saving resources and utilizing them in very productive & efficient manner Read full review By keeping student's academic work, financial aid, and accounts receivable information in one location we are able to report without the need for data aggregation. Colleague's web applications allow the students themselves to perform tasks such as enrollment without assistance from staff members. Using customized rules that we can set up in Colleague we can trigger events to happen as data is entered. This eliminates the need not only for someone to remember to perform an additional task, but it also saves the time of performing the actual task. Read full review ScreenShots