Boardingware, headquartered in Auckland, offers their student management system for boarding schools, built around managing the needs particular to boarding schools, such as student care and student tracking.
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Ellucian Banner
Score 6.6 out of 10
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Ellucian offers Banner educational ERP, including its student management system emphasizing control and reporting of process-oriented facets of education such as grading and attendance.
This is hands down the best application on the market in terms of making sure parents and staff understand where students are at any given time during the day. It also has done a great job of expanding into buy-in areas for students such as having event sign-ups inside the application. Having parent accounts also does a great job of keeping lines of communication open between the parents, school, and students.
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.
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.
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.
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
I gave this rating because Boardingware support is unbelievable. They are quick to reply and have a chat feature that they not only are there for most of the day but you can leave a note if they are not available and they get back to you very quickly. I thoroughly enjoyed any conversations I had with support from Boardingware.
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.
Senior Systems did not work as well and the functionality from the administrative side is not as user-friendly. I often felt like it was down and not working properly, or that I could not find where certain documents are. I believe that for a boarding school community Boardingware was much more user-friendly, and did not take as many steps in order to get the job done quickly.
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.
We were tracking student leave by hand or by an in-house program. Both of these became inefficient and/or unusable. Having Boardingware has expedited the process. It's hard to give numbers, but we're several days ahead of where we used to be in terms of tracking students' leave for Thanksgiving break.
Parent involvement was always an issue, but with Boardingware parents must approve a leave before we (the school) does. This makes parents take responsibility for their child which happens less than it should.
Having access to flagged students with health issues makes it much easier to plan field trips. We can easily know who should have what meds or epi pens based on their Boardingware profile. Safety awareness and prevention has gone up due to this feature.
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
