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.
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Ellucian Colleague
Score 7.3 out of 10
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Ellucian offers Colleague educational ERP, including a student information system supporting higher education institutions with student admissions and registration, academics, curriculum management, and other aspects of student management.
Banner & PeopleSoft are using the very expensive Oracle DB - while they all have very similar features. Currently, another solution provider is available - WorkDay: but they are still very new that they do not have all the necessary Federal and State Reports. Their …
Ellucian Colleague has been in use at my institution for over 20 years. We have recently reevaluated the solution and, from a financial perspective, it was our decision to stick with it for the future as well. We have realigned our budget working with Ellucian and partnering …
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.
Ellucian Colleague is well suited for student academic information recall, such as advisement details, courses, primary choice, GPAs, and demographic information critical to in-time decision-making for faculty and institutional leadership. Less appropriate scenarios would include our financial management needs, such as accounting, ledgers, and financial transactions. These functions are better suited to other CRMs.
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.
Colleague Student allows us to integrate services across the university for students with staff in various departments able to see the information about a student that they need to serve the student well.
Colleague Student makes it easy to see our students current academic record as well as transfer courses (and information) and their past records here at the university. Our old system required a lot of homegrown connection points to be able to see all of this information. It was neither quick nor easy.
Colleague Student makes the registration process for our students much easier. Our old system was clunky and would often prevent students from registering for a class but not provide information for them about why. Colleague Student makes it easy for students to see if they are missing a pre-requisite, have a hold, etc., so they can know how to get their registration back on track.
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.
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
For decades, Ellucian Colleague has served the University as our primary student record-retention CRM. Its functionality has weathered many recent trends in CRM development and continues to produce the needed results for our constituency and the size of our university. We look forward to continuing to utilize Ellucian Colleague in the future.
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.
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.
I did not use Jenzabar as extensively as Colleague, but they perform similar functions for student information tracking. I think Colleague is more appropriate for use across campus, as its student billing and scheduling options exceed Jenzabar. Jenzabar, however, offers better tools for use exclusively in student affairs. If an organization wants to track all student data, they should consider Colleague.
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
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.
