Ellucian Banner vs. Google Workspace

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.

Incentivized

Google Workspace does offer several different plans that can match well with the stage of your business. As your business grows, the higher plans can provide the better tooling or expanded features/products to scale with your needs. It would probably become very complicated to swap over to, if you are deeply embedded with another competitor. But, it could be a nice platform to consolidate several disconnected systems under one roof.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Google Calendar...amazing. I don't need to ask team members when they're busy anymore and play this game of bouncing times back and forth. All I need to do is enter their email address and it shows my calendar and theirs side by side and then select the day and time I find that works best for the both of us.
• I actually prefer Google Meet over Zoom. Zoom bogs down my computer and I find their UI overcomplicated for what it actually does. Google Meet is simple and does practically everything Zoom does without needing to pay any extra money.
• Sheets integrates with our CRM (Copper) so it's perfect for us. Being able to export information out of our CRM into sheets and then create pivot tables from that data makes our lives a million times better.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Pricing is a little bit higher than other services
• The cost of each email inbox costs the same whether you want just email or all of the features. For example, we wanted a support email address that we could setup our support desk with. The cost of that added account is the same as the account I use with all of the features.
• They removed their free tier for small organizations like mine and restricted the free tier from adding new domain names. This was likely due to abuse, but everyone lost the privilege of the free service.

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.

Incentivized

There is no better solution for cloud storage and real time collaboration. The amount of features included in G Suite is unmatched and out of other things we’ve tried over the years, nothing comes close to being as great of a tool.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Google Workspace is incredibly intuitive and user friendly. It's easy to adopt through simple features, for example the prompts to enable Gemini on each call for note taking is reliable, and helps to stop you forgetting to use the feature. The main reason for a strong rating is the consistency and reliability, whilst there's definitely areas for improvement, for example additional calendar features (sharing), or deeper functionality in sheets. The level that it provides means that anyone adopting it will be able to take full use of features within a day or two. Gmail, calendar and the documentation suite contain all the basic features for a small / medium business to run at a high level day to day, with minimal downtime or learning curves.

Incentivized

It's pretty much up all the time.

Incentivized

Has gotten much better due to new hardware.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

My experiences of getting support have been positive. Calling in is not overly difficult, but it does require getting a PIN. The knowledge of those responding to the calls has been impressive. I have managed to work with them to fix two Google bugs that I had identified. These bugs required a some technical expertise and the support staff were able to understand the issue and forward the concerns to the appropriate persons. The first bug was fixed with 24 hours. The second bug took a little longer, but it was also more complicated to reproduce.

Incentivized

very satisfied, along with the IT staff and ellucian support the upgrades do very well and have minimum down time.

Incentivized

nothing to say

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.

Incentivized

There are lots of competitors to various tools in Workspace, like Meet versus Zoom. However, Microsoft is the other big competitor I can think of for Google Workspace as a whole. To me, at least, the strength of Workspace is how easy it is to share and collaborate with others. For items that I only need for myself and can keep on my own computer, I typically rely on Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. For items that I need to share, I turn to Workspace a lot. Being able to collaborate in real-time and not having to send documents back and forth is so amazing, and such a time saver. And I love that Workspace is also a built-in tool with Dropbox now.

Incentivized

being able to scale with hardware was easy and not cumbersome. We were allowed to user virtual machines which made things very scalable.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Zero to no time managing tools allows us to focus on work saving us time and money
• Google Workspace allowed us to seamlessly transition to a fully remote workforce when the Coronavirus pandemic started - no lost time or productivity.
• Easily able to extend our workspace and add features, e.g. Voice, saving us time implementing other services.

Incentivized