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 It's a great system for storing student information and extracting it into usable data. If you're looking for a robust report creation system, though, it's not the best choice unless you have someone skilled with programming languages.
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 The ease of data exports into easy Excel Spreadsheets is one of my favorite features. It allows me the ability to quickly see data and arrange it for ease of use of our teachers, administrative staff, and stakeholders. Administrative Plus can be easily customized to display student record data in the most relevant way for our organization. The customer service support team is always quick to respond, and extremely helpful. I can reach them through user forums, emails, or a phone call, and I know they will always provide a fast and thorough response. 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 Their reports feature needs to be more user friendly. They use their own personal code to write reports, and it's not very user friendly to the average person. It would be much nicer to have a WYSIWYG editor where I could create what I wanted without having to know their special language. The system could use a more modern face lift, and perhaps a more intuitive interface. The sync process between the Parent, Teacher, and Student Portals is slow. Data should be continually synced between the two in real time, instead of initiated by the user. 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 We were using Aeries for our student information system prior to Rediker, and it was a messy database with too much redundancy, making it difficult to extract the data you were looking for from the system.
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 A less expensive alternative as far as Student Information Systems go. Read full review ScreenShots