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 is most suited for those within the education industry. For students and staff in particular, the Education Cloud allows seamless connectivity between each person and helps students stay on task. It can be very overwhelming as a student to have so many responsibilities in different areas, so Salesforce does a great job of offering many features that ease this process.
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 Great use of integrating across all aspects of enrollment. Easy to create tasks for counselors to remember to call prospective students and keep up to date on goals. Reporting is fabulous inside of Salesforce. All of the Apps in the App Exchange. 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 It’s hard to run reports or create working “views” for Enrollment/Student Advisor teams that include both Leads and Contacts in the same report. Some fields do not map from Lead to Contact object. When a student transitions from application to acceptance, some dropdown and fill-in fields completely disappear from the student’s page in Salesforce. Every version of Salesforce I’ve used has this problem. Salesforce overall is clunky and confusing for the average user. We require thorough Salesforce training for new hires on all teams because it’s not user-friendly or obvious what to click on to achieve a specific task. 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 It was really so easy to sign up and get going with the whole process
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 People will respond on time even though Salesforce is such a large organization. This also includes various methods of getting support beyond just calling - they have dedicated reps, chat, chatter, etc that all make the experience more pleasant.
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 I have not used similar products and I am new to this role. Salesforce has been very easy to learn and I appreciate the support and ability to access the platform when I need to. I was able to easily learn the program and become skilled in what I needed to do. It also made the transition to digital forms quite easy
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 Positive: Our entire company is more aligned because while still complying with FERPA, the right people have access to student records while also having the correct permissions. Positive: we can integrate with our partners who also use Salesforce, while still complying with FERPA. Negative: we've needed to hire a Salesforce Development team with multiple people to accurately customize the tool to work for us. Read full review ScreenShots Salesforce.org Education Cloud Screenshots