Ellucian Colleague vs. Frontline Student Information System (SIS)

Colleague Student is a great solution for smaller schools. I'm not sure it would work well at a large university (10,000 plus students) -- I'm not sure it has capacity to handle that. It is also well suited for universities where departments communicate well with each other. There is so much cross functionality, that if departments don't communicate well, issues could arise if one department makes changes without notifying or talking with other departments about the change

Incentivized

Frontline is perfect for managing student info, such as parental relationships, grades, IEPs, and other notes about each particular student. Frontline makes running reports quite easy, as you can group different info together for it to pull into a single report document. I wouldn't recommend Frontline for those wanting to do more detailed grading, or for those wanting to quickly enter information within a limited amount of time.

Incentivized

• Colleague offers a single reference point for all student data, which creates consistency and unity across campus and ensures students hear the same information from every source.
• Colleague recently updated its interface to be more accessible to all people. Previously, it was not accessible through any browser aside from Internet Explorer.
• Colleague provide helpful user restrictions that prevent departments from altering or erasing data they do not typically use. For example, I cannot change student billing and accidentally wreak havoc for the cashier's office.

Incentivized

• Student Reports.
• Grade calculation.
• Student information.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Speed (sometimes it is slow to load information).
• Auto-save (it would be great to have information saved automatically because if I get distracted or if my browser freezes, I don't have to start from the beginning if I didn't get a chance to save).
• Freezing (sometimes when running more detailed reports or trying to quickly enter grades, the program will freeze for minutes at a time, and I'll have to refresh).

Incentivized

Ellucian Colleague remains the most cost competitive solution for our organization. Alternative solutions, have had ridiculously high migration costs and ongoing maintenance fees which have not been friendly toward a migration of our existing data. Some the features of the other solutions are very nice to "haves" but the reward has to out-weigh the cost of adoption.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Frontline has helped streamline the way we manage student registration.
• We've had fewer user errors when using the Frontline software, likely because the UI is easy to navigate.
• We've been able to more closely care for students, as we can track information about them as they move from grade level to grade level.

Incentivized