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.
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inRESONANCE
Score 7.0 out of 10
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inRESONANCE, a Community Brands company, offers their student management platform to independent schools, which includes basic parent-teacher communication support features along with registration and enrollment support, billing, interactive website, and also general fundraising, gift and pledge management, and event management.
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
Well suited to having the ability to import information when there are large numbers of scholars to be updated, such as graduations or moving up a grade. On the other hand, the program is geared towards a school and we are not a school so we had to do a lot of tweaking for our purposes.
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.
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.
There are a lot of terms used for different information in the database. It would be nice if that could be streamlined somehow and more intuitive for the users.
There are a lot of details to go through to make custom list or create reports. If you don't do these processes regularly, it seems you are always relearning the process.
There was a point when data changes needed to be done in two different places, but I think we may have resolved that issue.
Brian, our representative, as been tremendous. His response time is outstanding - and if he is able to alter the tool on the spot, he will. We've been able to do more sophisticated maneuvers because of his willingness to problem-solve with us. When the functionality isn't there, it is also a very honest conversation and we know when we have to work outside of the tool.
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.
We were using the CRM database system, however it was too proprietary and when we wanted to make changes or customize we were continually paying an outside consultant to get things done. With inRESONANCE, we are able to make the updates, and customize as we need to internally. It has saved us a significant amount of money in this regard.
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.
Annual fund tracking is very easy and pulling simple things like donors/non-donors is easy. Fine for a straight-forward appeal.
If you are going with a comprehensive/combine ask - this is not the tool for you. There's no way to split gifts with % allocation. We're losing money in spending time trying to figure out how to configure pledges in accordance with the software.
