Ellucian Colleague vs. Jenzabar ONE

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

Jenzabar ONE is strongly suited for an all-in one solution for higher ed. The modern web-based platform make it efficient for end users. An institution that wants a full communication platform to connect with students, Jenzabar is the right product for your school. As with any product, development with Jenzabar One continues which is a good thing but also may cause some schools to want more features more quickly.

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

• Advising
• Quicker processing
• Easy to use
• Great to see student full academic history

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

• Almost every module requires extensive training and building to have it function for your institution.
• Some of the automated housing matchings is difficult to set up and must be changed each semester.

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

While I'm familiar with many other SIS in higher education, J1 is the only one currently in use

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

• We have not taken full advantage of all the modules that Jenzabar One provides yet. However, in news releases and product documents many improvements have been made.