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.
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PeopleSoft Campus Solutions
Score 6.9 out of 10
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Oracle's PeopleSoft Campus Solutions is a student management system option.
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.
PeopleSoft Campus Solutions is a fully robust solution for large campuses and University systems. The tools it provides are powerful and scalable. It can handle anything from 1,000 students to over 100,000. The issue because spreading that cost around. Smaller schools will probably need a dedicated functional staff and an information systems staff to handle the chore of managing the system. Although many of the tools allow for automated processing it take a considerable amount of effort to get to that point and the upfront and maintaining costs should be considered.
The Query Manager tool is useful - especially for users who are not comfortable writing SQL queries. Query Manager also allows Security staff to dictate exactly what access to grant to query writers.
Campus Solutions offers several batch-style functions, such as batch transcript requests and batch degree conferral. There is a Population Selection option that allows you to use a query or Excel file to specify the students who are in the batch.
The Communication Generation process allows users to create batch emails or letters that include mail-merge style data for each individual receiving the communication. There is a Microsoft Word plugin that allows you to craft the message that will be sent, and they can be sent on a set schedule or when certain trigger conditions occur.
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.
We don't like that you cannot export student grades and information into an excel spreadsheet or document that allows you to edit when necessary. Other tools do this but for a system us robust as PeopleSoft we are surprised you are not able to do this.
Continuing with the schedule, in order to see how many students are registered in a section one has to click on that section which is another waste of time. Each section has a blue square meaning full and a green circle meaning not full. Why can't the number of students be shown instead, or in addition? And to top it off, the number of students is shown so low that one has to scroll each time to see it.
Occasionally, PeopleSoft will randomly stop work, and you will lose all the information you were working on, so I recommend saving your work frequently. PeopleSoft is also not the most user-friendly student information systems. The new update did improve its aesthetic appeal though.
Relying on Oracle system administrators to do all updates and handle any problems that may occur. Sometimes you feel a little helpless and too reliant on the vendor. It takes a while for our admins to update the software because we have so many custom configurations and custom bolt-ons so they all have to be tested thoroughly to make sure nothing breaks when migrated to production. Because of this, our university is always behind when it comes to system updates.
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.
When you open a service request you will get contacted in short order. They will usually develop a patch or hot fix in a reasonable amount of time. You do usually need to keep the software updated and will want to be on the latest versions.
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.
PeopleSoft Campus Solutions has been the software of choice between Jenzebar and Campus vue as the user interface is easier, students seem to understand their progress and the system better than the other two softwares I have used. I would recommend this as all things student related are in one portal area.
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.
