Jenzabar now offers SONIS, a student information system (SIS) oriented around the needs of smaller higher education institutions. Jenzabar supports the former SONISWEB product since its acquisition of original developer RJM Systems in 2015.
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SAP for Higher Education and Research
Score 7.8 out of 10
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SAP for Higher Education and Research is a suite of scalable interrelated applications designed to support the various needs of higher education institutions, such as student lifecycle management, tuition and revenue management, grant and research management, research planning and analytics, and other institutional performance related modules.
We often had students who came and took a class or completed a program, left, and then came back for something else at a later time. It was nice to be able to have someone in Jenzabar SONIS with multiple statuses. They could be in as a Student for the current class while still being in as an Alumni for the program they had graduated from. Most of our programs are set up so the students within that program are all taking the same courses at the same time. The bulk registration feature made it easy to enroll one student and then use that student's enrollment to quickly enroll all of the others in the program. That was a huge time saver. We had letters and emails that we wanted to send out at specific times in the application process. The Activity tool in Jenzabar SONIS made it easy for us to have some things that were automatically added to a person's record and others that we could add as needed. We could then run timed letters or emails and get our communication sent out. We had some challenges with Jenzabar SONIS because we have a number of certificate programs that are only one semester in length. We often had students who would complete one certificate (program) in the fall and then complete another one in the spring. Many of the reports pulled data only for the active enrollment so we had to go back and manually pull the data for the enrollment from the other semester if we needed something for the full school year.
When I was at university, I used this product, which was quite new to me at the time. Since starting at my new institution, I've had the opportunity to learn more. It contains a lot of features and resources that facilitate integration with other systems and improve the efficiency of procedures. The software is not the simplest to use or comprehend. It has many features, making it challenging to learn everything. I had to enlist assistance.
SONIS sorts my advisees by class and then by name. This is NOT useful. There should be an option for sorting by name only. I advise almost fifty students. It wastes my time looking for them in the sophomore listing, then the junior listing......
When registration of a student for semester courses is complete, there should be an option to print out only the courses scheduled, NOT the entire page which shows available courses at the bottom.
Error Handling : Sometimes it created some issues where there was not enough explanation. But I think it is mostly related with the consulting company making poor development.
In every period, when students tries to access to the system all together and sign up for the courses, it always crashed for minimum a week. I think it requires Load Balancing.
The options we used were very limited there, I think there is more capabilities for collaboration is still needed. For example, exams, homeworks etc can be managed by itç
We changed databases in 2011 because the company we were with was going to quit supporting our software. We evaluated a number of different SISs available at the time and felt Jenzabar SONIS provided the best tools for our school. Most of the others were either geared more for adult education, individual course offerings or for schools that primarily had degree-seeking students. We needed something that could address both needs.We felt Jenzabar SONIS did that best of the ones we reviewed.
With its many partnerships and connections with other software used in higher education and research, SAP may assist institutions in streamlining their operations and enhancing access functionality. I chose SAP because I am already familiar with the other SAP products. I couldn't think of any other tools which stacks up against SAP for Higher Education and Research
There were a lot of other platforms also used along with SAP for Higher Education and Research, I believe reducing these needs would be very important overall.
At the background, there are a lot of important functionalities reside like Accounting, HR etc. and this is where SAP for Higher Education and Research comes very powerful I believe
Cloud version would be a lot useful especially considering that, user logins are always seasonal so extra help always needed to balance the loads in the network.
