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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Tyler SIS
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Tyler Technologies offers Tyler SIS, a suite of school and student management applications, including online student registration, school inventory management, Classroom 360 mobile accessible student information management for teachers, Student 360 with portal for grades, announcements, and homework for students and parents, and other features.
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 it comes to tracking grades and attendance or even just entering grades and attendance, this has been the best system I have used in fifteen years in education. The administrative side has many features and tools that allow us as a school or district to identify students that would benefit from specific interventions. Overall, it has been a great product for us. I am not aware of any scenarios where Tyler SIS is less appropriate than other products.
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.
Need for labels of all of the navigation pictures. It is difficult for me to know what button I am clicking into if I haven't accessed that part of the software in a while.
It would be nice to have a tutorial to know how to navigate the software better. It can be difficult to navigate at the beginning.
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.
Everything about Tyler SIS has been better than 4Clicks. I remember it being a running joke in my building about how the "four clicks" was such a selling point. Sometimes it was not really four clicks until you reached what you need, but it also felt as though it required four clicks to even do a simple thing. The gradebook system alone was infuriating with how many clicks (and the loading) it took to enter grades.
