Oracle's PeopleSoft Campus Solutions is a student management system option.
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Tyler SIS
Score 7.5 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
