Likelihood to Recommend Fiorano would be a good choice for small-medium businesses that need integration capabilities with clients but don't want to carry the burden of an in-house development team. The software can be used by technical non-developers and the organization offers professional services to get you off the ground. For larger organizations that have an in-house development team and a wealth of internal resources, other "enterprise grade" middleware/ESB solutions may be more applicable.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Fioranio's underlying design is very good. In the event of a sudden shutdown, it would - in theory - be able to recover messages that were in-flight. The visual design surface is very appealing and provides a very quick and easy way to decipher data flows. It has a definite advantage over traditional develop and document processes where documentation tends to be out of date. With Fiorano, the flow is already visualized in a relatively easy to understand way. One thing that Fiorano had over some competitors was connections into our AS400 data queues. Not all middleware solutions have that - which is a boon for organizations that still run an iSeries in the back-end. The support people are generally very well educated and easy to get a hold of if you have a support agreement in place. Read full review Keeps information secure, safe, and encrypted. Student information is easy to navigate when needed by authorized users. Allows for teachers to have their classes organized to take attendance easily. Read full review Cons Fiorano scalability was a problem for us - specifically we were told about a limit of the number of components that could be run on a single server. This was not explained during the pre-sales and is a serious limitation of the platform. Some of the components in Fiorano are just poorly implemented. For instance, we used the FTP component to download a large multi-GB file. Apparently, that component requires equal RAM to file size. So, if you download a 10GB file, you'll need at least 10GB of RAM to do so. Stability was also problematic for us - some of the components or entire data flows would suddenly stop for no reason. At time they coudln't even be restarted and we were forced to restart the Fiorano service. Not an ideal situation to be in for mission critical data flows. Consistency is a problem for the components in Fiorano. There are wide ranges of design variations in the UI between components. Even in the same component, it could be the case that you'd have to switch back to the "old" component UI to view certain important settings. This made development more difficult. 3rd party support doesn't exist - perhaps it isn't popular enough? There isn't a community supporting Fiorano which means that problems require you to go to a support person. Read full review So many features, many we don't know how to use. We have had regular issues with the website not working. Comment system for report cards needs sorting (or a search option). Read full review Alternatives Considered We are evaluating options such as Apache Nifi as a possible replacement for our Fiorano data flows. We've also used PilotFish technologies that has been able to fit the same use cases as Fiorano (minus the visual component). Generally the products mentioned above excelled in areas of stability and through-put compared to Fiorano, but none have been able to consolidate our ESB components into a single platform.
Read full review I am not familiar with another software system as I have only been in the organization when they have used Tyler SIS
Read full review Return on Investment Fiorano added another piece of complexity to our ESB solution but has not pulled its weight as far as ROI. As we started ramping up on the product, it continued to show it's short-comings and we are working now to ramp it down. Overall, it has not been a positive experience. Read full review There are so many features that we have not had to buy additional products (so it saves us money). Tyler SIS also makes things easier for parents by consolidating all information they need. There have been many times where the website has been down, and it essentially shuts us down until the issue is resolved. Read full review ScreenShots