Ellucian Colleague

Banner & PeopleSoft are using the very expensive Oracle DB - while they all have very similar features. Currently, another solution provider is available - WorkDay: but they are still very new that they do not have all the necessary Federal and State Reports. Their FInancial Aid is lacking too.

Ellucian Colleague remains the most cost competitive solution for our organization. Alternative solutions, have had ridiculously high migration costs and ongoing maintenance fees which have not been friendly toward a migration of our existing data. Some the features of the other solutions are very nice to "haves" but the reward has to out-weigh the cost of adoption.

Ellucian Colleague has been in use at my institution for over 20 years. We have recently reevaluated the solution and, from a financial perspective, it was our decision to stick with it for the future as well. We have realigned our budget working with Ellucian and partnering for the future by adopting early access to new modules and providing feedback.

We originally started on Jenzabar Cars platform and then evaluated PeopleSoft and SCT Banner.
Colleague won out on cost compared to PeopleSoft and features over Banner.
We noticed that PeopleSoft had a better technical underpinning with a greater integration with workflow.
Colleague had a better out of the box experience than either of the other two even though we heavily customized it from there.

I did not use Jenzabar as extensively as Colleague, but they perform similar functions for student information tracking. I think Colleague is more appropriate for use across campus, as its student billing and scheduling options exceed Jenzabar. Jenzabar, however, offers better tools for use exclusively in student affairs. If an organization wants to track all student data, they should consider Colleague.

Colleague Student is much more user-friendly in my opinion for both back-end users like myself and for our students. We have found that our students who were here in our transition to Colleague Student raved about how much easier this system was to use for registration and other functions they needed.

Workday's cloud based system has more flexibility than Colleague Student. While it seems Ellucian is responding with developmental efforts, the company waited too long to begin the process.

Best way to keep all student data in one place and seeing how information is being kept consisted. Overall, it is helpful for us advisors to be able to keep track of things that our files wouldn't be able to note since there is a lot of information on there, including departmental notes.

I have not personally used any other SMS systems.