Item: Blackbaud Education Management Solutions
Rating: 7
Author: Jennifer Cleary

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use the "on" products as a (somewhat) all-in-one web and database solution for the school. Currently we're using the full functionality of onMessage for our front end site, onRecord as the SIS, onBoard for Admissions, but are not using the full functionality of onCampus. We are still using Haiku as our LMS, and though we intend to explore fully using onCampus—i doubt we'll make the switch as it's user interface for teachers (i.e. posting assignments, classroom, etc) is not as streamlined. Also unable to use the Raiser's Edge sync tool (Connect RE) to streamline workflow as planned prior to purchase.

Pros and Cons

High level of customization (from the user's end) for onMessage pages
Nice user interface for several parts of the "back-end"/ portals
The chat help function is convenient
School forms (for online permission slips) - really awesome, and were a huge hit with parents. Except there is no way to organize prior years' forms, so I think they will be less than thrilled this year.

"Thinking through" features seems to be a problem, so most of them feel somewhat "incomplete." For example: School Forms are great, but without the ability to organize the dozens of prior years' permission forms for parents (i.e., re-order, or hide, or even change button color) the feature is going to go from great to terrible pretty quickly for parents. Same with SmartTuition integration, or the ConnectRE tool (which is perfect for maybe 40% of scenarios and requires manual exceptions for the rest,) Adding News is annoying (no WYSIWYG option for Header styles; can't enlarge the dialog box). Photo galleries are a problem when it comes to the responsive design. (No "lightbox" viewer, so any portrait images not only stretch to fill left to right, but also push content way down the page.) Navigation on the mobile display is ok, but requires an extra tap to get to a certain page. (i.e. Tap Admissions, then have to tap Admissions again, and then you see L2) I could go on about things that look/work great at first glance but still end up causing a headache. Still, by and large, the benefits are mostly worth the annoyances, though everything takes longer on my end to find workable solutions—including changing our own work practices to fit the website/database's demands.
The fact that the online event registration function isn't responsive is just plain ridiculous.
I'd love to see more ability to integrate, or even SSO, with other 3rd party solutions.

Return on Investment

Unsure. Time savings for integration may be offset by time spent in other areas.

Support Rating

Chat is convenient, and for most questions have answers. However, not so good at helping to "think through" a creative workaround.

Likelihood to Recommend

Workable when you have staff that can spend dedicated time with the products; troubleshooting, updating, managing, helping users, and finding creative work arounds.

Difficult to implement fully for the (natural) competing priorities of a school—i.e., should we use the onCampus LMS since there are benefit to our parents in seeing schedules/homework/etc, but more complicated to use for our faculty/students?

Ease of Integration

Not enough 3rd party apps to integrate with

Systems Integrated With

SchoolPass
Blackboard

SchoolPass is a 1-way sync for contact card data. It was relatively easy to do, however, communication was not clear from Blackbaud as to specific steps required. Blackboard (Connect5) WAS a sync with Contact Card Emergency Contact data, however, Blackbaud went hands-off the tool, and BlackBoard/Connect5 has yet to develop a new sync tool. (Result, I ended the integration and will be selecting a different text alert product.)