Item: Ellucian Banner
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Ellucian Banner

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Ellucian Banner contains all of our student data, which for a university is basically its lifeblood. Faculty and students use it for tasks including registration & advising; staff use it for financial and academic services. It also serves as a data source for near-real-time reporting. It handles financial aid, many communications (like financial aid award letter or enrollment verification documents, or transcripts), and admissions workflows. In addition, it interfaces to many other subsidiary programs that only handle a subset of business processes.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It stores data and manages users well.
It interoperates with other Ellucian products well.
It offer good role-based security, which supports compliance.
Important Oracle features like Data Guard and data encryption are well-supported.

Cons

It still runs on COBOL: the code base is getting stale.
The company's web portal is based on stale software stack, with little visible development.
Updates are slow and often interlocked with seemingly-unrelated modules.
Print output formatting is nearly nonexistent, requiring use of an expensive post-processor.

Most Important Features

Data storage.
Flexibility accommodate our curriculum.
Incorporates regulatory updates.

Return on Investment

It allowed the university to retire a mainframe, which was quite expensive.
It added web access to student data, which was a big win, and since has also added a mobile app.
It processes many things in real time, which the mainframe had to run as a nightly batch.

Alternatives Considered

We actually selected a different product, but Banner's then-publisher promptly bought it and deprecated it. Banner was our second choice. There are newer products which are web-based and have great features, but the effort to migrate to one of them exceeds the resources we can offer now -- both within IT and in other departments.

Key Insights

Do you think Ellucian Banner delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Ellucian Banner's feature set?

Did Ellucian Banner live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Ellucian Banner go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Ellucian Banner again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Apache Tomcat

Likelihood to Recommend

It really is a market leader for higher education, but it's showing its age. So core features work well, because they're running COBOL routines that are years or decades old: well-polished, perhaps, but never cutting edge. I don't particularly like the software or the company, but it's dominant in the market segment where they operate.

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