A must-have for Ellucian Colleague users
Updated May 04, 2016
A must-have for Ellucian Colleague users
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Entrinsik Informer
Our Registrar, Human Resources, and IT departments heavily rely on Informer, but almost every department has at least one user. Ellucian Colleague is used for crucial services like housing transcripts and course records and assigning student and employee ID numbers. Colleague has no useful way to report on this data, so Informer fills that need.
Pros
- Informer's Calculation columns are extremely useful, particularly "Script" columns. They allow users to write Javascript snippets that analyze other columns and display complex calculations, so long as you can write the Javascript to do so.
- Informer's Scheduler is full-featured and vital to automating its use. Avid Informer users like to schedule reports to write data directly to servers of ours (accessible while on-campus or through VPN), and non-users like to schedule reports to be emailed to them. Both replace the need for staff to remember to periodically run reports.
- At a basic level, Informer is vital for Ellucian Colleague users simply because it can easily query records and display them as a spreadsheet. It's supremely disappointing that Colleague users suffered so long without this feature.
Cons
- Informer needs more predefined date formats in its Column Display Editor. The existing 5 do not meet everyone's needs.
- It's a minor UI issue, but Informer's Edit Columns view stutters and displays empty space when scrolling left or right. It may be because I'm using Safari on Mac OS X, and Informer isn't designed for input devices that scroll with "momentum" (as Apple calls it).
- The Reports Listing takes longer to load reports than I believe it should. At least a progress bar displays to tell you when it's complete.
I have experience with Advizor AnalystX, and it was just awful. It is advertised as an interactive reporting tool, in which you can use your mouse to select and segment constituents by where they live (by clicking on a map), how much they've given to your institution, when they last gave, etc. In practice, their map feature was unusable; it's a static map image (imagine a paper map hung on your wall), rather than draggable and zoomable Google Maps, and it required hours of work to configure one map region. As far as computing constituents' giving statistics, it required way too much back-end work to build simple giving totals.
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