Ellucian

Banner is a fantastic data management tool.

Pros:

It's a rock-solid application that you can count on. That in and of itself is a huge deal. It works, has minimal bugs, and is the backbone of how we manage our data. When other applications are having a problem or we have a data integrity question, we often say "What is it in Banner?" because we know it will be correct there.

Cons:

It can be a little scary at first to new users, which I can speak to from experience. But the new interface is definitely helping with that. I would also love to see Ellucian develop a proper higher-education CRM tool. We had to go with another vendor because we needed something more comprehensive than what Banner could offer (Application Reviewing, Events Management, etc). I think Ellucian is missing out on a huge financial opportunity and could take a massive chunk out of the Higher Ed CRM market if they were to develop one.

Mixed Reviews

Comments: They are an established Higher Education software that is on the cutting edge with a lot of what they offer. The partnerships they offer with vendors seems to fall short in some cases. The support they offer for the products is generally good. But depending on the application may depend on how quickly they respond to support questions/issues.

Pros:

Offers a variety of different software solutions that integrates with its ERP (Banner or Colleague). Along with a variety of ancillary applications that integrate with the ERP.

Cons:

Cost would be by far the biggest issue. The second would be that as of late the company has a tendency to tout its upcoming or just released products will work but in reality it is being built and developed as the sales people speak. To be fair their established software generally works well and no complaints.

Difficult to use | Difficult to maintain | Expensive | Releases are poorly tested by Ellucian QA

Comments: -Business users in all departments find Banner difficult to use
-Database engineers find Banner difficult to maintain
-IT staff finds Banner difficult to support Banner is obsolete in the technological age we live; there are cloud finance, HCM, CRM, and student information applications which integrate well with each-other and outperform banner in nearly every category.

Pros:

Customer support Is friendly and responsive.

Cons:

-There is a Massive maintenance overhead -There is a need for business users to constantly watch the community for systemic issue and bug alerts -Documentation is intentionally over-complicated to encourage the purchase of Ellucian consulting -Implementation is more complicated than competitor applications due to the age of the product -Data is stored un-uniformly in 'shotgun' style in the database making migration away from banner very difficult. -There is no dashboard -- the entire user interface is a very weak showing -Self service is impossible to leverage for reliable company-wide / student-wide document delivery. -Almost no reporting capabilities are built-in; admins must instead write database queries for end users.

Provide more support for end users!

Comments: The underlying system is robust and stable, but difficult to manage, especially in terms of data entry and updates. Making changes can have unanticipated ripple effects.

Pros:

The end user product has good visual flow and is designed to protect student data.

Cons:

This is not an intuitive system, especially to users making a transition from the company's older product which was not visually or logically similar at all. Support materials are not adequate on the web site, unless you are a (paying) implementation team member.

Ellucians

Comments: The ability to update our Customer Relationship Management system with exported data-sets.

Pros:

Since this uses Oracle and SQL, I like having the ability to write reports for assistance in extracting data from the data tables we use.

Cons:

The software has many different modules and the last version of software released helped out with a more intuitive interface.