Ellucian Features

Mobile friendly self service Integration through Ellucian XE Active user community on Ellucian's eCommunities social media platform

Reporting. Expect to spend money on a reporting tool.

Very functional and customizable to your school. We get the opportunity to let the company know what we want in the software and they usually update to meet the various schools needs. Very aware of all federal guidelines and requirements.

Training for use of the module or processes would be nice when something new is implemented. Several screens and options are usually available with short descriptions.

Once you learn the terminology to search by, using the software becomes a lot easier. I frequently use reports for tracking open invoices and running payments. I like that the system is dynamic in that it updates quickly when another user is making a change.

It was a difficult system for me to learn and I couldn't find much training material for it. The reports you can run are basic and need a lot of manipulation to do any analytics.

The solution is flexible enough that each of our functional departments can use it effectively to accomplish their objectives. Our two largest user groups are Financial Aid and Accounting, each of which uses it daily. What isn't available OOTB can typically be added via customizations, although customizations often present problems when upgrades happen.

In my opinion, the solution has a very poor design. It consists of many, many UI screens that are accessed by typing in acronyms. This may work well for power users that memorize all the acronyms but there's been several instances where users have had issues, only to discover a 'new' screen that can offer the information they need. Simply put, if you don't know the acronym, your life will be difficult.

The product integrates with other software, i.e. Leepfrog (catalog and course inventory management system), Degreeworks (degree auditing/graduation software)

Speaks a foreign language that you have to learn. Quite the learning curve. The implementation process can be lengthy. Did not always feel supported by the implementation team.

Recruit has some great reports, integrates with both Eventbrite and Salesforce and can really streamline enrollment processes fo4 a school.

Implementation is painful, at best. Customer support is difficult because no one seems to understand the product. Customizing for a community college is difficult, as well.

The community that is always ready to help each other. You can reach out to hundreds of users and get answers.

Upgrades can be very time consuming and complex, the reporting is not up to standard and some user functionality is not easy.

the ability to see all the course work, history, current, gpa's, holds, etc at one place

still isn't always correct, some courses show up in places where they don't belong

It was super easy to use when we didn't run into freezing issues. Allows us to pull up any student information that we need and found a way to troubleshoot successfully.

Sometimes it seems that there are way too many extra steps for no reason. Although it was easy to use, there is a learning curve to master.

We liked the idea of a connected suite that worked with most of our existing software.

The consultants were very much at odds with each other and added confusion to the process. It also turns out that it didn't work with our existing software even when the vendors were listed as compatible on the Ellucian partner site. It also turns out that some of our 3rd party software would have worked, but we were told that it wouldn't. In the end the confusion and lack of understanding/ability from Ellucian consultants cost us tens of thousands of additional dollars during our deployment.

When Ellucian's products were first released--decades ago--they were cutting edge. Banner, their SIS (Student Information System) quickly became the industry standard for enterprise databases on college campuses which transformed the way higher education leaders use data to make informed decisions. Their products continue to be effective for large universities that have every module of Banner installed, i.e. have their entire campus from registrar to bursar to admissions running on an Ellucian solution. When used "out-of-the-box" it does its job, not easily or beautifully, but gets it done.

It's as if Ellucian (and their strongest competitor PeopleSoft) got comfortable once they dominated the market and just stopped trying to make the actual user experience better. They put on large, fancy conferences and have great branding, but using their systems is a NIGHTMARE. A different programmer designed every form/screen/section so they all function differently. Where two clicks should do, fourteen...

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I have been a user of Ellucian banner for over six years and have been through countless updates. The product keeps improving where I think things are already good, and is quick to address current issues. Our organization loves the fact that we can use a web based version as well. Additionally, the UI is very clean and I can understand what is affecting our balance sheet, income statement, ect., all at a quick glance. Finally, the reports that are generated from Ellucian are very helpful and make it so I can create accurate reconciliations.

The one problem we run into with Ellucian is that training to use the product is difficult. Many screens have specific acronyms to access them, which is hard for people to remember. However, they have introduced a search function that allows you to use words and it acts more like a google search, which is helpful to find what you need.

Customer support Is friendly and responsive.

-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.

Easy to use and navigate. Validation tables prevent data from being entered incorrectly. Standardized data means consistent reporting outputs and expected values. Covers the entire lifecycle of the student journey so the Ellucian SIS is set up to be the storage space of all student data.

Difficult to customize and add fields to the SIS if business processes require it. Can feel overwhelming for new users to learn the system. Very limited ability for most functional users to create their own reports. Usually need to involve report writers with SQL report writing ability. Reporting on multiple areas of the student journey can be difficult when needing to see multiple screens and forms.

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.

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.

It is a high-end software. Very stable. It integrates with the Microsoft LDAP. We have been using it for student and employee account management in term of course registration, tax forms, billing, salaries, student employment, grading, transcripts. It has very secure and solid database which is essential for the above mentioned matters.

Managing it requires training. It is not easy to administer. The price is very high compared to competing software in the higher education sector.

This product provides a learning management system which makes the jobs easier for students and the professors. Students can easly check their duties and see their activities on this system and professors can easily manage their classes easily.

If there are a lot of students dont buy this software, during the peak times it makes lots of bottleneck and managing the problem is not that easy always some problem appears if some administrative user did something wrong. The money you pay and the service you have dont compensate each other

It has a lot of great functions and features (when they work). Makes it easy to upload contacts into the CRM and it has a lot of customizable options.

It can very unreliable and dealing with support has been time consuming. The layout of the CRM is also unescarailly complex and is very difficult to learn for new users, it can costly to setup training of the CRM tool with our support team as well.

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.

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

It’s fairly easy to use but you do need some training on learning all the acronyms they use.

Every time they do an update to the product it seems to disrupt the flow of our production because every one is so thrown off the changes.

My workplace uses Ellucian's Banner 9 for a Learning Management System. It's great to use codes to view different records.

Elluican's Banner 9 feels like it wasn't created with input from working professionals who actually use Banner 9. The navigation is clunky and slow. The interface isn't intuitive. I would never recommend this service to my worst enemy. Don't walk away from Ellucian, RUN!

It did pull several systems together under one umbrella

Every time I turn around, they want more resources over and above the original specs

It is awesome to use for allowing students to track degree progress. It is simple for them to log on & see what is still needed.

There are a lot of bugs with this program. There is a high chance it is not working when you log on to use it.

With the new implementation of the Graduate College student tracking has become a higher priority. With this software our department is able to track students from start to finish. We house the most graduate students in our college and it’s been a hassle to maintain . But this program was able to help us identify what was holding students up (Thesis). After this we made changes to our requirements and also implemented a milestone tracker which has help every single student.

I have no cons so far. Everything has been great on my end.