Ellucian Reviews

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Pros

Ideally, when functional, the functionality between Ellucian products can be helpful. We use Banner and eRecruit CRM. We expected the CRM/ERP integration to be the best selling point when choosing the CRM application.

Cons

Despite being the same company, the products are not as seemless as we felt it should be. It took well over a year of implementation of the eRecruit CRM to customize it to fit with the Banner ERP. Even then, we still find issues where things are not being converted from one to the other well. One example, on the CRM, GB is the country abrieviation for the UK (Great Britain), but in the ERP, this is shown as Gabon. I’ve wasted so much time programming and converting little things like this that I find it hard to believe they were released by the same company.

Pros

Customer service is very good. The vendor is always willing to listen and help where they can. In addition, there is a customer portal which allows the customer to communicate with one another on issues or ideas.

Cons

My dislike is the current roadmap is very slow to achieve goals. Often release dates will be pushed out and this causes much frustration within the business that has planned to upgrade certain services.

Pros

Ellucian’s Banner Student has the basic student records functions included. It will force higher ed administrators to change their business processes to fit the software.

Cons

I did not like the tool set (queries, printing, data loads) that come with the product.

Pros

The Colleague Self-Service Faculty view offers rosters, midterm and final grade entry. Our faculty are so impressed with this new functionality they would fight to keep from losing it.

Cons

Ellucian is difficult to get to respond to issues. I have been working with the Ellucian Cloud testing and it has taken months to accomplish what should have taken days.

Pros

Ellucian allows us to build a functional interface for students and faculty alike.

Cons

It breaks. A lot. Can't tell you how many times I've been doing something fairly simple and suddenly Ellucian stops working or says a page can't be displayed.

Pros

I like that it is reliable and secure yet it allows me to save my password to log on. Some sites are so secure they do not allow it and it makes it frustrating to sign in and out multiple times.

Cons

There are times when the system is down due to maintenance. That is only because my university will perform updates at times.

Pros

I like the search capability and ease to look up any entity. I also like the ability to have all the information on an entity in one place.

Cons

Sometimes there is a lot of duplicate information, I wish there was a way to minimize that or to catch it before some information gets entered twice.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

It is hard to say because we have had issues with getting the system to do what we need it to, but I do like that it will create a positive pay file for manual checks.

Cons

It won't do some of the basic things for financials that I as an accounts payable person feel that the system should do.

Pros

I liked the fact that it could house both student and faculty information at the same time. In addition, it allowed you to input information for instructors and move them around if necessary. We used the Banner by Ellucian software and it was useful for our needs

Cons

Nothing to note. It is good for meeting the needs of an institution.

Pros

We use Banner part of Ellucian. It is effective to get large amounts of information into the system. It is effective is being our online filing cabinet.

Cons

The program is very difficult to use, to navigate through. It is impossible to use on mobile, literally impossible.

Pros

it has a way to store the entire student data for higher education schools. There are several forms that have all the student information from registration to courses to personal information to highschool to grades to degrees.

Cons

It can get confusing to learn the forms. It takes time getting used to. Once we know the forms its not as bad

Pros

I am a new user and I really enjoy that the product is very user friendly. If you have used any computer software in the past you should be able to adjust to using this.

Cons

The navigation shortcuts and codes were difficult to get accustomed to. Some lack of consistency.

Pros

I liked how you can add features, customize it for the needs of the institution. I work for a small college and we don't need all the extra features that the larger colleges might implement.

Cons

It can be a little difficult to navigate for the beginner. Unless the user knows what they want there is a chance of getting lost. Ive been using the software for about 4 years now and i sometimes get lost or have to search for specific information. There is no menu with a list of options. So I guess what I'm saying is that it would be nice if it was more user friendly, easier to navigate.

Pros

Ellucian Banner is comprehensive in that it can cover most of the core functions of a college/university. But that's about it.

Cons

Ellucian hasn't advanced the products in years. Every attempt for updates have been met with upgrade issues, compatibility problems, and user frustration. New products are rare and generally poor, whether they use COTS or homegrown applications.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

Reporting. Expect to spend money on a reporting tool.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

the support for Ellucian is awesome. It took a while to learn how to use Colleague but once I learned my area, it was very useful.

Cons

it's not intuitive. I wish there was a training that new employees could go to in their area to learn about the Colleague product to help understand how the change I make affects others.

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

I guess the only good thing I can say about this software is that it works (kind of) most of the time.

Cons

This software is the least user friendly software I have ever used. I understand that databases are boring, but this software (until the last update) looked like it was from 1996. Nothing about this is intuitive for the general user. For ease of use I would have given it zero stars, but I was unable.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.