Ellucian Reviews

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.

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 are required. The bugs far outweigh the features. Something breaks more often than it doesn't. It's awful, but they have us trapped because no one else can compete with them. Sometimes I think it would all be easier if we just used Excel to track student records! Since our school implemented Ellucian products 5 years ago, to the tune of millions of dollars, we've had to add 2 new positions in our office just to handle the tech components. And don't even get me started on what happens when you attempt to customize their products. Endless headaches.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Since our college gained access to the web-based version of Ellucian (we call it Colleague at our school, too), it has been a lot easier to use.

I wish the help feature and other help documents were a little easier to follow. We used to have a gentleman who worked in Admissions & Records that would make PowerPoint presentations and quick guides to help out the Ellucian users.

I like that we have a consortium we can share ideas and code with and have a single voice to Ellucian.

Banner INB is very clunky to use - even if you are good at using software in general. It is not a very intuitive product; however, the company is moving in the right direction.

Online platform available - the ability to store a lot of information in many different ways, and report customization.

A little clunky in how many clicks it takes to find the information you are looking for.

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.

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.

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.

This product is very commonly used in industry. The online support community around this product is very active and is very helpful when you encounter issues, bugs, odd behavior, etc. (which is often). It is based on a relational database so query writing is easy enough.

Software patches and updates from Ellucian are notorious for breaking various modules, connections between modules, etc. The UI is a very outdated model and tends to be very unfriendly for those who are not tech savvy. Customer service from Ellucian leaves a lot to be desired.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Contains a lot of integrated and complex data. From Human Resources, Student Records and Services, Payroll, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable all in one softward

so NOT intuitive or user friendly. We have to have a whole IT department just overseeing the functionality of this software. Users are frustrated in each area - Payroll, Accounts Payables, Student Services... no one seems to feel the software was created for their unique purposes. We keep trying to find the department that loves it...

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.

This software allows us a great way to keep track of giving history, event information, solicitations and personal information. Also allows us to pull simple and in depth reports.

Can be a little cumbersome sometimes when you want to dive deeper. Pulling in depth reports can be confusing with continued training.

The software houses all of our student information and IT finds securing the database reasonable for higher education. Though Ellucian, we are able to recruit, register, and maintain financial aid records for students. Our HR office also uses it to house employee and faculty information.

Many of the screens take excessive commands to get through. There are three or four extra steps every time you want to pull a transcript, run an evaluation, or register a student for classes.

It's easy to use and my favorite thing about this software is that I can enter very little info to do a search to find who I'm looking for. The possibilities are endless!

When it shows a listing of all the proposals a person has received, I have to pull each one up because there isn't anything about the listing that identifies specific ones. It's a minor irritation

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.

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