Ellucian Banner vs. Salesforce Education Cloud

As a SIS, Banner Pages is the full meal deal. There are multiple modules that integrate out of the box. Because Banner is all I've ever used as a SIS, I can't contrast it with another program. I can say, it gets the job done for us. I will also say that a tremendous amount of time goes into strategizing how to get new functions to work for us and there always seems to be some catch that requires even more work. In general, the university has been hesitant to build too many modifications into Banner because they take a lot of time to maintain. Inevitably, a new update (of which there are MANY for Banner) will break stuff that isn't "vanilla." This is unfortunate because we've had some great ideas for how to make Banner better for us, but also understandable. If you're looking for a highly modular system, this isn't it. Banner has lots of components, but the components work the way they work and that's that. Also, don't expect very quick responses to bugs or glitches. If the bug is major, yes, it will be addressed. But, little function issues seem to be regularly overlooked.

Incentivized

Well suited:

1. Groups that need to integrate their CRM with other partners: many education institutions use Salesforce!
2. Groups with huge student populations now, or expected in the future.
3. Groups that have resources for custom Salesforce development, like an in-house Salesforce Developer role.

Less appropriate:

1. If you expect your company/school will have a limited number of students.
2. If you set up Salesforce to use ONLY Leads or only Contacts, not both. What happens if you have a student re-enroll? How do you handle losing data when converting a Lead to a Contact? If you don't have good answers for these in advance, you'll want to use only Leads or only Contacts to track each student.

Incentivized

• I think it's great to use if you are tracking grades for certain classes, especially if you'd like to see how students do, comparing midterm to final grades. If you have the permissions, you can see both.
• It's also good to track students individually. You can look up a certain semester, and see how they did in that particular time frame, but you can also see their cumulative gpa, or even look up their entire course history.

Incentivized

• Great use of integrating across all aspects of enrollment.
• Easy to create tasks for counselors to remember to call prospective students and keep up to date on goals.
• Reporting is fabulous inside of Salesforce.
• All of the Apps in the App Exchange.

Incentivized

• One thing I miss from the previous version of Ellucian Banner, is the control + page down. I struggle with alt + page down.
• I love the Ellucian Banner favorites; however, it is a little difficult to navigate.
• I can honestly only think of 2 things that could be improved. I use Ellucian Banner daily.

Incentivized

• Reports - Comes with no out of the box reports.
• OOB functionality may be limited - important to have folks with experience customizing EDA to an organization's needs.
• Upfront cost - Implementation services (either a hired team or consultants) is imperative to make it work.

Incentivized

We have no reason not to renew with Ellucian - we are in deep with the ecosystem, and have Ellucian providing us with information technology support. If anything, should the opportunity arise, we'd probably consider adding a different ellucian tools into the suite of applications we already have on board.

Incentivized

You definitely have to learn it before it becomes easy to use. It's better than it was, but it's still not entirely intuitive. You can't just look at it and play around to figure out how it works

Incentivized

It was really so easy to sign up and get going with the whole process

Incentivized

It's pretty much up all the time.

Incentivized

Has gotten much better due to new hardware.

Incentivized

Our department generally does not contact the support center for Banner but the IT department does. That being said, in the seven years that I have been here, I have not once needed to contact the support center; we have had no glitches on Banner's side that needed to be addressed.

Incentivized

People will respond on time even though Salesforce is such a large organization. This also includes various methods of getting support beyond just calling - they have dedicated reps, chat, chatter, etc that all make the experience more pleasant.

Incentivized

very satisfied, along with the IT staff and ellucian support the upgrades do very well and have minimum down time.

Incentivized

PeopleSoft was more user-friendly. It also provided the ability to save and bookmark queries. PeopleSoft will allow users to use common names to search for queries. Overall, it seemed much more current than Banner. PeopleSoft provided enrollment data for specific sections which allowed one to spot trends of enrollment in a given class.

Incentivized

Salesforce.org Education Cloud has many different functionalities that do not revolve around just the assignment and grading aspect of a student's education. They provide ways for staff to communicate with students in real-time and provide additional support, such as mental health resources, which is incredibly important. Not only is the education aspect important, but providing resources to help a student in every aspect of life is possible on Salesforce and is very useful.

Incentivized

being able to scale with hardware was easy and not cumbersome. We were allowed to user virtual machines which made things very scalable.

Incentivized

• There is positive ROI on the product overall. It had reduced or allowed us to focus our staff members on something which is very use and it does the job in the background.
• The application has supported in a lot of ways in saving resources and utilizing them in very productive & efficient manner

Incentivized

• This is always awesome to find and have companies where you can educate yourself online.
• Even when you look at things such as FOREX, this is one of the biggest industries, so it is a tell tale sign that it is well on track to the future.

Incentivized