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Jenzabar SONIS

Score8 out of 10

5 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Jenzabar SONIS?

Jenzabar now offers SONIS, a student information system (SIS) oriented around the needs of smaller higher education institutions. Jenzabar supports the former SONISWEB product since its acquisition of original developer RJM Systems in 2015.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Jenzabar SONIS has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 5 ratings of Jenzabar SONIS's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Online Registration Management

    The system supports administrative setup and management of registration processes, and allows students to register for classes online.

    Category average: 8.9

  • District Communications, such as messaging and alerting

    The platform supports communications district-wide and/or with between specific individuals. Examples include alerts, announcements, and direct messaging between faculty and parents.

    Category average: 8.2

  • Roster Management

    Faculty and administrators can view, edit, and update their class rosters effectively.

    Category average: 8.7

Areas for Improvement

  • Integrations with 3rd-Party Education Technology

    The student management system can send and receive data from other educational systems with little to no manual steps required.

    Category average: 8.1

  • Platform Customization

    The student management system can be adjusted or customized to fit specific or unique needs of the school.

    Category average: 7.6

  • Community Support

    There are community resources from other users of the platform to help users troubleshoot and optimize their use of the system.

    Category average: 8.4

Reviews

What users are saying about Jenzabar SONIS.
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Jenzabar SONIS, worth the money!!

Incentivized
Miranda Shake
Library Director/ IT Coordinator in Information Technology at Lakeview College of Nursing (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our small college uses Jenzabar SONIS daily for student management tasks. Students can see their schedules, required book lists, midterm and semester final grades, as well as fill out course evaluations on the online portal. Since our school is so small we do not utilize the online registration features, but SONIS does have that capability. Faculty can also see rosters, print photos of students, email or text their class or a portion of the class very easily within SONIS. Grades can be exported and imported from most LMS or hand-entered by faculty. SONIS has some LMS features as well, so if you are a very small school it has a lot of fabulous features and can save you the expense of having a separate LMS platform.

Pros

  • Great value
  • Built in reports are great, but it also has add on reporting that is fantastic.
  • Hosting they offer is phenomenal nearly no downtime, ever!

Cons

  • I wish they would hire more Customer Support.

Return on Investment

  • The Online Application has helped us gain applicants.

Tools for all Schools

Incentivized
Angela ValentineView profile
Student Services Coordinator at Vision Charter Academy (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Jenzabar SONIS provides tools for working with individuals from their first request for information through submitting an application, being accepted for admission, enrolling in courses, taking and completing courses, and graduating from the school. The available tools not only provide a way to manage the data, but also for ongoing communication between the school and the prospect/student/graduate.
  • Jenzabar SONIS allows a school the flexibility of enrolling students in individual courses, like you might have in adult education departments, or in programs and courses like you would find for students working on a degree. This flexibility made Jenzabar SONIS a valuable tool for us because we had not only certificate-seeking students but also a large Community Education Department and could use the same software for both.
  • Jenzabar SONIS has the tools to record attendance and grades directly into a gradebook or to import final grades. This allowed us to continue to use our LMS for those teachers who wanted the resources available in that system while letting teachers who just needed a place to store grades to enter them directly into SONIS.
  • The ability to attach pdfs to courses and individual records allowed us to scan many of our cumulative files from our archive and attach them to the alumni records in Jenzabar SONIS. This gave us more accessible, secure storage for our historical records and made it much easier to produce transcripts for alumni.

Cons

  • One of the biggest struggles we had with Jenzabar SONIS was trying to figure out the best way to use some of the features. We didn't always understand the table relationships and so wasn't sure how some of our process decisions would affect other areas of data. There weren't any specific guidelines about how the designers expected fields to be used or how data should be entered. We sometimes discovered later that a field we chose to not use in one table made data entry in another table difficult.
  • We weren't ever able to use any of the financial features of Jenzabar SONIS. When we first tried using them there were a lot of things that the software either didn't do well or that took so many steps that our business office staff was frustrated. I think that part of the software has improved but our business office was still not comfortable using it.
  • Report writing was difficult for someone without strong SQL knowledge. We purchased the add-on report writer shortly before I left the school I was at and I believe it will help with that issue but a school who chose not to get that add-on would definitely need someone who knows SQL if they want to be able to generate their own reports.

Return on Investment

  • Jenzabar SONIS was a very positive investment for us. Prior to using Jenzabar SONIS we had two people involved in admissions acitivites: setting up classes, enrolling students, processing applications, etc. We were able to do that with one person when we switched to Jenzabar SONIS.
  • Processing transcript requests was a very time consuming process for us because we had to go to the vault, locate the students paper file, pull it, and then either make copies of it or enter the appropriate data in the student's Jenzabar SONIS record so a transcript could be printed. Because we were able to scan and attach the records to files in Jenzabar SONIS we can eliminate several steps and reduce the time it takes to produce a transcript.
  • Having all of our prospect, student, alumni, and course data in one place as streamlined many of our processes and allowed for more effective prospect tracking.
  • We are able to share enrollment and grade information directly between Jenzabar SONIS and our LMS. That greatly reduced the staff time involved in entering enrollment data in the LMS and then pulling grades and entering them in Jenzabar SONIS.

Other Software Used

PowerSchool Student Information System

I use Sonis almost every day. A useful program.

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • It has an attendance function. It is easy to use this function when needed.
  • It has a function for inputting midterm grades. This is very useful for our students and for tracking academic issues. Input of Midterm Grades is easy.
  • It has a function for inputting final grades. Input of final grades is easy and there is a confirmation when completed.
  • It has a function for course registration. This is menu driven and easy to use.

Cons

  • SONIS sorts my advisees by class and then by name. This is NOT useful. There should be an option for sorting by name only. I advise almost fifty students. It wastes my time looking for them in the sophomore listing, then the junior listing......
  • When registration of a student for semester courses is complete, there should be an option to print out only the courses scheduled, NOT the entire page which shows available courses at the bottom.
  • SONIS sometimes kicks me out for no reason.

Return on Investment

  • Facilitates grade input by faculty.
  • Facilitates course enrollment by students.
  • Facilitates viewing student records and determining progress to program completion.

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365 Business