Jenzabar SONIS

Score8 out of 10

5 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Jenzabar SONIS are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

Sonis is a cost-effective and customizable online Student Information System, or SIS, that meets the basic needs of small educational institutions. Despite some challenges in managing the app, users have found it valuable for various student data issues like attendance, grades, course registration, billing, and financial aid. One standout feature is the ability to easily search for people and access their information, which has been highly appreciated by users. Switching to Sonis as a web-based SIS has allowed users to automate many manual processes and save time.

By utilizing Sonis, educational institutions have been able to effectively manage their student bodies and improve student retention through automation. The platform has streamlined tasks like attendance tracking, grade entry, and administrative needs, simplifying the overall management process. It has also enhanced receivables tracking and improved organization for college registrars and institutional researchers. While the UI design may be outdated, the degree audit and registration functions work well.

Users have reported successful utilization of Sonis for maintaining contact with prospective students, managing student records, and generating reports. Additionally, they are looking forward to leveraging the application portion of Sonis to allow students easy access to their applications. The company behind Sonis has been responsive to user feedback and helpful in customizing the product to meet specific requirements.

Overall, Sonis is recommended for small to medium-sized colleges due to its wide range of student and course management tools. It offers a useful system once users become familiar with it. However, complete integration with other systems would be ideal for seamless operations. The product has been continuously enhanced by the company and remains a cost-effective solution for student administration needs. Sonis is valuable in managing data, ensuring privacy, storing information, and facilitating communication between faculty, staff, and students.

Reviews

3 Reviews

Jenzabar SONIS, worth the money!!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 21, 2022

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

My main reason for not giving SONIS a 10 is the customer service. Over the years as the company has gotten larger the customer service has gotten slower. Depending on the issue I have had to wait for some unreasonable amounts of time for resolution. Uptime is fantastic, so please expect your servers to be well taken care of and things to run smoothly (if you go with Jenzabar for hosting). But sometimes things go wrong and a report will not function as you expect it to, and sometimes those fixes take a while to happen. For the most part, when things are working, they work very very well and we are happy little staffers.

Miranda Shake

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

Vetted Review

18 years of experience

I use Sonis almost every day. A useful program.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

December 11, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SONIS is used organization wide, by faculty, staff and students. It is utilized for maintaining student records. Faculty input midterm grades for all students each semester. Faculty also input final grades for all students in SONIS at the end of the semester. I use SONIS on a regular basis to determine course enrollment and student progress toward degree completion.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is my opinion that SONIS is generally useful for the management of student records, student registrations, and the grading of courses. I use it for these purposes and it generally gets the job done. I am not really qualified to make any determination regarding the suitability of this product for other organizations.

Verified User

Professional (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

14 years of experience

Tools for all Schools

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

November 27, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Technical College of the Rockies uses Jenzabar SONIS as the Student Information System for the entire school. We used it for managing all student information including address, phone number, demographics, emergency contacts, and enrollment records. We also used it for all of our course records including course schedules, teachers, enrollment and grades. We did not use it for financial records. We imported all of our electronic records from our previous database and scanned and attached student records that had been in printed formats. This allowed us to have all of our student records in one place so we could more easily find both current and historical data.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

We often had students who came and took a class or completed a program, left, and then came back for something else at a later time. It was nice to be able to have someone in Jenzabar SONIS with multiple statuses. They could be in as a Student for the current class while still being in as an Alumni for the program they had graduated from.
Most of our programs are set up so the students within that program are all taking the same courses at the same time. The bulk registration feature made it easy to enroll one student and then use that student's enrollment to quickly enroll all of the others in the program. That was a huge time saver.
We had letters and emails that we wanted to send out at specific times in the application process. The Activity tool in Jenzabar SONIS made it easy for us to have some things that were automatically added to a person's record and others that we could add as needed. We could then run timed letters or emails and get our communication sent out.
We had some challenges with Jenzabar SONIS because we have a number of certificate programs that are only one semester in length. We often had students who would complete one certificate (program) in the fall and then complete another one in the spring. Many of the reports pulled data only for the active enrollment so we had to go back and manually pull the data for the enrollment from the other semester if we needed something for the full school year.

Angela Valentine

Student Services Coordinator at Vision Charter Academy (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

View profile

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Tools for all Schools

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

November 27, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Angela Valentine

Student Services Coordinator at Vision Charter Academy (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

View profile