Ellucian Colleague vs. Ellucian Ethos

Ellucian Colleague is well suited for student academic information recall, such as advisement details, courses, primary choice, GPAs, and demographic information critical to in-time decision-making for faculty and institutional leadership. Less appropriate scenarios would include our financial management needs, such as accounting, ledgers, and financial transactions. These functions are better suited to other CRMs.

Incentivized

We live in the world where one system cannot solve all of your business problems, because of that we want to make sure that information is exactly the same across multiple systems and Ethos allows this to happen. Your identity and everything related to you will be exactly the same in all systems across the board. With cloud solutions coming up at the speed of light, it is imperative that every solution you acquire has accurate data in order to be efficient and cost-effective.

Incentivized

• Colleague offers a single reference point for all student data, which creates consistency and unity across campus and ensures students hear the same information from every source.
• Colleague recently updated its interface to be more accessible to all people. Previously, it was not accessible through any browser aside from Internet Explorer.
• Colleague provide helpful user restrictions that prevent departments from altering or erasing data they do not typically use. For example, I cannot change student billing and accidentally wreak havoc for the cashier's office.

Incentivized

• Ethos Integration obfuscates database access from the developers and functional users.
• Ethos Integration provides common-denominator data model between different systems on campus.
• Ethos Integration has good management tool - API Management Center.
• Ethos Identity allows easy federated access with our Shibboleth IDP provider.

Incentivized

• Develop API's that are vendor agnostic rather than selecting specific vendors (Clearinghouse, ImageNow).
• Colleague tends to be to reactionary to the changing needs in higher education rather than developing the future.
• Hound clients to pay extra for consulting (consultants are usually bad), rather than helping institutions to use the product. Seems to be the first thing help line personnel jump to rather than working with clients to figure out creative solutions.

Incentivized

• It is expensive
• Getting Ellucian Ethos does not mean you get all functionalities, other modules like workflow and analytics have to be purchased separately
• Takes a while to set it up

Incentivized

Ellucian Colleague rates highly for its usability and functionality. Ellucian Colleague serves as a comprehensive solution, making it easier for students, faculty, and staff to communicate, find the information, and accomplish multiple tasks. Colleague has provided enhanced visibility into data and improved decision-making to drive strategic institutional outcomes. A colleague has created efficiencies for staff.

Support from Ellucian for Ethos Integration was generally good. The help in building Ethos was adequate, and resolving issues were handled professionally. However, for Ethos Identity module, the support in building the cluster failover architecture was lacking. After over a month of open engagement, the issue still has not been resolved.

Incentivized

Ellucian Colleague offers exceptional value for the money compared to the pricier options in Blackbaud's suite of products. Ellucian Colleague stacks up well against Blackbaud and other CRMs in terms of its value for the money, ease of use, and customer service. Overall, Ellucian Colleague provides greater value for the money.

The integrations with Banner and other systems are currently done by home-grown systems.

Incentivized

• With Colleague Student, we have been able to be more efficient in our department which has given us the opportunity to take on other projects that are helpful to our students.
• Colleague Student has enabled my department to cut down on our paper consumption which has been a huge budget savings. Our old system was so untrustworthy that we were printing many things to keep in case we couldn't get the information out of the system again. With Colleague Student we do not have to do this. We have stopped printing many things we used to print.
• Colleague Student has also helped us have a better handle on which students are preparing for graduation each semester. This allows us to more accurately print commencement materials, etc.

Incentivized

• Our ROI is nonexistent at this time as we are still implementing. However, the minimal cost signifies that it will be a significant help.

Incentivized