FACTS Student Information System vs. Jenzabar SONIS

We base our entire student data on the Student ID that is produced in FACTS. We create user accounts for technology and online textbooks as well as their lunch account, all based on the Student ID. We also can run many different reports using the SID as the data constant and all the other information variables are available as needed to report.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Allows full student/family information to be placed in student file.
• Can report from any field of information including custom fields.
• Creates student schedules and Classroom rosters.
• Allows parents insight into grades and discipline as well as lesson plans and daily/weekly classroom topics.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The new inputting process is a bit complicated.
• Label creation is sometimes hard to get the info you want on the label.
• There is no notification when an email does not go through. You'd have to look it up to know.

Incentivized

• I wish they would hire more Customer Support.

Incentivized

It's user-friendly, the customer service is great, and we have a significant amount of time invested in training our faculty and staff to use many aspects of FACTS within their areas of responsibility. I really like the variety of reports I can generate which gives important data to our administration and Board.

Incentivized

I greatly prefer FACTS to the other grade book systems we have used. I think it is far superior to Blackbaud, Renweb, and Edmodo. It is the simplest and most efficient system that we have used. We are so excited about the vast number of options we have at our fingertips with FACTS.

Incentivized

We changed databases in 2011 because the company we were with was going to quit supporting our software. We evaluated a number of different SISs available at the time and felt Jenzabar SONIS provided the best tools for our school. Most of the others were either geared more for adult education, individual course offerings or for schools that primarily had degree-seeking students. We needed something that could address both needs.We felt Jenzabar SONIS did that best of the ones we reviewed.

Incentivized

• It keeps parents happy and therefore creates fewer complaints.
• It creates a solid record of student performance so that any discrepancies or allegations can immediately be resolved (when used with regularity and consistency).
• It allows for qualitative as well as quantitative feedback so that students can receive specific, detailed assessments of their work.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized