Jenzabar SONIS vs. PeopleSoft Campus Solutions

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

Campus Solutions is a solid product. It is used successfully by large and small institutions across the world. A fair amount of customization should be expected, as the delivered functions just aren't flexible enough for specific needs sometimes. If an institution has the developer bandwidth to support some customization, then this is a great product. It offers a seemingly never ending supply of efficient functions, such as Activity Guides, which allow the institution to assign desired tasks to end users, such as updating their emergency contact information. Students could be assigned a registration hold until they have completed their tasks.

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

• Degree progress for students and tracking
• Tracking of course enrollment and progress for individual students
• Housing all things pertaining to each student as a whole
• Tracking students success as they reach graduation

Incentivized

• I wish they would hire more Customer Support.

Incentivized

• The user interface can be way better
• Usability of the application should be improved.
• Data analytics and reporting functions should be improved upon

Incentivized

When you open a service request you will get contacted in short order. They will usually develop a patch or hot fix in a reasonable amount of time. You do usually need to keep the software updated and will want to be on the latest versions.

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

I used Banner previously and I think PeopleSoft Campus Solutions was so much more user friendly. I also found the reporting to be easier to access with CS. CS works well when paired with FMS and HCM. You can pretty much go full oracle and also implements database systems for data warehousing and even more detailed analysis. Due to the size of Oracle and PeopleSoft the amount of third party support also seems higher. I had also used Hobsons products before but find CS to be more robust than their offerings as well.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Retrieving information has been faster for us since we implemented Peoplesoft, this has enabled us to better serve our students and provide them with support and answer their questions in a timely fashion.
• Because of PS Campus Solutions, we have a central location to house student information making it easy to access info rather than having the information stored in multiple places all over the campus by different groups. This has tremendously improved our processes and made it very easy for us.
• Since Peoplesoft securely stores our data, we do not have issues with data security or questions from parents or students about fears of student information being leaked or falling into the wrong hands. This has helped us remain compliant and comply with FERPA regulations.

Incentivized