Ellucian's Colleague is an unnecessarily complex SIS (i.e. thousands of "mnemonics"/forms) with over-priced and non-cancellable service contracts, legacy (i.e. outdated) and non-intuitive UI (e.g., using multiple screens to "save" just to print a report). There are far more efficient and modern, web-based SISs on the market that were built on web-based platform technologies from inception. Datatel/Colleague has seen better days (around since 1968). Don't let your institution go "down a rabbit hole" by throwing valuable taxpayer dollars at an SIS that has many competitors that do the job more efficiently and in a more user-friendly and modern way. More importantly, don't let your state's Education Department standardize on this SIS. Finally, Colleague is great for entering the data. But, getting complex (and even simple) ad-hoc reports out of the system is nearly impossible, regardless of SLEDs (so-called "saved lists"). Even Ellucian contractors will admit to this (in an online meeting where their comments cannot be tracked). Their response is always, "It cannot be done in Colleague, it must be done in the database" (meaning, using SQL and SSMS and the SQL Server DB tables not in the UI). Finally, don't be fooled by over-hyped and fancy marketing names for their add-on products such as "Ethos" and "Argos." Rather than focusing on their "Ellucian Live" conferences with comedians, actors and other celebrities (who do not care about Colleague or Ellucian), the company needs to focus on making their core products work. Our information technology professional society is working with state university and community college chancellor offices to educate them in selecting right-sized and appropriate SISs for their institutions. Ellucian Colleague and Banner are not the appropriate SISs for the reasons mentioned above and many others.
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