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Student Lifecycle Management >> CRM Meets the Campus
2/1/2007
MORE SLM VENDORS: A SAMPLER
Oracle isn’t the only vendor dabbling in student lifecycle management (SLM) these days; all told, a handful of vendors are gradually filling the space. Here’s a rundown of notables, and a brief description of the products they offer.
SunGard Higher Education
SunGard’s SLM products are those technologies that the company acquired from SCT, which
means they all carry the Banner moniker. In particular, Banner Student fuses administrative and
academic worlds and helps manage data strategically. This module is designed to work with six
others that span a variety of functions.
Datatel
Datatel’s ActiveAdmissions and ActiveAlumni products work with pre-existing ERP systems to track
student “customers” from prospective status through enrollment and beyond. A series of online
tools available with each product provides users with personal and customizable features designed
to enhance the overall experience.
Campus Management
This vendor’s flagship CampusVue product is touted as a total administrative solution for SLM.
It provides visibility across recruiting, financial aid, billing, online advising, career services, and
other key workflows. The product also includes built-in CRM for workflow efficiency and better
services to students.
Jenzabar
Jenzabar brands its SLM offering as the Total Campus Management solution, and the technology
is a combination of dashboards with datamarts and campus office applications. The vendor’s
Constituent Relationship Modules are said to provide tight integration between the front-end
portal and back-end logic.
Merced Solutions
As far as vendors go, Merced may be small, but its offerings are notable. Case in point: the company’s
TopSchool product line. With its workflow-centric approach, the technology focuses on the student
instead of the system, to maximize prospect conversion rate and minimize administrative errors.
Going forward, CSU hopes to use the CMS software to identify class scheduling needs; that is, to determine which classes to offer in which semesters, based on how many students are going to need a particular course as they move down the path to a degree. "We are not at that point yet," says McLean, "but that's certainly one of our major goals: to be able to assist better academic planning, or at least academic schedule planning." He adds, "For us, it means greater control of our process, so we don't have a situation where we don't know what's ailing us. For students, it means greater involvement in their education on the part of the administration, which is sure to get them more interested in sticking around."
While it's largely too early to determine how successful the pilot program has been, CSU does have some early results: As of October 2006, 10 of 23 campuses were running CMS. In particular, Sonoma State University and Cal State-Fresno had moved their course registration process from a painstaking paper-based routine into the online environment. Cal State-Long Beach followed suit, embracing a newer, more automated approach to creating courses and hiring lecturers.
Down the road, McLean says CSU expects these types of improvements to spread to the system's other 13 campuses. He says he fully expects the CMS technology to empower students to move toward matriculation more quickly, and notes that this process will ultimately increase enrollment since it will open up more spots. As an added bonus, he predicts that the process will reduce the cost of education, since students will spend less time in school. "Even though we don't have all the software in place, just creating the awareness that we are trying to do better vis-à-vis graduation rates helps to improve the situation," McLean says. "We're in good shape now, and we'll be in even better shape once the technology becomes more widespread."
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