Ellucian Colleague offers a versatile higher education ERP to make processes more effective and keep students, faculty, and staff informed. Entrinsik Informer works natively with Colleague’s UniData database for easy ad hoc reporting.
Colleague was initially developed with an underlying UniData (MultiValue) database. Informer actually preserves specific MultiValue functionality such as one-to-many relationships presented in rows and columns, by-exploding, and savedlists.
In Informer, users are able to generate savedlists that can be utilized within the Colleague application for different processes. Data populates into the Colleague screen or custom program to take specific actions. For example, users often need to print batches of student transcripts. Informer can run a report of students matching certain criteria and create a savedlist of those IDs to populate in the TRAN screen.
Transcripts will be generated for all students selected, with no need to type the individual IDs. Users can also create savedlists in Colleague and use the savedlist to generate reports against the records included, demonstrating the bidirectional functionality of Informer and Colleague.
Informer provides a high degree of flexibility with existing Colleague processes to enhance efficiency and take advantage of automation, allowing users to save a significant amount of time.
Informer offers unlimited reporting abilities with intuitive drag-and-drop functionality, drilldown capabilities, real-time data rendering along with scheduling reports.
“For example, our customers use the Jobs functionality to schedule reports and to help automate the Financial Aid awarding process by querying the database to find students that are ready to be awarded. Financial Aid advisors are emailed a list so that the awarding process can begin,” said Regina Lopez, Informer customer success manager.
Jobs can also be used to create quality control reports to find missing data and alert the respective office to ensure data integrity. An example of this is finding students with missing birthdates to verify this data is collected and updated in the database. Another use case for Jobs is generating nightly files to push data to other third-party systems via a secure FTP.
Informer also includes the ability to map Colleague Valcode tables and Code Files through the use of Codes. Codes are code/description pairs defined for a specified property and can include Ellucian delivered Valcodes and Code Files as well as user defined codes, as needed.