Information on the Ellucian Colleague Project

Ellucian is the vendor that created and maintains the Colleague software suite and licenses its use to Johnson C. Smith University. Ellucian provides hosting services to dozens of colleges and universities around the world. 

Replacing Jenzabar EX with Ellucian Colleague allows us to better support the strategic mission and goals of the institution. As we build this new system, our goal is to take advantage of every opportunity to redesign our business processes, improve our efficiency, and create new, user-friendly solutions that will improve our workflow as an organization. 

Moving to the cloud provides us the opportunity to move to the latest releases of the Ellucian platform. Built ‘mobile first’ the new Colleague Self Service environment provides a mobile friendly, responsive solution. Colleague Self Service’s ease of use combined with new functionality will help our students, faculty and staff accomplish important processes more effectively and efficiently. 

Currently, our IT Department focuses a lot of energy on keeping various systems talking to each other. Our new system, Colleague, is a fully integrated application that allows everyone immediate access to the same data, ensuring that, university-wide, decisions are based on the same information. Colleague Core provides a central repository for information. For example, an individual helping a student register can get online access to current course information, the student’s financial aid award or package, or even an existing accounts receivable balance. 

Since March 2023, JCSU (Johnson C Smith University) team leaders and technical experts have worked closely with Ellucian to guide all of us through training and implementation of our new ERP.  Training will be offered in phases and customized for different stakeholders. Some training has already begun. We will share further announcements regarding training schedules, configuration, testing, data migration, reporting, and specific timelines in future communications! Other applications will be integrated with Colleague over the next 12 months.