Admissions Application vendor

[Michael McGlynn]

We are shopping our admissions application out of house. Anyone have recommendations or vendors to shy away from?

[Kristin]

I would also like to know about recommendations....our school is using Datatel Colleague Admissions module on the backend, and would like for our online inquiry and app to feed into it (don't want to use Active Admissions).

[Mike Thornhill]

Just a bump to this thread, as we're in the market for the same thing. I created an ASP app, but have run into some users getting errors which I cannot duplicate, and thus cannot fix. Given my limited coding skills, it seems more feasible to find a vendor who can provide something turnkey. Any suggestions?

[John Graham]

Well I will say it really depends on what you are using for your internal processes.  We are in the of processing dropping a turnkey solution.  We have been using Applyyourself, but recently we have begun to develop our own application in Asp.net that combines our CMS, (Sitecore) with our CRM (MS dynamics).   

 

While I understand you may want the quick out of the box solution, it has been my experience that getting people to change their business process to match how many of the out of the box solutions works creates a problem.   Also how do you manage the data after it is collected?  Are you going to use the box solution, or export it and create the ever so common excel spreadsheet.

 

Creating our on allows us to taylor the application to the business process, all the while we are able to maintain better control over how we manage our brand experience on the web.  (Don't go look now... gimmie 2 more months than judge what we've done).  

 

If you look at the costs of many of these solutions you are paying for 1/3 of a full time developer position.  A developer w/ an understanding of a good environment (We use ASP.Net)  can really crank out a lot of applications in on year... 3-6 months of which can be devoted to the Admissions Application.   

 

My 2 cents.  :-)