Experience with Finalsite website vendor?

[Keith Guehring]

Has anyone had experience with using the finalsite vendor? They are a competitor with Whipple Hill.

[Matt Ball]

We are just about to finish our first academic year with finalsite at Landon.

[Keith Guehring]

Great. Is this your website? http://www.landon.net/

Are you importing data from another information system such as Veracross, Blackbaud, or Senior Systems?

[Matt Ball]

Yes, that's us. We also just launched a capital campaign breakout site at www.landonunited.com.

We use Blackbaud Education Edge and Raisers Edge. We import faculty, student and parent data from EE and alumni data from RE into finalsite. We use the faculty, student and parent web portals, but have not yet launched our alumni portal. We have Infosnap Datashuttle for importing web changes back into RE, but we are still ironing out some problems with it, before we go live with the alumni portal.

Finalsite has been doing the constituent data imports for us, while we do the classes and class roster updates ourselves, at the start of the semesters and during add/drop.

[Linda Robinson]

Thanks for sharing so far. I have many questions, because I have walked into something similar and I'm trying to sort it all out. What considerations were taken into account during the decision, regarding your school's staff needs for doing the addition tasks - data exports, manipulation into templates for importing, yearly and with ongoing changes? Were the needs known clearly in advance? Was there adequate staff? Or did job descriptions change to include the additional work? Do you have a "webmaster" or do you manage the web work through distributed management by many?
Thanks.

[Keith Guehring]

Sorry for the late reply . . .

What considerations were taken into account during the decision, regarding your school's staff needs for doing the addition tasks - data exports, manipulation into templates for importing, yearly and with ongoing changes? Were the needs known clearly in advance?

1.  We had a committee with a student, parent, alumni, and members from all 3 divisions US, MS, LS, and Admission, Advancement.

2.  In brief, we focused on working with our centralized student information system, Veracross.

3. .  Yes, we do have a webmaster to manage web projects as well.  We also distribute the work among the different departments.  The webmaster, me, sets up reminders on the calendar, then sends out reminders to the different depts.  I am setting up meetings to address updated content this month and next month with the different departments.  The process is on-going.

 

Hope that helps.

[Linda Robinson]

Matt and Keith,

How have the academic portals worked for your school? We are very interested to hear from others about these. The positives and challenges would be much appreciated. Feel free to contact me off this site at [e-mail].

Thanks.

Linda