Ellucian Live had 2 motivational speakers this year at the opening and closing sessions who were pretty good I thought. I know some prefer a celebrity but they did a nice job. The conference for the first time combined sessions of Banner and Colleague (formerly datatel) which caused some confusion at first. The first FIS session I went to was a Colleague one and I couldn’t figure out what the heck they were talking about till I realized it was a different product all together.
Several talks pointed out that their product map is out there for all to see so this is obviously an emphasis for the new company. There was also some emphasis on the code sharing repository with several talks on it.
Banner 9/horizon has become Banner XE. It is still using the groovy/grails code but Ellucian has backed off using Spring as a frame. They’ve come up with using git as the means for distributing their source and there is some set up involved in using it along with ssh keys. They kept pointing people to Banner Commons for setup and information but I found very little in the way of definition for setting up the architecture as far as step by step instructions go. They’ve got a ways to go.
Banner general has some nice new features and Banner finance has mostly rpe fixes.
