College website integrations with EBS, ProSolution, UNIT-e, REMS and more

Further education management software solutions like Advanced ProSuite (including ProSolution), EBS by Tribal Group, ESS UNIT-e and Civica REMS are especially important to our college customers. They help facilitate applications, enrolment, enhance engagement with students and provide advanced datasets, communications and reporting. As a key provider of websites for colleges, our ability to integrate our website solutions with each college’s chosen data provider is paramount. Here at Concept4 our talented team of developers are always up for a challenge of this nature and we have become specialists in this critical area. In fact, the key to a successful college website is getting these software integrations right.

CAN WE MANAGE YOUR COLLEGE DATA? – OF COURSE WE CAN!

First up, we’ll take a course data feed from your college’s management information system (MIS). This forms the beating heart of the website – searching for courses intuitively, listing courses by faculty or subject area and the course pages themselves. There are several ways to bring this MIS course data in to the website, but we’d always recommend this is done with a strict focus on user experience – making it as simple as possible for your prospective students to dive in and search for courses.

Often, the MIS course data does not contain all the information that your marketing team might want to promote. For these cases, our Course Manager product helps you go the extra mile and is specifically designed to help you augment and improve upon the core data we integrate with. Course Manager is designed to make the website user experience more engaging and intuitive; we work closely with our college clients to customise and automate the course data workflow to help reduce your workload, improve processes and enhance user experience. Follow this link for more details on Course Manager.

Secondly, the website needs to deal with course enquiries, applications and enrolments. Each MIS provider has their own solution for this, and it will be important that the website we build links with this efficiently. This can be as simple as passing over a unique course code/identifier, or having a course basket that can handle multiple courses at once. Other solutions require direct MIS integrations, passing application form data from the website to the MIS. Whichever solution works best for you, we have the experience to help make this as seamless as possible for your website users!

LARGE COLLEGE – NOT A PROBLEM

We help craft solutions for colleges throughout the country, large and small. Indeed, working with Capital City College Group, London’s largest further education college group, their ‘centralised’ Course Manager solution feeds from EBS across six of the Group’s websites. Administratively, this means a single source to manage all courses, for all websites Group-wide. For any colleges in a group, this is a hugely efficient way to manage course data.

In Wales, we help Coleg y Cymoedd manage a very large feed of courses, fully bilingual in English and Welsh. In this case Course Manager has been customised to allow them to adapt and augment their course pages in both languages – for example to add rich media content/videos and even SEO pages separately per language.

CERTAIN TYPE OF PERSON!

According to Andrew, one of our data workflow specialists, it takes a certain type of person to work on MIS and course data. To be fair he should know. I am not entirely sure what he means but I am assuming a combination of characteristics in the area of hardworking, intelligent and patient. Often, our customer liaison is split between the MIS manager (technical-led) and the Marketing Director/team (design-led). Whatever the role, our interaction with college data staff is paramount, blending the design and technical elements with the know-how to ensure a great overall outcome. Matt Jarvis, Marketing Manager for Coleg y Cymoedd stated “On top of the great service, we now have a website that we are really proud of. Alongside the website, we also purchased their Course Manager platform. With over 400 courses on offer at our college, this platform has brought us significant benefit to us….just wish I’d known about it years ago!”

Really, we’ve only scratched the surface here. It’s a complex area, but know that we’ve got your back. It deserves a detailed conversation, and one that we’re happy to have with you! If you’re considering a new website but are not sure how all the technical aspects will gel together, get in touch and we’ll walk you through our ideas and suggestions.