I cannot believe that it has been five years since we officially went live with Workday Student. I am often asked if Workday Student has all the functionality one needs. Sometimes a few who have not yet implemented Workday will make a statement like “Workday Student doesn’t have all the functionality we need”.

Let us face it, no SIS has everything one needs, period. And to expect them to do everything everyone of us wants is unrealistic expectation. This is precisely why, we surrounded systems like Banner and PeopleSoft with several other products. And customized these products in ways that came to bite us when major upgrades were rolled out.

For us, even with Workday, we continue to have some of the additional systems, but less than before and we have successfully adopted a lot of the native functionality of Workday. Using its excellent integration methodology we have increasingly centralized a lot of information that were non existent or were all over the place. And by using its low-code programming platform, Workday Extend, we are moving more and more of the functionality that were externally programmed. Doing so presents the users with a unified interface like the native Workday. In addition, the product is supported and has followed the rest of Workday when it comes to upgrades – the applications work for the most part and if changes are likely to affect them, you have sufficient notice to fix them. Finally, we have built the student datawarehouse using Workday Prism. Such centralization, I don’t have to justify, has clear advantages and lessens the total cost of ownership.

I would like to share our experiences with the hope that it helps clarify what are the capabilities of Workday Student that have worked out well for us. Because of the length, I am splitting it up in multiple posts.

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