Salesforce as a Student Information System
After Ellucian Banner: the student record on Salesforce.
Westmont College replaced Ellucian Banner in 2023 and has run its student record on Salesforce since. Migrating off Banner is not a theory — it is a completed project with a live reference.
In production
This migration has already been done.
Westmont College replaced Ellucian Banner in 2023. Its student record — registration, academic records, student finance and compliance reporting — runs on Salesforce EDA today, with real students registering in real terms on the system this page describes.
Where things stand
The situation around Ellucian Banner.
Banner is higher education’s highest-volume SIS — and since Ellucian acquired Anthology’s SIS business in December 2025, it is one of four student systems the same owner maintains side by side: Banner, Colleague, PowerCampus and Anthology Student. No public roadmap states which receives long-term investment.
What runs natively
Everything Ellucian Banner holds today, native.
The record of truth moves whole. In our deployments these run natively on Salesforce — configured on the platform, not built beside it.
- Registration
- Prerequisite enforcement, section capacity and waitlists.
- Grading
- Grade entry, grade rolls and grade-change workflow.
- GPA and academic standing
- Computed in the platform, not imported into it.
- Official transcripts
- Produced natively; delivered through your existing service.
- Course catalog and class scheduling
- Terms, sessions, sections, rooms and times.
- Degree audit
- Degree progress and what-if analysis.
- Transfer credit
- Articulation rules, not just stored evaluations.
- Student financials
- Fee assessment, accounts receivable, payments and refunds.
Financial aid stays in the system your aid office trusts — live integrations with PowerFAIDS, Regent and Campus Ivy tie aid status into the same student record. Reporting and compliance run natively, by jurisdiction.
What changes day to day
The work after the migration, not just the migration.
A replacement is judged on the years after go-live. Four things Banner institutions tell us changed once the record was on a platform.
- One system, three audiences
- The same record is usable by the registrar’s office, administrable by IT and reportable against by anyone with permission — without three skill sets, three tools and three backlogs to get one answer.
- Finding things works like finding things
- Search behaves the way the rest of your software behaves — a course, a student, a section, found by typing what you know rather than by knowing which form to open first.
- Releases arrive without a project behind them
- Three platform releases a year, taken as they come. Keeping the platform current is Salesforce’s job, and a configuration-first implementation leaves them little to break.
- The data model fits what you record
- Fields, objects and relationships are configured to your institution rather than inherited from decisions made decades ago, and changing one is a configuration change rather than a request.
Ten months, typically — for institutions under 10,000 students.
Institution size drives the timeline, and larger or more structurally complex institutions take longer — we will tell you where you fall in the first conversation. For context, the industry norm for an SIS replacement is measured in years.
Common questions
Moving off Ellucian Banner.
Should we move to Banner SaaS instead?
That is a real option and for some institutions it is the right one. What is worth knowing is that a SaaS migration is still a migration — data, reconfiguration, testing and change management — so the effort is comparable to evaluating a platform. It is worth running as a selection rather than a renewal.
We are part-way through Banner 9. Does that change anything?
It usually helps. Institutions mid-transition have already done the process review, data cleanup and stakeholder work that a replacement needs, and that work carries across. It also means the comparison is between finishing one migration and running a different one, rather than between staying still and moving.
What happens to our Argos and ODS reporting?
Reporting becomes native to the platform, against live data rather than an overnight extract. Reports are built and changed by the people who need them, with permissions applied from the record itself, so a nightly-refreshed reporting store is no longer something to maintain, license and explain the lag of.
How much of our Banner data comes across?
The record of truth moves whole — academic history, transfer credit, holds, financial history. What does not come across is anything that only existed to work around the old system: staging tables, reconciliation jobs and the shadow spreadsheets that grew up beside them. Deciding what to leave is part of the first phase.
Insights & events
On this migration.
Article · Feb 23, 2026
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Case study · Dec 9, 2025
Aligning Systems with Strategy at Unity Environmental University
How Unity Environmental University migrated off an aging on-prem CAMS SIS to Salesforce, building the agile, AI-ready core its Enterprise Model demanded.
Article · Dec 7, 2025
Beyond CRM: 3 Ways We Showed Salesforce is Ready for SIS Primetime
Tondro's EDUCAUSE CRM Demo Day session showed Salesforce running flexible terms, cart-style course registration, and integrated financials as a full SIS.
Start here
Bring us your Ellucian reality.
Your contract dates, your academic calendar, your integrations, whatever your registrar worries about most. A discovery call is a working conversation with people who have moved institutions onto Salesforce — we will tell you candidly whether this is a fit.