2025 Scheduled Sessions

Session Grid / Conference Map / Descriptions

Admissions/Enrollment/Registration/Advising

• Birds of a Feather Networking
• Enhance Student Success: Automate Attendance Indicators in CRM Advise
  • Join us to learn about how we utilize attendance from Self-Service to drive indicator rules in CRM Advise to automate messaging for students facing attendance challenges. We’ll share best practices for implementation and actionable strategies to enhance communication and support for your students. Let’s transform attendance data into meaningful interventions that drive academic success!
• From Reactive to Proactive: CRM Advise Alerts for Better Student Engagement
  • Discover how CRM Advise alerts can transform student engagement from reactive to proactive. This session showcases how customized alerts streamline call campaign management, enhance compliance monitoring, and enable early interventions—empowering students to stay on track and succeed.
• Preparing for a Smooth CRM Migration with APIs and Redirects
  • Schoolcraft College recently launched Element451 for prospects and applicants. Several teams worked together to ensure a smooth launch in early July. Come learn how we used APIs in a variety of ways including: scouring our WordPress CMS for links to redirect & update, automatically creating Colleague registry accounts (i.e. DRUS) after applications are created in Colleague, populating extended Colleague data elements with Element451, and sending information about applicants back to Element451. We hope our techniques and strategies will help other schools considering CRM migrations.
• Hollaback to Curriculum Tracks, Student Planning, & Progress
  • Budgets are BANANAS, so we have been doing all we can to use the tools we have to their full potential. Valparaiso University phased in Self-Service Student Planning from individual plans and registration, to Sample Plans, and Progress.
• Navigating the shift to the Ellucian CRM Unified Interface
  • In this session, we will cover in-depth details on how to make the most of this transition from an institution that is already live. From basic navigation to understanding advanced settings, CRM users should walk away more prepared to leverage the new interface to their advantage.

AR/Finance

• Birds of a Feather Networking
• Implementing Self Service Procurement
  • Baldwin Wallace has implemented Colleague Self-Service Procurement to replace the manual paper forms. Review all the decisions that we went through and the configuration to set it all up. This will cover purchase orders, payment requests, and approvals.
• Payment Plans and Integration with Colleague SaaS: Tools for Business Office Automation
  • Join us for an in-depth look at how Nelnet Campus Commerce integrates with Colleague SaaS to streamline business office operations. This session will highlight recent implementation projects and showcase how institutions are leveraging payment plans to support students in managing both current and past-due balances. Attendees will gain practical insights into automation tools that enhance efficiency and improve the student financial experience.

CIO Agenda

• Q & A with Ellucian's Jackie Cygelman (Data Connect, Intelligent Processes and Forms)
• New Ellucian Modules with Jim Rogers, Ellucian Account Executive
• Where are you in your SaaS journey? Lessons learned?
• Use of IT consultants at your institution
• AI products used or pilots
• Current biggest challenges round robin, group discussion on solutions
• Any other hot topics

Financial Aid

• Birds of a Feather Networking
• Financial Aid Yearly Setup Assistant
  • Come learn about the yearly setup for financial aid in Colleague, and how building several components is a breeze with the FASA assistant. FASA eliminates tedious data entry for communication management, award periods, disbursement codes, attendance patterns, and more. Session is intended for end users and tech folks, including those with experience completing annual setup or with no previous knowledge about how to carry over components from one year to the next year.
• Unmasking Fraud in Financial Aid: Risks, Red Flags, and Responses
  • A session on how to identify fraud in financial aid, different types of fraud, what to look for, and how to respond. Sinclair College's experiences over the last few years and how our process has progressed.
• Basics of Communication Management
  • Communications Management is probably used most extensively by financial aid offices, although there are many aspects of CM that can be used widely across the higher education enterprise. This session will focus on the basics of CM for financial aid, how communication codes can be used to trigger other actions, and where communication codes can be automatically assigned to student records.

Human Resources

• Birds of a Feather Networking
• If You Leave... Paper Leave Requests Aren't Pretty, Even in Pink!
  • Valparaiso University went from using a third-party timekeeping software to using Time Entry in Self-Service several years ago. In the last 3 years, we have transitioned our Leave Requests for both hourly and salaried staff to Self-Service from a paper process (on PINK paper) and in-house system, taking a days-long process for carryovers and awarding down to one day.
• Empower. Engage. Evolve. Rethinking Performance Reviews for Retention & Readiness
  • In thinking about your current performance evaluation process, does it work for all stakeholders? Do employees feel as though a holistic account of their performance is being captured? Do managers find your current process cumbersome and time-consuming? Does your HR team exhaust themselves trying to chase down incomplete evaluations? If you are like so many higher education institutions and experiencing challenges with performance evaluations, this session is for you! NEOED is excited to share the research that has gone into our award-winning talent management software, used by over 13,000 customers in North America. Each attendee will receive a copy of our Top 5 Trends in Education report for 2025, and walk away with strategies to bolster retention, aid in succession planning and improve the performance evaluation process for all.

Information Technology

• Adapting to Student's Needs: Enhancing Ellucian Experience at Delta College
  • Discover Delta College’s journey to boost student engagement with Ellucian Experience. After initial struggles with user adoption, we revamped the platform through feedback, design improvements, and outreach. Join us to explore our strategies for creating a more user-friendly experience and learn how to apply these insights at your institution to foster vibrant student engagement.
• Birds of a Feather Insights
  • Moving to Insights, already moved to Insights or just wondering about Insights? Join colleagues for an open discussion about challenges, innovations, solutions and more.
• Data Connect Roundtable
  • Any specific Data Connect questions you would like included in the Roundtable, please send to EmerickJ161@macomb.edu
• Insights Walkthrough, Rebuilding a Report in Insights
  • Demonstrations and walkthroughs showcasing the creation of reports within Insights are widely available. This session will address the practical considerations of migrating existing reports from other platforms. I will demonstrate the process of rebuilding a current report in Insights using two distinct methods: the native report builder editor and the SQL Query feature. Furthermore, we will explore the procedures involved when custom data, not currently residing in the Insights data lake, requires ingestion.
• SaaS Preparation Journey: Essential Steps from Planning to User Acceptance
  • This presentation explores the transition to SaaS through a structured approach encompassing research, planning, and preparation. We highlight essential pre-work activities that ensure project acceptance and success, including stakeholder engagement and risk assessment. By sharing practical insights and examples, attendees will gain valuable strategies to navigate the SaaS preparation process.

General and/or Sponsor

• Smart Plan and Award
• Platinum Vendor Shark Tank
• Chart Your Course to Saas
  • Is your institution beginning to explore the potential benefits of moving to Ellucian SaaS? Or have you begun your journey and you’re looking for proven actions to support your modernization efforts? This session will offer key strategies for jump-starting and enhancing the success of your Ellucian SaaS journey, through effective sponsorship and stakeholder engagement, readiness initiatives, and implementation planning and execution. Participants will take away actionable strategies for charting their course to Ellucian SaaS!
• Improving Student Retention & Fostering Regional Collaboration Through Course Sharing
  • Let’s explore how course sharing is transforming the educational landscape across the Great Lakes region! This session will highlight how course sharing empowers students to stay on track for timely graduation, access critical or specialized courses, and explore diverse academic offerings within the region, all while remaining enrolled at their home institution. For institutions, we'll delve into the benefits of addressing enrollment gaps, leveraging specialized faculty expertise, generating new revenue streams, and forging stronger, more resilient regional partnerships. Be part of the discussion on how we can collectively strengthen the Great Lakes' educational ecosystem
• EIP, Experience, Insights: Using SaaS to get Beyond Legacy
• Harnessing Analytics to Drive Student-Centric Operations
  • Traditionally, academic processes such as scheduling, curriculum management, the catalog, and assessment lived in isolation, making it difficult to access valuable data. Today, new solutions bring these disparate processes and associated data together. Discover how unified data in academic operations can unlock fresh insights and analytics that drive student retention and strengthen the financial stability of your institution. **Learning Outcomes: - Discover how analytics can forecast student demand and determine the ideal number of course sections. - Explore strategies for integrating academic operations to gain access to new data. - Understand the impact of streamlined academic operations on student success and satisfaction.
• Birds of a Feather → Forms