Aspen is used by dozens of our school districts customers representing over 1,500 schools in PreK-12

We are working with Follett to provide easier access and seamless integration to 3rd party applications in areas outside SIS such as classroom support and collaboration tools.

Pros

Fully enterprise-grade software, Aspen was the only product that could scale to support the 50+ school districts and hundreds of thousands of students we are running on our managed SIS service. It has a broad and deep range of functionality that covers almost every need at the school and school district level, while also providing the local capabilities required to support individual students, teachers, parents, counselors and administrators. The solution is also very flexible, allowing a high degree of customization and personalization straight out of the box. From a technology standpoint, Aspen is based on Microsoft SQL Server and .NET technology with a browser-only UI, so Aspen is built for and fully compliant with a multitude of web and cloud environments. The modularity of the design makes Aspen the easiest product to set up and manage while still allowing for localization, integration, reporting, etc. The other key issue for us was security and data privacy, where we used Aspen combined with AD to enable permissions for data access only on a very strict need-to-know basis as required by federal law. From a company standpoint, with over 600,000 active students to support, stability is very important to us. Follett Software is part of Follett Inc. which is a $4B company with 140 year history dedicated to education, so these guys aren't going anywhere! In the very fragmented education software space, that was very important as we were making a 10+ year commitment.

Review regarding Aspen plus software

By using this aspen software generally do simulation and modelling and also use to find various parameters at given process conditions also it is used for doing optimization of plant and heat integration, detail study of equipment.

Pros

Aspen plus is a very powerful tool for the process industry for making the simulation and modelling it provides a wide variety of equipment and tool for making the proper simulation and also we can find process parameters for binary and single components and also we can do optimization and sensitivity analysis for better process performance.

Cons

Sometimes it takes a long time to run a simulation apart form that everything is fine about this platform

One of the most archaic systems I have used

I cannot believe our district paid money for software as archaic as this. I feel like no user-design experience went into the creation of this thing. Poor programming can be seen everywhere. Multiple clicks and screen reloads are required to submit a simple thing such as attendance, which can take upwards of 10 minutes per class. The bottom line is I would rather keep a paper and pencil gradebook than use this software.

Pros

Ability to email all student from inside the portal.

Cons

* Attendance set up is painful. Say a student is not there, you mark them absent. Click submit. Then they show up. As a teacher you must now mark them present, click submit. Wait for the page to reload. Mark them tardy, click submit. Then to add to that you may only submit 3 changes per reload before the system produces an error. Am I being tortured. * Lets talk about the assignments and gradebook. Naming assignments requires you to create "GB Column Name" which is limited to 10 characters long and must be unique. This is just lazy programming. Why can't we have an unlimited character string. * Most other gradebook software, even the ones that are FREE allow the user to upload grade from a spreadsheet or csv file. Not Aspen Follett. * Do you like to write comments such as marking an assignment that was turned in late, or incomplete, or completed with one-on-one assistance from an aid? You cannot do this by simply clicking a checkbox. You must instead physically type this as a comment after opening each student's individual assignment record and saving and reloading the next screen. *Student experience is almost as bad as the teacher experience. Students must go thru multiple screens of navigation (up to 13 screen reloads) in order to view the assignments and grades for their 8th period class.

Aspen is the premier in the category

It is a little cumbersome in the user interface. The program is designed for knowlegeable users. That said, it is able to do calculations that would be impossible to do by hand.

Pros

Aspen has been around for a long time. It does amazing calculations in the background that would be impossible to do by hand. The answers may actually mean something if you have the expertise to ask the right questions.

Cons

It is very complex. The user interface is dated. It is still using Fortran 77 as the basis for the programming. The answers you get are very dependent on the inputs you provide and the calculation methods you select. The user must be knowledgeable in the process.

Top notch customer service!

Pros

It is very evident that Follett Aspen cares about their customers and meetings their needs. I love that I can easily configure Aspen to meet the needs of my district initiatives.

Cons

Aspen is so extensive. It does have any thing that I don’t like.