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.

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.

Overall it's a comprehensive program for student information management, though I believe it could use some updating for ease of use.

The software is easy to use and is comprehensive for educators.

Running reports is a lengthy process and you have to create "filters" to save common run reports. I wish this was an easier process.

I’m 49 years old... Trillium did everything we needed with ease and we were able to do our jobs safely and successfully.. Unfortunately, Aspen struggled to provide us with the most basic of tasks.. I would say these past few months with the new program were the worst job experience in my entire life and I believe the majority of office managers at BWDSB, teachers, principals, guidance personnel and anyone who worked in the program would agree with me.. Covid 19 was NOT the issue... Setting up report cards was ridiculously time consuming and so many simple tasks take far too many steps.. surely our time would’ve been better utilized if the tasks were streamlined. I do love all of the options the system offers in regards to manipulating data but there are a few basic things I think could be improved.. When we create a new homeroom in Schedules and attach a teacher to it and pull students into it, then we should NOT need to have to go to that staff member, type in the homeroom and then in addition have to select the students and link them to the homeroom we typed into the staff members name. There is TOO MUCH ROOM FOR ERROR.. in my opinion.. in the 21st century when you create the homeroom in schedules and assign the teacher and students that should automatically update them in the student list and staff list. When we added all of the subjects/sections in Schedules I think they should be in a separate place apart from the Homerooms! now i’ve run out of space :(

I like that we can create our own field sets so that we can search by First name and even parents names. I also like how easy it is to download info into excel spreadsheets.. I love being able to download class lists into WORD documents so I can create quick tally sheets..

The most basic function that is missing is the fact that attendance doesn’t communicate with the Bus Manifests and remove and/or add students as their attendance info updates through the day. The other missing element is the option to create a bus EXEMPTION list that REMOVES students who are on pick up that day. Having to print 18 bus lists and manually cross out students and then add or remove additional students throughout the day as records change is tedious, time consuming and far too risky for error.. thereby threatening the safety of children if mistakes are made.. If we had these two basic functions we would be more successful!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.