Alma SIS Reviews

As a teacher I can say that Alma is one of the best virtual classrooms that I have tried, it is an all-in-one and something that I love is the management of evaluations and students without having to resort to any other external platform.
The function that I use the most is evaluative management since right there I can check my lists for the student report card system as well as the grade assigned to the same task and document

It is difficult to say that Alma has something bad, rather something not so good and that is first-hand integration, but once learned it is phenomenal

Alma SIS has some of the best tech support, one on one access all the time. They are always considering feedback and ways to implement when possible.

Some of the things that I request for feedback don't always get completed but they have their reasonings for that.

You can log in quickly. The people who have come in to assist with how horrific this year has been have been mostly humble and at least tried to help.

Absolutely impossible to have what we need at our hands as high school counselors. Everything is laborious or actually impossible to do. It has taken MONTHS to get even tiny bits of advances to make this usable. Transcripts, which are an essential piece for our kids, took 6 months to have functioning, and they're still inaccurate. Scheduling is months behind because the programming is inept for a school this size. It lacks confidentiality and privacy that's important for our students. Household units are not available, access to other buildings makes it impossible to know who has siblings and other people living in their home, which poses a safety issue when filing reports to CPS, report cards are still completely wrong and inaccurate. I could truly go on for an awfully long time, but I digress.

At the end of the day, I think I can vouch for every person in my building when I say that this program was rolled out in a deplorable way, changes and improvements are slow and sometimes non-existent, and it's made me reconsider even working in this corporation due to how terrible this system is. A program in its infancy has been detrimental to every single stakeholder in this corporation, and I've been disappointed since the first day of training in August.

Very strong design-sense, and improving their app-center interface. Customer Service is fantastic.

Their admissions platform needs to advance to include billing/tuition.

Alma is intuitive and easy to navigate. Setup and implementation was smooth, overall, it is very user friendly and easy for teachers and families to navigate. The reporting is excellent and the report cards look professional. Accessing data is easy on a day to day basis.

There are some simple features missing, like schedule send, more editing options with school announcements which would have a bigger benefit.

I like how user friendly the system is. Families, students, and staff are able to navigate Alma with ease.

We look forward to Alma implementing some kind of texting in the future hopefully!

It's a very professional and easy to use platform

The price is high compared to the features needed for our use

In addition to standard features of other applications, this product provides the ability to generate customized reports on just about any type of student data, and also automates the bulk of our report card procedure.

This product does not compile data well- eg. Student grades or attendance expressed as an overall average, rather than being listed by course. Additionally, while attendance by class records is supported, this data is of limited reporting functionality compared to attendance by day.

Alma is so easy to build out and use. They get more and more features every year.....For example, we can now import new student information, and easily run all of our NYS reports. It's really amazing how comprehensive yet seemingly simple Alma is at each user level. I think that because it's on the newer end of student information systems, the interface is just simpler...they don't need to account for decades' worth of data that was entered in a certain way years and years ago.

The recently changed their customer support to a tiered system, making it more difficult to get answers quickly. That said, the system is simple enough that questions don't come up all that often. Also, they are building out their SFTP capacity, but I wish it could communicate directly with our lottery/enrollment system.

1) The features that where the most impactful:
-Attendance and Report Cards

2.) Is the product easy to use?
-The learning curve was a little steep in the beginning, but because of fantastic customer support, all concerns were quickly answered and solutions were given/suggested that solved the problems.

3.) Was the integration with your existing business processes easy?
-Teachers found it easy to use overall.

1.) Are there features you feel are missing or could be improved?
a.) Finer granular control over the lay-outing of the templates.
b.) Ability to add drop-down dates in some places.
c.) Manual inputting of each teacher’s class schedules for all grade levels is tedious. Alma should have a built-in feature of uploading .CSV files for creating and updating class schedules instead of using an optional 3rd party service.
d.) The sandboxed sites for testing the look and feel of creating classes and report cards are geared for US school systems and not for international school systems, and which I did not find very useful.
e.) There should be a feature during the initial set-up of the school year to allow certain weekends that can be ticked-off as part of the school year.

2.) Are there aspects of the product that are difficult to use?
-ALMA Start (for creating online school enrollment forms, online parent info access, etc.) is a little complicated to learn and implement without a sandboxed testing environment when the school year has already started.

Honestly tough to answer. It’s nice as a club sponsor to be able to email whole groups of students (not just those in my classes).

Basically every single function/aspect is worse than Infinite Campus. Entering grades, making/changing seating charts, printing roster spreadsheets are all more difficult and time consuming than IC. This program is not suited for secondary schools.

I loved that our district made a deal to get a group purchase for ALMA so it made the price just perfect for us. ALMA looks beautiful and is an excellent tool. It is such a powerful data tracking tool which is great when you're trying to analyze large amounts of data. I love that you can run an extract and upload it to CALPADS, it makes reporting so much easier! The customer support team always has a great attitude and truly feels like they love helping you.

One of the major CONS is that it is not yet fully approved by the state for reporting, which adds another step to program administrators to get it approved for attendance. That was a major bummer. Another CON is that because it is such a powerful system, some training is required if you hope to use it properly. When I started using it I thought I could just teach myself how to use it and ended up costing myself and my teachers a week or so of grief until I could get proper training. It's all in the settings. If you don't have those set up properly, then you're doomed. Once you train for 2-3 hours though with their great staff, it's a breeze after that!

Common sense functions, easy to move about. I like the look of the program and is easy to teach to other users. I like how the reports card area is set up, altho we can not print them easily without a pdf converter!

Reports -reports are not in pdf forms as needed. Hate the reports, most secretaries do not have time to mess with formats and a lot of us do not have the software to even do so, corporations do not want to provide that due to budgeting. Please start making PDF options. The reports options are basically useless for my position of lead secretary. Not doing well with our higher grade level schools. We can not even run reports cards.... the reports make us do more work, and we do not need more work . We do not have the abilities to use the reports. PDF form is a better option for secretaries. The biggest complaint thru the system is Reports are not what we need....

I like that Alma has customized the system to a lot of our needs since we first adopted it. It's very easy to use!

I would like for the Alma gradebook to work more seamlessly with our LMS, Schoology.

Ease of navigating, state reporting and Alma response to making sure reports work well.

Nothing so far, it has been very easy to set up and get our information into the system.