Colleague/Benefactor on UniData?

[krnntp]

Hello all,

Years ago, I had a fairly fun and creative job supporting a university alumni department... I wrote and fine tuned a lot of custom fundraising reports and data exports, using every imaginable feature in UniData, from the query level to UniBasic and out to Unix. The database product  I worked with was called Benefactor, first offered in 1986, and it had a companion product called Colleague which was used for payroll and student affairs. 

It turns out Colleague is still alive and well, but Benefactor must have disappeared sometime after 2006? 

It seems that some of the most active UniData users out there today, are academic sites running Elucian's Colleague product.

Is there anyone on this list using  Colleague? Does anyone remember Benefactor, or know why / when it disappeared? A 20+ year lifespan, for a software product, is nothing to be ashamed of; but still. I just found out about this, and can't help but feel a little sad.

Best regards, 

K. Warwick Russell

krn...@gmail.com 

[Dawn Wolthuis]

Yes, a good friend of mine, who had been at a Colleague & Benefactor site like the one I worked for, was the PM for the project to move from Ben to a Colleague Advancement module. I could ask re the reasons but Benefactor was the earliest Envision product and used a separate PERSON file. So, it made some sense to persist demographics pin the same files over time.

I left Datatel/Ellucian in 2002, and this project was just getting launched or at least put on the roadmap. 2006 is a good guess. 

I work with Colleague sites that are using Enrole and, optionally, updating Colleague when students register for non-credit courses through their Enrole “shopping cart.”

—Dawn

Typed on a mobile keyboard

On Oct 26, 2022, at 8:38 PM, krnntp <krn...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[krnntp]

Dawn,

 Very cool. I don't think we out in userland had any inkling Benefactor as a stand-alone product was ever going away, at least as of early 2005. My site did not have Colleague, only Benefactor, so we would have been left high and dry.

The college ultimately decided to migrate to Raiser's Edge as a cost cutting measure. At the time I thought it was too bad really, since we really had all the bases covered as far as needed functionality... Mac and Windows users all just used a terminal-based interface to Benefactor (accessed via a vt100 terminal emulator on their desktop). It was fast and uncomplicated.

Best, 

Katherine Warwick Russell

krn...@gmail.com

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