Acquia DAM (Widen) Features

Widen Collective is being used greatly by many individuals in similar roles in our company due to its many features that allow each of us to achieve our tasks with ease. I use this product for the sake of its archiving purposes, project and workflow management accessibility. The possibility to manage minor tasks, access controls and track employee milestones are important jobs I have to do which is made easy by Widen Collective.

Widen Collective is a broad software with multiple available features, with this is the difficulty to maneuver around this program at a first glance. It may take a few tutoring sessions and practice to be able to perform tasks with this software, especially if you are not that inclined with technology.

Widen has been a great partner to work with on our new Digital Asset Management. The implementation process is very smooth and straightforwards.

There are restrictions on how much we can customize the dashboard.

Integrations with other systems is quick and simple.

Should reach to more systems and CRM for deeper integration.

The DAM interface is quick and easy to use, the reporting capabilities are robust, and the security allows a lot of flexibility. In addition - we love the Portals - which allows us to provide assets to our non users.

Knowing that a DAM is customized to your company’s needs, I'm not going to lie – implementing a DAM system can be grueling and a lot of work. But that’s the beauty of a DAM – as your company grows, your DAM can also grow and be customized to reflect changes and future needs.

Beauty and brains - the dashboard is legit! You can personalize it to your needs, it's visually appealing without the clutter. The activity feed and the spotlight collection is useful for me and the other admins. Love the idea of the brand portals and can't wait until we can implement and launch it.

As an admin, I'd like to see asset thumbnails in the uploads and downloads tab instead of filenames. Also, the asset versions isn't as easy to use. If we have 3 versions of an asset, I'd love it if when you click on the asset, you can tile the assets to determine which one to download. Currently, you have a "switch version" button that gets lost in the details. Lastly, the batch edit tool sometimes doesn't apply to all assets in the batch.

The storage capability that Widen offers is awesome. Using this platform has helped our team manage our multimedia content in one single place and make it available for others when needed. Uploading assets and tagging the metadata is easy and can be done in batches for efficiency, which saves us a lot of time.

If portals can be searched for on the collective site, it will really help our team communicate our newest products. Currently, portals are not able to be searched for and sharing individual portal links can be time consuming.

Easy to use and getting easier every day..

So much to learn and so little time!

Sending and finding images has never been easier. Customer service is amazing and helped me tremendously when setting up my companies DAM.

We have a different use case than most because most of the time we are sending media outside of our organization. Widen collects emails when items are downloaded, but we are not able to get the data. I know they are working on this and we look forward to this update.

Digital assets are organized very intuitively and can be accessed/downloaded with great ease.

Searching for specific assets would be made easier if end-users could include additional criteria to narrow down their search (i.e. duration of video assets, file format)

I've used quite a few DAM solutions in the past and Widen is by far the best one I have worked with. The thing that I like the best is the ability to manage the metadata just as easy as it is to manage the assets themselves. On top of that, the ability to assign permissions to access and administer assets by role has proven to be very valuable. We have assets that are only applicable to certain...

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The only thing I have an issue with is my inability to customize the home page. From what I can tell, you have to be pretty savvy at HTML to do it right. But, I can say that there are some basic things that you can customize that will make your page on brand by adding logos and customizing the colors of fonts, buttons, etc.

Our DAM houses all of the images we use in our catalogs and online. I love it's ability to organize and tag image in order to search for them with ease.

I think the one thing that I struggle with was the update on how to upload images. My retouch artist and I are usually the main uploads, and we enjoyed the drag and drop feature that used to be on our main page instead of having to click through the Upload Wizard.

I love that it is cloud-based and you can access it from any computer, phone or tablet. It's super easy to create collections and share media with internal and external clients.

Some of the features need updating in my opinion. I have asked several times for certain changes that I'm sure I'm not the only one to encounter.

The searchable option and the ability to organize all of our thousands of assets. As well as the ability to download these assets in different file formats.

If spelling isn’t accurate in the metadata or search bar, it will not be able to find what you are looking for.

It makes keeping things organized (which is a complicated job) super easy.

It works really, really well, but as with any asset management tool, there is ongoing maintenance and auditing that has to take place. That can get tedious at times, but we realize that it has to be done to keep things current, delete outdated/redundant assets, or just to check things that might have been uploaded with incorrect metadata, for instance.

I like the ability and flexibility Widen offers to integrate the digital media content with our applications and websites. It also offers nice tools and functionality to add, maintain, organize, and secure content.

No cons were added to this review

Its searchable content. As long as metadata is used, searching for assets is relatively easy.

Upload process. The Drag/Drop feature was nice! Now I'm forced to go through a wizard. Too time consuming for my liking.

The biggest business problem that it has solved for my company is it allows multiple people to do what once was a one person task. It saves time when being able to have multiple people have access to the same files and being able to send, upload and manage it all. Being able to easily send outside organizations images and documents has saved us so much time and has left very little room for error when sending. With Widen's recent website advancement's, it's given me an opportunity to create a creative brief for projects I'm working on. All within 1 website. It's great.

This doesn't happen all the time, but sometimes I will be uploading files and Widen will time out or freeze during my upload and I'll have to start the process all over. This could be a problem with my internet connection as well.

We use Widen as an asset manager, giving our teams easy access to photos, videos, and illustrative elements. As the administrator, I can create different user accounts, letting some people have more access than others if they need it. I can also provide third-party contractors access to our resources too.

The admin side can be a little bit tricky to navigate, and it would be nice as the administrator to be able to change my view settings to spoof different levels of access, so I can quickly see what kinds of access my users have and make changes or alterations without needing to create multiple accounts for myself.

Using Widen software has allowed our creative teams to manage content more effectively. With it, we are able to track asset revisions and popularity. This has made it easier for us to be more strategic in the creation and placement of our content. Additionally, with the Workflow management tool, digital proofing interface and Digital Asset Management library, our users only have to visit one site to enter jobs, proof and collaborate on new content, and access current assets and media.

Sometimes we experience "glitches" or "bugs" within the software after a major update is rolled out, but that's to be expected and they are always quick to respond when this happens.

Customer and technical support are world-class. Widen is always looking to its customers for roadmap enhancements and give honest, helpful feedback to all inquiries.

The Adobe CC Connector is still a little buggy and looses connection links to the DAM during updates or if shared with someone without a CC Connector license. I would like enhancements to make it more user friendly.

I love that I can easily store all of my content in the system, then make a website like portal to share and organize my content in a neat way.

I wish there was a way to add hyperlinks to Asset Collections so that I can link out to other internal websites within my company or to an eCourse within Workday.

The Admin GUI is an intuitive mix of front-end and back-end Admin Tools, with STRONG client support accessible via Chat, email, demos and structured training sessions.

Lack of an XML generator (so, no ability to create an MRSS feed for distro to 'New Media' platforms such as STB's and smartphones), and lack of a .csv ingest manager for direct 'Custom Metadata Import.'

My favorite things about Widen’s DAM software include an easy to navigate interface, very intuitive searching capabilities, customizable metadata fields for great detail to be attributed to assets, the ability to download files in multiple files types (fairly quick conversion depending on size of original file), the ability to customize your login screen and home screen (keeping everything on-brand is important!), and their customer support team is amazing.

I feel that the asset sharing options could be expanded upon. Currently, you can type an email in and send a set of assets. I would like to see additional options implemented because it feels fairly limited currently.

Wixs simplified proofreader makes it very simple to make an expert site without having to know a codel with many layouts and with very great instructions on how to do so. It is very beginner friendly and help with a lot of small business websites to get started.

A con is that you cannot change templates once your website is live which i believe you should be able to. Also, it has storage limit on all plans.