Widen Collective Reviews

Pros
The search functionality is powerful. Metadata parameters are as broad or as narrow as I'd like them to be when I'm uploading my content, but I know that I'll always be able to track things down with the search bar. I love that, as an administrator, I can assign different "roles" or "groups" to both users and assets to ensure that the right content can be found by the right people, and restrictions or limitations can be put in place when required. The front page is pretty customizable, though that part isn't as intuitive as it could be. (A free-form HTML editor option would be nice, for the geeks among us who want to really extract the full potential of a customized front page). Fully integrated Single Sign-On makes it easy for anyone in the organization to log in and get going with virtually no effort on my part as an administrator. The analytics reports let me know how much use we're getting out of the tool, what people are searching for, and creates opportunities for optimization. It also gives us a clear indication of what type of content require to get their jobs done, so we can better cater to their needs.

Cons
Again, the lack of a truly free-form HTML editor option for the homepage layout is a bit limiting - We've managed to find clever ways around that to ensure people can still easily navigate around and find what they need, but the ability to customize that homepage would be great. It would be nice as an administrator to be able to quickly and easily change my view mode to be able to see what content is available for different role types. Currently, I find myself having to log into a number of dummy accounts with different access levels to verify what content is/isn't displayed, which can interrupt my workflow.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

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

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

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Good customer support Robust reporting features Assets can be downloaded in a variety of file formats Various types of file formats are supported Permissions can be setup to protect assets Users can access the site through a standard web browser Media can be built in minutes without needing expensive software programs Assets/media can be ordered and downloaded at any time of day or night Software updates made throughout the year

Cons
Pages can be slow to load at times Reporting tools can be confusing Custom enhancements to the site can be expensive Some education is needed for new users of the site The site is not setup for printing on demand Home page can be confusing if your site includes the DAM and the media builder

Rating breakdown

Pros
The product is easy to use and modify as needed. There are always new updates to the features which makes it even easier to use for my users.

Cons
The AEM Integration does not work as it should. This was a big sell for us since our website is hosted by AEM and now we can't integrate the two without AEM working properly with Widen.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
I like that they started archiving style numbers so I can easily search for the assets I need. After searching I love how it pops up everything whether the product was featured in a model shot, mailer, or catalog. I also love the filtering section to the left.

Cons
The amount of time it takes to download an asset.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 5/10

Pros
Widen's DAM tool is intuitive to use and easy to manage.

Cons
There are occasional bugs with Workflow, however the support team is responsive.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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 customers, so I can easily manage that through the admin tool. The time that we spent managing assets went from a full-time person's job before implementing Widen to only an hour or so a week once it is up and running. My team has to manage over 15 different categories of assets. Most of those categories are individual brands within our company. Some are segments of the brands. All of that to say that we have sliced up our asset offering in many ways to best serve our customers. By being able to segment those brands, we are able to get the right asset served up quickly in a variety of formats to fit most every need. In addition to that, we can make it so only certain assets can be served to certain customers. All through the use of Widen's "role" and "asset group" functions. We have well over 1000 end-users that we can easily manage.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Assets are served up quickly around the world and it is a very stable platform. When technical issues do arise, they are very communicative about their progress of solving the issue. I like the dedicated customer rep as well as access to new features and feedback through their Trello boards. I also like the ability to extract metadata from image IPTC metadata and map it to our custom fields.

Cons
I like the ability to create portals in order to highlight and add info to curated groups of assets, but there are some weaknesses in portal functionality and portal creation capabilities. It would be ideal to be able to create custom dashboards/homepage without extensive use of html. The current wysiwyg is extremely limited in design/layout capability. We'd like a better way for our users to be able to search for portals.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

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

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Pros
Widen is a fairly easy and efficient way to store, archive, and distribute photographic files. In the year that I have been using Widen, it has changed the way I work. Now when I receive a request for a specific photo, I don't have to resize it and make sure it is the appropriate size to fit into an email. I just choose the file I want, send it to the recipient and they download it directly from the site instead of through e-mail. This is especially helpful to those who are always battling an in-box size limit! It has also made it easier to work off-site. Say I am out of the office on assignment or home sick. If I see a request come in, I can log onto Widen from anywhere and send the requests files out at any time! The search features also work great for us. Users throughout the university can now directly search for whatever type of photo they are looking for instead of requesting it through our department by phone or email.

Cons
Though I love Widen there have been a few minor issues we have encountered. The first is that it is a little hard to understand at the beginning. The back end of the program seems complicated to a new user. However, we have now figured everything out and so this really is no longer an issue for us. The other issue I sometimes run into is that the processing can be a bit slow. There are times when I upload my files and then cannot see the previews of my files for quite some time. This can be a problem when I am trying to identify people in the photograph to add their names to the keywords. The only way around this currently is to be patient and go work on something else for a while.

Rating breakdown

Pros
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
The Media Collective software is easy to use and is easy to configure. If you need some help there is an extensive online help library full of things which can help you, but if you need to talk to someone directly you can web chat, email or call. The help associates are always very friendly and will work with you to understand and fix the issues that you're having.

Cons
I guess I don't like the fact that it's not free? I had to put something in this space. If it was free it would definitely be better however that's probably not a sustainable scenario for Widen.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Rating breakdown

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Pros
Speed. Since the beginning we've upload thousands of images and added hundreds of users across our company and partners. It has not slowed down with all of the added weight and burden. It's still as snappy and responsive searching for assets in the beginning. Narrowing the search results and downloading images is very quick.

Cons
Support. The support could be better. There has been times, not in a while, when it goes down, just like any cloud service. But it seems the first line of support are the on-site admins. It's a problem when they are not in the office. There's not an easy way to contact support when needed. There should be a chat feature to let them know when we are experiencing outages and get the issues solved.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
I have been very pleased with using Widen for our DAM tool. Their support team is phenomenal! Anytime I have a question or issue, they respond immediately and are very helpful to get to the bottom of any issue I might be having, or explain a feature I may not be knowledgeable in. Their entire team is always looking for ways to improve the tool based on user feedback and suggestions. It's great to have a company so open to what the users are saying. I have also found that the tool itself has been great in meeting our DAM needs. By building out a thorough and intuitive organization structure through categories, asset groups and metadata, we have been able to greatly increase the use of our tool and have received numerous compliments on the improvements. That along with Widen's new interface launched in 2012, the collective is now a much more user friendly and intuitive tool for both users and administrators alike.

Cons
My only complaint at this time is that the "Send File" feature has been discontinued with the launch of the new interface. I believe our company may have been one of the few groups that used the tool fairly often, and were sad to see the feature go. We hope to be able to find a solution either with Widen or with an outside service in order to send large files directly to another user without having to have the asset 'live' in the DAM tool.

Rating breakdown

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
The convenience and logical layout of the site as a whole. Our sales reps, the Woolrich team, and our buyers all are able to use the site without any hiccups. I really like that I am able to control who can see and download what. Because of Widen I don't have to download every asset and take up space on my computer, I can send links to anyone and everyone that needs them, but also it makes it so our reps can take care of their accounts directly and aren't coming to me for everything. It reallly makes my job so much easier!

Cons
I don't really have any complaints except I wish I didn't have to change my password so much. I'm running out of ideas! :)

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10