Acquia DAM (Widen)

Widen's DAM system is intuitive for our users and has made sharing assets effortless

Pros:

It is very easy for me to onboard people, I don't really have to do much training since the program is so intuitive. I am able to permission out who sees what. Widen's customer service is also second to none with any software company I've ever worked with.

Cons:

There are a few minor things, but nothing major that would make me start looking into other solutions. One example being that I wish we could organize global collections better

Widen is a responsive and powerful DAM with bonus features and very attentive customer service

Comments: We are able to archive and distribute thousands of marketing assets to a global audience very efficiently and with a sufficient amount of protection and guidance about proper usage. Portals have allowed teams to communicate out about curated groups of assets and instructions with a single url which has helped their ability to promote the most valuable and up to date marketing assets.

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.

no one home

Pros:

Nothing

Cons:

I could not get any support at all. I was on a deadline and there was no one home to help fix a simple sign-in problem.

Widen Collective Is Your Digital Asset Filing Cabinet

Comments: IT's hard to to quantify the value this project brought to our organization-but it was incredible. We have reduced the amount of time spent looking for images, we have given access directly to our agency (reducing the number of emails back and forth requesting assets) and since partnering with Widen we've improved the quality of our assets. I would absolutely recommend Widen to any organization looking for a solution to a similar problem.

Pros:

As someone who loves to have everything neatly organized and labeled, I really appreciated the ability to easily organize, categorize and tag all of my organization's digital assets. It's a daunting task-hundreds or thousands of images and video files, all had to be housed in a cloud in a manner that was intuitive and retrievable. Yet, Widen Collective helped me make that happen.

Cons:

As with any software, there is a learning curve. But, Widen offers comprehensive training and excellent customer support. Don't let this hold you back!

Widen has changed the way I work

Comments: Overall I would definitely recommend Widen to any company that has a large amount of photo files that they need to store and easily be able to send to others, either internally or externally.

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.