Acquia DAM (Widen)

Highly positive experience, with ease of use and great customer service!

Comentarios: We learned more about DAM management and learned to love it!

Puntos a favor:

It's so easy and intuitive to use. The metadata search boxes on the side help narrow and refine the search. And the customer service can't be beat!

Contras:

I don't like how the collections can't be edited between users. We have had to figure out a workaround to be able to share and edit the same collections.

Widen Collective Is Your Digital Asset Filing Cabinet

Comentarios: 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.

Puntos a favor:

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.

Contras:

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 Collective

Comentarios: The Digital Asset System was put in place to provide easy access to assets owned by Trek Bicycle Corporation for those internally and externally. These assets can be ordered and downloaded at any time of day or night. It's an invaluable tool for our dealers, distributors, and international offices.
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The Media Template is an online ad, and media builder. It allows Trek to control brand consistency, while it allows our users to build media in minutes using pre-approved images and text without the need of expensive software programs. We use this portion of the site to provide promotional items and in store signage to our large dealer base. Overall, I think the Widen collective is a great product and I really enjoy working with Widen.

Puntos a favor:

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

Contras:

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

Before, I was lost. Now I have found...my assets. Great tool/ great people

Comentarios: Gee, it makes work easier. We have dealers and marketing teams around the world. This makes distributing those assets not a pain in the ass. Also, WAY less questions than before we implemented about 'where is is this asset?' It rules.

Puntos a favor:

The customer experience team and help desk teams are great and make you feel like a real person instead of a cog in the giant machine of software life. The portals. The PORTALS! Portals rule. They really do. Best way to organize brand stuff.

Contras:

I'm waiting for workflow to become even more robust for it to become a Workfront killer. Which I hope that it does.

My Widen DAM Review

Comentarios: Using Widen’s DAM to organize our assets has greatly reduced our marketing teams time spent hunting for images.

Puntos a favor:

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.

Contras:

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.

Hundreds of very helpful features; enhanced well over the years with great advancement in marketing

Puntos a favor:

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.

Contras:

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 Collective is the best DAM tool we have used.

Puntos a favor:

The user interface is so simply we can add new users quickly and easily and they can find assets with a minimal amount of training.

Contras:

Some of the role permissions arent explained ver well. There were a few settings we needed to have turned on in order for users to be able to use the system effectively.

Widen helped us to organize the thousands of assets we used to house all over our network folders.

Comentarios: Company-wide self service, insight analytics, and quicker webpage loads.

Puntos a favor:

The tag and search functionality. We no longer have the chief marketing officer instant-messaging our team to find awards, accolades, images, and illustrations. Other departments can self-serve as their needs dictate, and we can track usage of key assets with Insights.

Contras:

The Insites analytics are not intuitive to use. I would like deep practice, usability, and best practice webinars and or forums to better understand the power this feature.

Collective

Comentarios: Never had any loading, usability issues at all.

Puntos a favor:

Integrations with other systems is quick and simple.

Contras:

Should reach to more systems and CRM for deeper integration.

Fantastic, Love it!!

Puntos a favor:

Customer Support, website functionality, ease of uploading new assets and then finding them later, user control, sharing capabilities including the file type selection. Love the zoom feature!

Contras:

Honestly, it's not with Widen itself. My biggest complaint is with my own team because I keep having to reset people's passwords for the site because they forget them. Luckily, it's really easy to do in the Admin functions!

The Best Bang for your Buck

Comentarios: My overall experience with Widen has been great. The customer support is always responsive to my needs, and the tool has been a game changer for the marketing team. Widen continually improves the end-user experience, instilling confidence that the program will evolve and get even better with time.

Puntos a favor:

The marketing team loves the portals, collections, and asset version control.

Contras:

The search/filter functionality and the lack of styling on the standard portals.

Widen Collective Review

Comentarios: From the beginning, I have 100% loved every experience I have encountered with Widen. I absolutely love everything about your company's history and philosophy. Because of such wonderful management, you know how to treat a customer! I always know I can count on your team to help me with my problems and offer solutions in a quick manner. I have attended 2 years of the Widen Summit and get SO much out of the experience. I learn so much and always go home with a notebook full of notes on how to improve my own DAM and my own user's experiences. You all energize me is a way that I never though was possible with image organization and metadata knowledge. LOL! Keep doing what you're doing, this customer is very satisfied.

Puntos a favor:

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.

Contras:

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.

Amazing product and customer service

Comentarios: Ease of use is a big factor for us and being able to modify the DAM as needed makes it a program we can use and adapt to the different business units at NVIDIA. The customer service with Widen is a big help whenever I have questions or issues.

Puntos a favor:

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.

Contras:

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.

Widen has changed the way I work

Comentarios: 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.

Puntos a favor:

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.

Contras:

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.

Excellent software

Comentarios: Our agency works with many clients, but only my client uses Widen Collective. I am the envy of the creative team since I can easily find any image I need.

Puntos a favor:

What I like most about this software is that I can easily see the newest items that have been added to the collective. The search tool also works really well for finding specific items.

Contras:

The most challenging part of using this software is that apparently the administrator that adds items to the collective is not required to add all the meta tags that would help users find what they need easily. I don't think it's a fail on the part of the software but maybe if adding all meta tags were required it would make searching easier.

I am a digital asset manager for my company, which uses Widen.

Comentarios: Many time-saving features in asset searching and sharing both within my organization and externally with customers.

Puntos a favor:

What I like most about Widen is that they are very open to receiving feedback and improving the software based off of user comments. They host annual events to bring other clients together to share ideas and knowledge of how their users work in the software. All of the Widen staff is available for comments.

Contras:

What I like least about Widen is that all of the connectors and API's that help integrate our DAM into other business platforms, such as Salesforce, Sharepoint, CreativeCloud come with an additional annual fee.

Widen Collective Review

Comentarios: I would definitely recommend Widen to those familiar with DAM as well as those who are just starting out. The Widen team is also a great group to work with from start to finish and are there for you every step of the way, even for a company like ours that have been using Widen's services for over 7 years now.

Puntos a favor:

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.

Contras:

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.

Widen is intuitive, easy-to-use and makes organizing digital assets a breeze!

Puntos a favor:

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.

Contras:

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.

Widen Collective Support & Features

Comentarios: The storage capability that Widen offers has really benefitted our team since we heavily use the archiving feature. We are able to organize our multimedia files when obsolete, expired or updates have been made.

Puntos a favor:

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.

Contras:

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.

Made Our Commercial Archive Pretty and User Friendly

Comentarios: Widen has allowed our agency to maintain our commercial assets easily and has streamlined my job allowing me to take on different responsibilities elsewhere at work.

Puntos a favor:

This software is incredibly helpful for storing our vast collection of assets. It allows for easy organization and I'm able to find anything I need easily through name or metadata searches. It also has a relatively quick download speed for when you need something off the cloud in a hurry. Their Portals have simplified the way that we can show clients current campaigns and it's given us the ability to send individual commercials to clients with ease, and as a bonus, it's all available on mobile.

Contras:

Widen just updated with a new upload mode, which would be fine, however, they completely removed the drag and drop option on the Widen homepage.

Helping us push forward as the dance company of the future

Comentarios: Prior to implementing the Widen DAM my colleagues and I lacked a truly organized storage system to access to our digital assets. As digital formats and social media continue to grow and become a real focus of our marketing efforts, not having a centralized, searchable system with metadata and versioning was becoming a real problem. As part of a larger institutional initiative the ballet reviewed several DAM solutions. In the end Widen was the best solution for us, because it provided the basic features we needed in the everyday, with a road-map of exciting updates and enhancements coming at a pace we can keep up with. The Widen DAM touches all aspects of our organization and will continue to grow with us. It is already helping us work in a more streamlined manner and more efficiently. In the long run it will help preserve the legacy of the ballet.

Puntos a favor:

Intuitive, strong on basics, interesting road map for upcoming releases.

Contras:

It would be nice for non-users to be able to approve digital assets for use when they are sent a collection. However, the road map for Widen Workflow shows promise as a solution for this.

Great product!

Comentarios: Great experience both with the software and with the service.

Puntos a favor:

We use this to hold a lot of our files and it is super easy to use.

Contras:

One thing I wish it allowed was the usage of HTML files.

Widen is what our department needed

Comentarios: I'm part of a small, internal corporate video team. We have presenters around the world who often need access to some of our video assets on short notice. They used to have to contact us, and we would have to drop what we were doing to send a file to them. Now they can just log on to Widen and easily find what they need. Quick note about what kind of company this is: A few weeks after we first joined Widen, we asked our representative if a certain feature existed (sorry, I don't remember exactly what it was'it was something that would make things easier for some of our users). He said no, it doesn't, but he would suggest it to the development team. Just a few days later he called us back to let us know that he had talked to the development team and they were going to incorporate that feature into the next release, which was just a few weeks away from launching. Great news! So here is a company of people who listen to their customers and genuinely want us to have a good experience. The interface is easy to use, I like the upload wizard, I like uploading new versions of items--the asset's url stays the same. The only 'con' I can think of is that there was a bit of a learning curve at first to figure out how to, for example, send one or more assets to someone to download (not just view). For the most part, it's intuitive to use but plan to spend at least a few minutes familiarizing yourself with it when you first use it. We looked at other DAM products out there as well (don't remember their names). If anyone else out there is looking for a good DAM system, this is what worked for us. I could see it working for a large corporation or even a business like ours of ~130 people (plus over 100 presenters and international associates). The best value, best features, best customer service, a perfect fit. Thanks.

Widen Collective Digital Asset Management Platform for Large Corporations

Comentarios: Our company has used this platform for several years now and it's been increasingly important in our marketing communications strategy as we move from print to digital. The more I learn about the tool the most impressed I am, and there is always something new to learn because they not only keep pace with the latest technology -- they actually stay ahead. There is no need to build costly new platforms from scratch, we just need to rely on the experts at Widen, learn from them and deploy. Great value for anyone who is serious about digital marketing.

Puntos a favor:

Easy to use and getting easier every day..

Contras:

So much to learn and so little time!

The company was the best and remains the best because they deliver a quality product

Puntos a favor:

Customer service is personal. People ask and care about your user experience and guide you from start to your entire use of the tool.

Contras:

I cannot say anything bad. But what I like least is that collections appear in categories. This only is problematic when batch editing. But it can be filtered.