Likelihood to Recommend Widen is a great digital asset manager internally. I loved the framework that the platform has. However, we created a main portal to share with our external partners so we could control what was private and what was public. The portal framework was not as user-friendly and we tried too much to make it like a website when it was meant to be a DAM. The main reason we switched providers is that we wanted to have the option to have a consistent framework internally and externally that was more user-friendly with better search capabilities.
Read full review So one of the primary focuses in the company has been SEO, and it does not seem well suited to SEO. For instance, how we set up the alt image tags. It's pretty tricky and there are multiple steps to do that. So I would like to see an Adobe Experience Manager that is more focused on out-of-the-box solutions for SEO, schema coding, alt image tags, and other sorts of SEO functionality to have that more built into the vanilla version of the product. Well suited? It's very good at scalability. And because we're managing such a large number of hotel properties, it works well for an enterprise.
Read full review Pros They offer valuable guidance and educational resources to Administrators Their I.T. support is knowledgeable and responsive. And friendly! They build community among Acquia DAM (Widen) Admins They aren't as salesy and pushy as many of the other DAM Vendors that we considered. I don't feel like they are constantly trying to upsell me or take advantage. I hope this continues to be the case with the acquisition by Acquia. They're just plain nice people to work with. Read full review It is able to support our incoming volume. We're one of the largest in what we do in the country, and we've not had any issues in terms of how it performs, or how it scales our customers coming in. It's a fairly stable platform. It is also a very intuitive platform in us being able to give our business users the ability to come make changes and request additions without going through a huge lift in getting those requests implemented. It has also been a very developer-friendly platform for my team to be able to develop, adapt, and build. We're also expanding on being able to use AEM both as a pure content management solution and also as a headless content solution. So that way we are trying to build a unified content platform that would allow us to create, publish, and manage content across channels from one place. So it's fairly intuitive that way. It's fairly scalable. Obviously, the modern tooling helps, but overall I think it's been a good experience. Read full review Cons Improvements in the cropping and editing features within Acquia DAM are essential to ease the workload for our graphic designers. The current functionality falls short in providing the necessary tools and precision required for efficient asset manipulation, not helping with that time management at all. Enhancing the onboarding experience, we propose creating more video tutorials for Acquia DAM. These visual guides, covering topics from account setup to collaboration features, offer dynamic, step-by-step learning. To improve the onboarding experience, we recommend expanding introductory tools and templates in Acquia DAM. Introducing more user-friendly features and providing a variety of templates will empower new users to navigate the platform with ease, fostering quicker proficiency and enhancing overall usability. Read full review I think some of the key things that can be done better is today we have more point solutions for different things like personalization. We have Adobe Target and for email marketing, we have Adobe Campaign Marketer and all that kind of stuff. But truly I have worked both as an implementation partner for Adobe as well as now I'm a client of Adobe. Being in both those shoes, I can say that we can do a lot better in terms of beefing up the capabilities of AEM, bringing personalization and search and content search experience closer together. It would definitely put Adobe Experience Manager in a different league if we can bring all those personalization capabilities together. I think initially the content management systems, the market was mostly meant to serve static sites. It never matured into that full-scale content personalization being married together. I think that's one area where if those integrations rather than being point solutions, if those capabilities can be made more native to AEM, I think it would definitely be a big sell for a lot of customers. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Acquia DAM (Widen) is changing its pricing model and at this point, we are unsure whether it is a good thing for us or not. While we consider this a robust tool, we will take our time to evaluate the competitors.
Read full review We had and still have a fantastic experience using Adobe CQ. Lots of flexibility, great integration with other Adobe products we already use and a powerful technology make it a great fit for our corporate environment. Also as the community grows, it makes it easier to network with other developers and users to get new ideas on how to continue to get the best out of the software.
Read full review Usability We used to have to respond to any email questions from our library users about how to find assets. With Acquia DAM (Widen), the system is similar to online shopping, workable with keywords for those who like to search that way, or with filters for those who like to browse.
Read full review From our learning curve until we got better. I'd say as we're moving forward and we're making more customizations and we're getting used to it, I'd say it's about a seven or an eight. But as more innovations and more information comes out from Adobe as they make more changes and they make improvements, I'd say they're getting probably about an eight right now.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Never had an issue where I was unable to access Widen.
Read full review Being part of Adobe Suite means you are already notified when the tool has any outages. However, I have never faced unplanned outages. Whenever you face any issue with the site, it is clearly stated if there were any planned outages and how quickly you will be back to normal. So, I will say that even the outages are planned and managed in a great way like their other services.
Read full review Performance There have been a couple of rare instance where after I uploaded an asset, I was unable to rename it, or after uploading it it took a while before it actually appeared and can be viewed in the DAM.
Read full review With respect to performance, Adobe experience manager is one of the best in the CMS space. We didn't observe frequent slowness on platform, however the systems which are accessing experience manager should be of good specifications without which slowness would be observed. Adobe experience manager works well in integration with other solutions, unless the destination application is designed to trigger frequent calls to AEM.
Read full review Support Rating It's very seldom that I have to reach out for support, but when I have, there are quick solutions and follow-ups to make sure the system is working how it should be. My customer support team is also great at reaching out on a regular basis to keep me up to speed on emerging features I may be able to leverage to improve my experience.
Read full review Adobe Experience Manager, in all its capacity, is a great alternative to any other CMS you are using. It helps in rapid development and makes life easier for maintaining the website for multi-language sites. Technical know-how is eliminated at content authoring. Better documentation in terms of live examples with videos would be appreciated.
Read full review Online Training The training was very thorough. The recordings for all our traning sessions were provided to us so that we could go back and review. Our trainer was always available for follow up questions. Our trainer shared a spreadsheet with us as a checklist for all things that needed to be done to ensure proper import and setup of our assets and DAM.
Read full review Implementation Rating It was a lot of work! But worth the effort to get our assets cleaned up and organized. Enough time and personnel need to be allotted for any implementation, but we had some advantage in having our assets in a previous DAM with attached metadata in XML, and our users were prepared with knowledge of our existing DAM at that time. Though old habits present their own issues, a company that is starting from scratch with no DAM has to think farther ahead about how it will organize and collect assets. Far more pre-planning with stakeholders would be needed for a company starting an implementation from scratch.
Read full review Depending on your individual needs, It is really quite simple to create an authoring experience for a website that looks really good. I have been part of many implementations and many teams and have seen many projects that were super successful and others that were not implemented well. AEM has room for a lot of flexibility in the implementation process compared to other CMS like SharePoint
Read full review Alternatives Considered Compared to
Google Drive , the DAM platform stands out as a significantly advanced solution, offering additional features that elevate the user experience and functionality. While
Google Drive excels in basic file storage and sharing, the DAM platform goes beyond these fundamentals, providing enhanced capabilities that cater to diverse needs.
Read full review At Canadian Tire Financial, in the time I've been there, we've always used AEM, but in past places I've used
WordPress , I've used
Squarespace . Things that are more general user-friendly where you're like building your own blog or you're creating a small business website where it's basically just text, you're not intaking information or something like that. I think the customization options in AEM are huge. My experiences with
WordPress were pretty straightforward. Again, it was like, I don't know, like college newspaper website or something like that where you're just like putting content up for people to look at. You're not necessarily taking in any other information. Maybe you might allow people to log in or something and save articles or something pretty straightforward, but then even then I remember that stuff taking me forever to do, to figure out and scroll through tons and tons and tons of documentation. It's just not fun. No one enjoys doing that and then even then you might not have the answer available to you. And that's so frustrating. Hey, it's super user-friendly, figuring out the content editor is pretty straightforward. You're not clicking around and being, "what the heck am I looking at?" Or you're not looking at a bazillion menus to be like, "maybe the thing I want is in here." I can't stand that. I want to be able to look at a page, see what I'm going to be getting in production, and then publish it. I don't want to look around in menus to figure out how to add something to a page.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model Can not give an accurate rating.
Read full review Instead of being directly involved in the tool purchase, I am involved in analysis or what we can use to maximize the tool. Small organizations may find it expensive. However, if the team or organization focuses more on your ROI or the features you will get, then it will definitely be worth it. Pricing is based on a number of factors, including team size or the use of the tool. The user can select the pricing option that best fits their needs based on the number of form submissions they make or the number of pages they wish to publish on their global/multisite sites.
Read full review Professional Services The professional services team within adobe is one of the best in terms of technical and solutioning knowledge. However, considering the billing charges of adobe professional services team, it is always recommended to involve them during platform initial setup or when a complex solution is to be built with platform customizations.
Read full review Return on Investment The central area for all images and videos is excellent. It has helped improve brand visuals and reduced requests on creative teams. Due to our small user base (50), many features are not fully used by our business, the small user base is mainly down to costs and budgets set at the start of the year which is a shame as the benefits would be great but the step in costs is too great to transition effectively. Uploading photoshoots can be tricky due to restrictions on upload and edit counts. Read full review This actually has been great for our websites. In the time that I've been with the company, we've seen at least the profitability of our websites because we are measuring that through analytics. We've seen it double since using it. We were using it when I first started with the company, but we've gotten better at how we're using it and really optimizing the use as well as the design. I think that that's made a huge difference. We've seen a huge jump in the performance of our websites with maintaining users and the e-commerce side of it. Read full review ScreenShots Acquia DAM (Widen) Screenshots