Cascade CMS (formerly Cascade Server) by Hannon Hill is a content management system, with built-in tools to help users eliminate stale content, increase digital outreach, and promote end-user adoption and accountability. Cascade CMS is designed for decentralized web teams in most major industries, including higher education, government, healthcare, and technology.
Included is Clive, an engagement and real-time personalization tool for collecting information and using it to craft personalized…
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Perdoo
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Perdoo aligns employees with a company's strategy by focusing teams on the OKRs & KPIs that matter most to the organization.
Cascade Server is well suited with it's WYSIWYG editor being better than most editors that I have used in other systems. In context, editing makes adding content easy compared to the last CMS I used where you had to wing it and view the page outside of the CMS to see if it was correct. The ability mix HTML, CSS, and the Script of your choice anywhere and with ease.
The scenarios were Cascade Server is less appropriate would be in the use of compilers or programs like Visual studio. You need to go out of Cascade Server and go to other environments to perform tasks and then copy the result to Cascade Server. You can write directly in Cascade Server, but it's easier to do in and editor that is specific to a function.
Perdoo would be a great tool for companies that have been through a couple of OKR cycles and have developed a somewhat mature process. It then becomes a very helpful platform to streamline all steps, from design, review, up to post-mortem. It's also a great tool for companies who want to focus on the OKR process, but are not too interested in mixing it up with other frameworks, and other features, like performance reviews, etc. For us, this focus on the core of OKR is a big plus, as it drives simplicity and makes adoption easier.
OKR roadmap: I like how clearly this lays out the connections between the different levels of OKRs (team, company, long term etc)
OKR Webinar: they have a great OKR 101 type webinar that we made all our leaders go through, even those who had worked with OKRs before, to ensure that we were all on the same page. Perdoo is very intentional and thoughtful about the terms they use.
Initiatives: I really like that Perdoo goes down to the initial level, not just OKR. Initiatives are the projects/tasks that roll up under each KR to actually get to the result.
slack updates: I like seeing the notifications come through when colleagues update something in Perdoo. fun to see progress!
Cascade CMS is not an out-of-the-box pre-built system that you can install, turn on and expect to be serving sites and pages on day one. It's not a blogging system like WordPress, or a drag-and-drop system like SquareSpace (both of which I've used for their own purposes). You need to have someone tasked with management and system administration – and if you implement the on-premise self-hosted version, you ought to have several people. We have the university's IT shop handling infrastructure (server hardware, containers, clustering, operating systems, load-balancing, DNS, database servers, NAS/SAN drives), our Web & Design team managing Cascade CMS (system settings, sites, templates, permissions) and managers coordinating each respective academic unit (A&S, business, education, law, marine science).
Changing systems would require too much effort. Our institution is using Cascade Server, WordPress and Drupal but we only serve 2200 students so we have 1 too many content management systems. Reflecting on current technical resources we would like to drop down to 2. This effort hasn't moved forward because of the extensive work required to migrate content and train users in a new system.
Cascade CMS is completely usable on mobile devices, we can train our content editors in a single 2-hour session, and we support 1,000 users with a very small team.
There is a level of complexity for the system administrators, site managers and web programmers who implement templates and content types. But the complexity is neither arbitrary nor inconsistent – and once learned provides a powerful environment within which we can develop robust sites that are beautiful and powerful, yet easy for our content editors to manage.
They have always regarded any question or problem we encountered as very important. We have never felt that they ignore or downplay any issue and not once has anything been left unresolved. They also hold an annual conference where users are invited to attend and share their experiences and wisdom with the entire Cascade community. And with the care and support the provide, we all feel a part of that community.
The key to any CMS implementation is PLAN, PLAN, PLAN. Proper planning with Cascade can increase your satisfaction exponentially once the site migration/creation is complete. When all is said and done, your implementation can make your site run like a Yugo or Maserati. Be smart and deliberate in your decisions. Drive the Maserati. It is already paid for.
We selected Cascade server seven years ago, and the CMS environment at the time was clearly different than it is today. We decided to go with a vendor solution rather than a free solution because the long term cost in hosting a free solution is not, in fact, free; we've found Cascade to have been an excellent choice for us.
I've used Lattice and I liked their OKR UI a lot, it was simple and easy to use but (at least when I used it) lacked some of the functionality that we found in Perdoo. My team got a bit frustrated with LatticeAlly was robust and had a lot of good features, we just ended up going with Perdoo because they were comparable and we loved the OKR webinar.
Initially, ROI was positive - because we completely redesigned the website when we implemented Cascade.
Over time, the inability to keep up with the latest interactive tools has reduced visitors time on site.
Also over time, the difficulty of use has led to less buy-in by backend users, leading to outdated pages, little timely information, and lower visitors.