CONTENTdm is well-suited for smaller organizations as a simple solution to present a digital collection on the web. If your need is complex and requires digital preservation as part of the workflow, it may not be the best solution.
Best for image asset management; hands down the most robust and cost-conscious solution we have worked with. Best for customer support--from design and integration to life-cycle maintenance. Best of expansion of catalogues and assets--- easily add asset packs onto your SaaS agreement as you need--no worries here. Portfolio is continuing to improve its video asset management. However, if you are seeking solely a video management solution, Portfolio is maturing, but not "there" just yet.
As a digital asset management system, one would expect the capability of managing preservation, which CONTENTdm lacks.
Lack of batch updating and other advanced metadata management capabilities.
The usage statistics does not work, and the company is not planning to fix it, at least based the interaction with tech support staff. Customers were referred to use Google Analytics.
We have someone in Extensis Portfolio's customer service who is the main contact whenever our group has questions or concerns. When we were looking into a campus-wide option for a digital asset management service, they were very forthcoming and easy to work with, and able to answer any questions that we had for them.
We selected CONTENTdm because it had a good reputation, was used by many institutions, provided a good product, and supplied feedback and monthly reports. We are wondering about DPLA and if that will be the next evolution or platform.
We have been with Extensis for many years-- so the comparisons are outdated at this point. Companies like WebDAM, Adobe's Lightroom, mediavalet, and others, just don't have the robust catalogue management Portfolio does. There is a solidness and assurance of functionality we experience when using Portfolio-- nothing clunky or web-cloud shaky
It helped us to get started with our digital collections projects at a relatively low cost.
As our needs grew, it became apparent that we needed something more powerful, and that provides better workflows and better statistics and is able to handle the whole life cycle of digitation projects.
