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Cascade Server is a highly versatile content management system widely used by universities and colleges to manage multiple websites across …
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What is Cascade CMS?
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…
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Popular Features
- Publishing workflow (19)9.090%
- Role-based user permissions (19)8.080%
- Admin section (19)8.080%
- WYSIWYG editor (19)6.161%
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What is Cascade CMS?
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,…
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What is Cascade CMS?
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 web experiences. With it, users can build profiles and engage with audiences through targeted content delivery.
Cascade CMS Features
Web Content Creation Features
- Supported: WYSIWYG editor
- Supported: Code quality / cleanliness
- Supported: Content versioning
- Supported: Admin section
- Supported: Page templates
- Supported: Mobile optimization / responsive design
- Supported: Publishing workflow
- Supported: Form generator
- Supported: Content scheduling
Web Content Management Features
- Supported: Internal content search
- Supported: Content taxonomy
- Supported: SEO support
- Supported: Browser compatibility
- Supported: Bulk management
- Supported: Availability / breadth of extensions
- Supported: Import / export
- Supported: Website analytics
Platform & Infrastructure Features
- Supported: API
- Supported: Internationalization / multi-language
Security Features
- Supported: Role-based user permissions
- Supported: User-level audit trail
- Supported: Version history
- Supported: Simple roll-back capabilities
CMS programming language or framework Features
- Supported: PHP
- Supported: Python
- Supported: Java
- Supported: .NET
Additional Features
- Supported: Full support of COPE (create once, publish everywhere)
Cascade CMS Video
Using Velocity and XSLT in Cascade Server
Cascade CMS Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac |
| Mobile Application | No |
Cascade CMS Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
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 web experiences. With it, users can build profiles and engage with audiences through targeted content delivery.
Reviewers rate Page templates and Publishing workflow and Bulk management highest, with a score of 9.
The most common users of Cascade CMS are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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Cascade Server is a highly versatile content management system widely used by universities and colleges to manage multiple websites across various departments and administrative offices. Users with no web technology experience have found Cascade Server to be easy to navigate and use, resulting in an efficient web publishing environment. This has allowed departments with high update rates to have immediate control and updates through the IT department's back-end design and structural support.
Scripps Research, for example, has implemented Cascade Server across its entire institute, empowering individuals, studies, and departments to create their own websites without extensive intervention from the IT department. This has significantly saved time and costs. Northern Illinois University also relies on Cascade Server as its main web client, enabling everyone in the organization to easily update and manage their web pages, particularly in the Marketing and Web Communications Department.
Cascade Server's robust features such as versioning, check-in/out assets, workflow management, and cross-site sharing capabilities make it a powerful tool for managing multiple sites, approving content, and maintaining version control. With its intuitive user interface, staff can efficiently retrieve information from the content repository throughout the workday. Additionally, Cascade Server's integration with Spectate allows for personalized web content, easy form generation, and lead tracking. It serves as a comprehensive suite of web content tools that cater to diverse organizational needs.
The flexibility, adaptability, and scalability of Cascade Server have made it ideal for universities and organizations seeking a powerful CMS solution. Its ability to assign different roles and levels of access has been praised by users for providing a self-service tool for end users without web management experience. Furthermore, Cascade Server has enabled departments and programs without technical resources to build and maintain their own sites effectively. It has become instrumental in managing content from hundreds of university web pages while ensuring consistency across the organization. Additionally, Cascade Server has proven valuable for managing online journals by simplifying text placement, image inclusion, document attachment tasks, thus enhancing efficiency in journal management.
Time-saving Tool: Users have found Cascade Server to be a valuable time-saving tool for monitoring stale content and broken links on their public site. They appreciate the automatic handling of version upgrades on the cloud, which has been lightning fast and only takes about half an hour to convert a site with a large number of assets.
Intuitive Permissions: Setting permissions in Cascade Server is described as intuitive and easy to set up at both high or granular levels. Many users have praised the CMS for its ability to track assets and links when moved, deleted, or renamed, as well as its capability for allowing relational publishing of all affected assets.
Great Integration with Third-Party Products: The integration of Cascade Server with third-party products such as Google Analytics, SiteImprove, and WebDam is highly valued by users. They specifically mention the excellent customer service provided by Hannon Hill, the company behind Cascade Server.
Cons:
- Overwhelming and Challenging Interface: Many users have found Cascade CMS overwhelming and challenging to understand, especially without programming knowledge. The complex nature of the system makes it difficult for non-technical users to navigate and utilize effectively.
- Limitations with Images: Users have mentioned that Cascade CMS has limitations when it comes to working with images. Specifically, they find it challenging to save multiple versions of uploaded images and encounter difficulties in managing image-related tasks within the system.
- Complex Maintenance for Large Websites: Maintaining a large website can be difficult in Cascade Server due to its push architecture and the need to write a web services application for re-publishing template-specific pages. Users express frustration with these complexities, which make it time-consuming and labor-intensive to manage their websites efficiently.
Users commonly recommend purchasing consulting time from Hannon Hill to configure and set up Cascade CMS. They suggest considering WordPress for its ease of use and overall design, while acknowledging that Cascade CMS excels in revisions and file structure management. Additionally, users find Cascade CMS to be a powerful solution for enterprise-level content management, although it does require familiarity with Velocity templating language, XML, and structured content markup. They also highlight the ease of use for basic daily functions in Cascade CMS and praise Hannon Hill's customer support. Lastly, for users with advanced technical expertise, they suggest considering Drupal as an alternative option.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-4 of 4)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
July 09, 2015
NIU Huskies
Cascade Server is used as our main web client for NIU. We use it campus wide, especially in the Marketing and Web Communications Department. It helps us maintain our NIU website.
- Analytic data
- Web content
- Storage
- Loading speed
- More custom templates
63.75%
6.4
58%
5.8
60%
6.0
50%
5.0
N/A
N/A
- Efficiency
- Cost
- ROI
Very well. It works just for our purpose.
200
Campus wide departments
25
Training and IT
- Web content
- Marketing
- Communications
- New website
- Update web content
Not Sure
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Analyst Reports
Product reputation. We wanted a reliable product.
N/A
- Vendor implemented
Change management was a major issue with the implementation
Takes people a lot of time to deal with change in an organization.
- Training
- Online training
- In-person training
- Self-taught
You really needed all training if you had never worked with it before.
Yes - we have added extensive custom code
It was easy to do with my background with code.
Yes
Yes and no, it takes a long time for certain instances.
When the servers were running slow they helped us get back on line.
- Training
- Templates
- Forms
- Make multiple common pages
Yes
Works great for our new website.
- Mobile
- Javascript widgets
Not to my knowledge
It works to your advantage if you know what you are doing.
Long term commitment
Build those relationships
- Faster service
- Even faster service
- New templates
February 25, 2015
Simplicity at its best!
My organization uses Cascade Server on a daily basis. It's very easy to learn for all users across our organizations, not just techies. The great benefit Cascade Server offers is, it allows us to let everyone in our organization update and mange their web pages.
- Allow the use of multiple users and groups.
- With working in such a large organization, it makes it easy to manage multiple web pages, by allowing users to update their pages.
- Cascade Server is very simple and easy to learn.
- Cascade Server could have more updated "How to" content.
- Improve the documentation and offer more plugin features
- It increases efficiency for our organization.
5
8
February 25, 2015
Cascade Server - The Agnostic CMS
Cascade Server is being used by roughly 1500 people at Indiana University to manage around 400 sites from 7 campuses including IU Bloomington, IUPUI Indianapolis, IU Kokomo, IU Northwest, IU South Bend, IU Southeast, and IUPUC Columbus. We have a decentralized IT infrastructure so we needed a push CMS that would allow people to use one system to publish to many different types of web servers. We also decided to use Cascade Server to mitigate risk since other dynamic CMS sites were regularly getting compromised. The sites managed on Cascade Server include marketing gateway sites like www.iu.edu, as well as admissions, departmental sites, schools, news and much more.
- Cascade Server is generally very secure because most of the time it publishes out static HTML content. We've not had a compromised site using Cascade Server.
- Cascade Server is good at previewing your site before making it live. The built in page preview supports HTML, CSS, and Javascript so you can see exactly how the page will render once published.
- The Hannon Hill team is very good at providing quick support. They have a support forum, a Knowledge Base and also an idea exchange where you can submit feature requests.
- Cascade Server is good at being agnostic when it comes to installing the software and publishing the content to a web server.
- Unlike most content management systems I was use to, Cascade Server has a publishing queue that takes time to render and then publish out your content. The queue is shared among all users of the site. We've set best practices to publishing (such as never publish the full-site during business hours).
- Most content management systems provide community plugins and themes, however Cascade Server does not.
- When you first come into Cascade Server as a developer, you'll find there are a lot of connections to piece together a page. In other words, the learning curve is steep.
- We've moved some of our vulnerable sites to Cascade Server to satisfy our goal of reducing redundant systems and mitigating risk.
- IU decided this is the CMS that will be supported and our users have been happy with the support we provide. In general we do not support any other CMS.
- Our marketing department has retired most of their legacy servers/websites after moving to Cascade Server, saving time and money.
The learning curve is steep for Cascade Server so if your goal is to get a new site up quickly then you may look elsewhere. However, if you have the time Cascade Server is worth the investment since it's secure and easily allows users and groups to manage their site's content. The support and community for Cascade Server is good because it's a fairly small product so people are always happy to help. As a developer, if you learn Cascade Server, you will become a very attractive candidate for jobs using Cascade Server.
5
December 18, 2014
Cascade Server - Just do it.
We use Cascade Server across our entire university web site. It allows us to maintain consistency with branding while allowing individual departments to take control and ownership of their content.
- It is very easy to customize to your needs as well as your users needs. You can build out custom editors for different departments based on what kind of content the need to display.
- It is really easy to use one editor to populate multiple pages not only in the same site but using different sites as well.
- Since you can have multiple publish points, it is really easy to test out different design options when working on a redesign.
- A bit of a learning curve from administration stand point if you don't have any programming knowledge.
- We are able to provide content in multiple locations for our prospective and current students.
- Our users have a better editing experience.
- If we need to make a change to something, we can roll it out faster.
It is way beyond what LCMS is/was. Everything we wanted LCMS to do, Cascade did and did it perfectly.
150
Secretary, Director, Vice President, Staff and Faculty
3
Programming, Training, Basic Computer knowledge
- Website Content Updates
- Digital Signage Content Updates
- We use it to maintain our Digital Sign in our Residence Halls
- Mobile app content
- Vendor implemented
No
Change management was minimal
- Making sure that the content import went smoothly
Support has helped me numerous time. If I am ever stuck on something, I know that I can e-mail support and have a response usually within the hour.
- Easy to sync new users.
- Very easy to edit content and publish entire site.
- Easy to test scripts before submitting them.
- Remembering steps can be a bit confusing at first.
- Some terminology can take a bit to grasp.
Yes
Very well.