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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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- 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
(1-25 of 44)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
February 23, 2020
Cascade Server rocks!
- Versioning
- Multiple sites
- More robust reporting and ability for end-users to create various reports.
- The online help through the knowledge base is hit or miss. Some pages need to be updated, and some of them are hard to follow.
April 24, 2019
Cascade Server Gets the Job Done
- Simplified page layout.
- Allow quick editing and previewing.
- Use templates and apply CSS.
- Image uploading and linking can be cumbersome.
- Users posting in div tags and inadvertent coding into content HTML can mess up page design and navigation display.
December 17, 2018
The Gold Standard in CMS Enterprises for Higher Education and More
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Version upgrades on the cloud are lightning fast. Only took about half hour to convert our site, with about 50,000+ assets.
- Setting permissions is very intuitive and easy to set up at a high or granular level.
- CMS tracks assets and links when moved, deleted or renamed, and allows for relational publishing of all effected assets.
- Integrates directly with many third-party products, including Google Analytics, Siteimprove, WebDam, and many more.
- Great customer service!
- There aren't many options in who can assist with developing sites, as there aren't many Cascade developers available. We contract most of our development work with third party vendors.
December 07, 2018
A robust CMS for all of your digital publishing needs
- Cascade CMS makes no assumptions about your content. Templates control how the content gets displayed.
- Workflows are intuitive and allow for one or more people to review content before it is published.
- The published site is static (no database connection) which allows for faster page loads and reduced risk of attack.
- Upgrades require some technical knowledge; there is not a one-button upgrade.
- There is not an integrated backup/restore. Our IT department manages backups for this server.
December 01, 2018
A fully-baked enterprise web content management platform
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Cascade CMS uses a simple folder–page paradigm that our content editors can quickly grasp, as it parallels the drive structures they find on their Mac and Windows computers and the URL paths within their sites.
- A powerful and flexible Content Type system allows site managers and administrators to simplify complex page structures and user interactions into manageable fields and WYSIWYG content blocks our content editors can maintain.
- Cascade CMS implements a fully-baked-publishing paradigm. This allows public-facing web pages to be served by an arbitrary number of front-end web servers, while isolating the CMS itself from any spikes in external traffic.
- Cascade CMS provides granular control of permissions/actions pertaining to non-publishable (administrative) and publishable assets assigned to users, groups and site-specific roles. Additionally, optional workflows, asset-naming criteria, file-size limits, spelling and accessibility checks, and other restrictions/automations can be applied and enforced.
- 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).
December 01, 2018
Scripps Research using Cascade for 9 years and still loving it!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Templates
- Distributed authoring
- Overall we feel that Cascade Server meets our needs with a wide variety of features.
October 03, 2016
Cascade, Spectate and Your Web Site: A winning combination
- The content contributor interface is much like Word, and easy for our content providers to use.
- The company is highly responsive to suggestions and input when building out versions.
- Spectate comes free with Cascade.
- With the roll out of the newest version, many improvements were made.
- They could extend versioning to other pieces within Cascade.
- Extending integration with other platforms, both for pulling information and pushing information (which is on their roadmap already).
September 23, 2016
Cascade: What you see ISN'T what you get
- Security is decent
- Organization (allowing use of a folder tree) is helpful
- Backups of page versions works well
- Plain and simply, this is not a WYSIWYG editor - not matter how hard they market it as one. What you see on the backend is NOT what you see on the front end. You have to know at least basic coding to get things spaced correctly, and if something is more complicated - you need to know more than basic coding. Want to add a picture into the main body of a page? Text formatting, image cropping... it just doesn't work as well as it does with other products. Example: Better know how to add space around the image in Photoshop or be able to add spacing in HTML. Otherwise the image will sit directly against the text.
- Functions that you're used to seeing on most websites, like comment capability, 'posts you may like,' tagged pages, and website searching is either missing completely or is difficult to implement and (therefore) doesn't work.
- Updating to new releases doesn't mean everything actually gets updated. You have to do A LOT of backend work to make new functions work. or you'll have missing functionality and issues like styles not looking the same from the backend to the frontend, etc.
- iframes! Video can only be embedded through iframes, there is no capability to use third party widgets unless you can make it work in an iframe, etc. And don't even get me started on forms.
- After years of repeated trainings, everyone completely abandoned the web calendar, because it was way too difficult to use. It was literally blank for a year before we replaced it with an outside system - which we had to embed in an iframe. (See above.)
- There is no open graph integration. So if someone shares one of your webpages on social media, Facebook, Tumblr, etc won't recognize images, title or description. Unless you code each page separately when you create it.
- No login capability for frontend users. So forget about user forums, or other info that you'd want to require a login to see.
- Sit search capability is pretty sad. Can't tag or keyword pages to help with searches, can't designate landing pages to come up first when their topics are searched, and can't search specific sections of the website.
- Side blocks are sometimes cutoff - and some just don't show up at all on mobile devices.
September 16, 2016
Cascade Server is solid
- It's easy to use, even for non technical end-users
- Technical implementation can be as simple or as advanced you need
- The amount of clicks can be reduced in order to speed up the user experience
- Can't query the database directly
February 17, 2016
Make your work efficient and counting.
- The asset management is one of the best features.
- Creating individual blocks to complete a web page with different lines of code makes it simple to display.
- The help guide provided by Hannon Hill is nice to have when you're learning on your own.
- Improve the browser support.
- Enhance the block features.
February 17, 2016
Cascade is easy to use intuitively, coming from a place with limited HTML/CSS experience
- Easy, almost text-document style interface for people who don't know coding and HTML. Made it easy to update.
- Have the option to switch to HTML and CSS if needed, in case there were more intricate things I wanted to do.
- Having the ability to save drafts to get back to later made it easy to work on longer and more complicated page updates.
- With the ability to time page availability (go up on this date, come down on this date, etc) we didn't have to worry about timelines as much.
- Most of the more confusing aspects of Cascade were simply when the tools went above my head--usually when that was the case I just sent an email to IT to get help.
- The publishing aspect had a lot of steps sometimes.
- Sometimes the HTML would update to something else, even though I had changed it, in HTML. Usually something with paragraphs or breaks.
February 16, 2016
Cascade in California
- Cascade Server pushes pages to a static web server via SFTP so when we need to apply an update to the database or application, public pages remain available but not updateable. This is very tolerable for our users especially during off hours.
- Cascade Server has a built in link checking so links don't break when pages are moved or renamed.
- Hannon Hill does a great job of listening to its customers. The company is Higher Ed focused and feature requests are often included in future releases.
- The way Cascade handles permissions can be difficult if users move between areas in a large organization. If users leave the organization entirely, it is easy to de-provision by removing from the global AD group.
- Workflow is available in Cascade Server but is a bit complex and not as user-friendly as some other systems.
December 23, 2015
Cascade Server is Highly Customizable
- We can customize the edit screen to add form fields which allows us to then customize the output.
- We can set permissions to view or edit content on a very granular level.
- We can customize the site template as needed.
- Cascade has few pre-built templates or plugins, so our site is a fully customized build.
- XSLT formats can be challenging to edit.
- Very easy-to-use. I trained over 200 users, and never once heard someone say that it was difficult to figure out. People generally left the training excited to get started managing their content.
- Technology independent. We were able to put any language into it that our customers required: .NET, classic ASP, PHP, static HTML.
- Customer Support. The Hannon Hill team was truly amazing when it came to helping their customers, including us. They always went above and beyond to fix issues, help customers figure out complex methods for using Cascade Server, and general support.
- Annual User's Conference. This was a great event that brought Cascade Server enthusiasts together, and the entire Hannon Hill staff was present and available for customers to talk 1-on-1 with.
- Cascade Server had a hard time handling a large amount of data. Since it is a "push" CMS (publishes out individual files that are disconnected from the CMS, vs. a "pull" CMS, which dynamically displays the pages by reading the CMS's database), it had to index pages and content in order to build the pages. If there were a ton of items to index, it took a while to process. They were constantly improving this process, however. I would have liked to have seen an option of using a pull vs. push model.
- Cascade Server was not as "drag-n-drop" enabled as other products out there. Customers sometimes complained that Cascade Server wasn't "slick".
- Cascade Server was very developer-friendly, allowing development shops like ours to customize it the way the customer needed. However, there were many times where development was required to make an application, whereas having an app that you could just insert, style with some options, and have it work, wasn't available. Hannon Hill always provided the app code, but there was no good way to just drop it into a site...it required a good amount of configuration.
July 20, 2015
Cascade: Easy and Quick
- Cascade's display interface is very similar to the interface one uses to navigate the files in their computer. An experienced computer user should have no problems navigating through Cascade's interface to find webpages and files.
- Creating new files and pages is as easy as finding the appropriate folder and hitting a couple of buttons. A new user can easily figure out how to create new files and folders without any training.
- Cascade ensures that no two editors publish the same draft at the same time. When one is ready to publish a page, Cascade informs them if there is another draft of the page available to be published. This feature helps save unnecessary time and confusion that happens when more than one person is working on a webpage.
- Although Cascade's interface allows for easy location of files, the font and folder sizes can sometimes make navigation and identification of files and folders uncomfortable to a user's eye.
- Except for deleting and renaming files, Cascade does not allow for much editing of multiple files and/or webpages simultaneously. This can sometimes cost valuable work time.
- Cascade does not have a clean and organized system for users to leave comments to each other and/or on specific webpages.
July 14, 2015
Cascade scales
- Unified templates
- Dynamic data definnitions
- Reusable data
- Xslt and velocity scripting
- Bulk publishing
- User/group permissions
- Scheduled publishing jobs
- Interface rendering speed
- System resources
July 09, 2015
NIU Huskies
- Analytic data
- Web content
- Storage
- Loading speed
- More custom templates
June 30, 2015
Easy to start and great for beginners, experts will be frustrated by point and click nature
- Easy to learn
- Simple controls
- Point and click functionality
- Ability to use more advanced options
- Cumbersome file layout
- Certain instruction manuals can be difficult to find
- Lots of clicking to get simple things done.
- Needs to be more streamlined
- Publishing files seems redundant often
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Cascade Server handles the task of permissions and access very well. It allows for very precise permissions based on individual assets from an entire site all the way down to a single page or directory. Users and groups are easy to understand and manage.
- Customization of the product to fit our needs is amazing. Our programmers have been able to create a system that is superbly flexible, yet does not allow for "off-the-wall" changes and edits to pages.
- Version control is wonderful. User can now make edits to pages and not feel pressured to make it perfect, knowing that it can be rolled back to a previous version to start again, if needed.
- Not much that I can add here, except that as a non-programmer, it can be a bit overwhelming to understand all the options and capabilities of the system. We have programmers who have been able to do almost anything we need with the system, but I can't understand it!
April 17, 2015
Cascade Server - Great support and Flexibility
- Cascade Server comes with several avenues of support. The main resource is help.hannonhill.com, where all support requests are handled by staff but other users frequently contribute. Other avenues include the annual user training conference and the "Idea Exchange," where users vote on new features.
- Because Cascade Server is XML-based, it can ingest any XML-formatted feed (e.g. RSS) from external platforms like Flickr, Tumblr and WordPress. Conversely, content can be published in multiple formats, following the "Create Once, Publish Everywhere" (COPE) strategy. For example, a single page, published as a traditional HTML file, can also be published as a mobile friendly page and PDF document. Similarly, a groups of press releases can be published as an RSS feed and a group of website pages can be published as an XML Google sitemap.
- Cascade Server user interface is customizable for different content types. We've created custom interfaces for admissions open house pages, job openings, staff directories, events and press releases.
- One of the drawbacks of being an XML-based content management system is that any text entered, that isn't XML-compliant, triggers an XML error and the content can't be saved. The company seems to be working on this, as it recently released a new feature allowing content to be saved as JSON and CSS, which don't have to be XML-compliant.
- There is room for improvement when working with images. While the company has made improvements to the image editor and recently added the ability upload images via "drag and drop", the system can't save multiple versions of uploaded images automatically (e.g. original, medium, thumbnail).
- While Cascade Server's push architecture offers performance and security benefits, it can make maintaining a large website challenging. For example, the only way to re-publish template-specific pages is by writing your own web services application in either PHP or Java.
April 08, 2015
Power has a price
- Very flexible. The system is based in XML which allows for a lot of flexibility for distributed and syndicated content with XSLT and Velocity.
- Large and active user community in Higher Ed. This system is used by many other higher education institutions so there are many relevant resources beyond the vendor and Higher Ed is an industry where other institutions help each other.
- Distinct separation of content from layout. It is very easy to break content out into separate blocks for reuse while leaving a template and layout intact.
- No inherit control over types of content that users can upload such as pdf, jpg, or other files. This has to be done via regular expressions. It's also possible for users to create files/folders that don't use web-safe naming conventions.
- Requires an experienced XML/XSLT developer to implement and structure. Because it's so flexible it's also very complicated to implement a structured solution that allows users to maintain content without getting frustrated with layout and formatting challenges with the WYSIWYG.
- The system doesn't support the latest XML/XSLT standards so you must use a lesser known scripting language Velocity to accomplish more advanced tasks.
March 19, 2015
Cascade Server Rocks!
- By removing the core coding skills from the average user including non-technical individuals, Cascade Server allows all users to produce consistent content regardless of the content author.
- By providing excellent workflows content publishing is easily monitored and controlled, including scheduled after-hours publishes.
- By allowing multiple publish destinations you can easily test things out and publish to development servers before making anything live on the public site
- We safe a ton of time monitoring stale content and broken links now that Cascade Server handles these for us automatically.
- Would love to see better integration with Spectate. We have need to manage our social media and the lack on connectivity via API prevents us from accomplishing this.
- Would love to see the ability to parse code within the default content block. Think WordPress shortcodes.
- The new button layout at the bottom (sticky buttons) are messed up. They are difficult to click as they start popping in to show the draft buttons. Instead of inserting them to the right and shifting the others to the left. Just put the new buttons in on the left to prevent this jumping around
February 25, 2015
Simplicity at its best!
- 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
February 25, 2015
Cascade Server - The Agnostic CMS
- 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.
February 04, 2015
Cascade makes working online easy and efficient
- Cascade Server is easy to use and navigate through. I am not very web savvy and I particularly enjoy this product. it is easy to create, find, and edit new webpages and add photos and links
- My organizations website looks so much better because of Cascade Server, and we have been able to train numerous people and get them on board to use it for their own departments site within the organization. Everyone is enjoying Cascade and making use of its easy-to-use format.
- Many people can attend to a website using Cascade, making it easy to divvy up responsibilities while still maintaining a consistent, nice-looking website.