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Cascade Server is a Content Management System (CMS) from Hannon Hill. It is designed for decentralized web teams and counts clients in most major industries, including Higher Education, Government, Healthcare, Technology, Finance and Publishing. It can be installed or hosted by Hannon Hill in the cloud. It includes access to a web marketing tool to allow content contributors to promote, measure and optimize their web content.https://dudodiprj2sv7.cloudfront.net/product-logos/3M/m6/2D2INT8JVMJ3.PNGHannon HillA robust CMS for all of your digital publishing needs2018-12-07T16:02:51.764ZWe use Cascade CMS for our institution's main website. While it is primarily used by the Communications Department to manage the visual display, most other departments have a presence and update their own content within the system. A major benefit is Cascade CMS's workflows. Workflows allows content contributors to make changes that are then approved by their supervisor before being published online.,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.,9,Cascade CMS can be pricey for organizations with small web budgets—especially when comparing to free CMSs like Wordpress or ExpressionEngine.
The cost is justified by the robust features, frequent updates, and top-notch support.
The Cascade CMS community is vibrant and full of very helpful members.,ExpressionEngine and WordPress,Developer,100-1,000 pagesJohn DezemberA fully-baked enterprise web content management platform2018-12-01T20:05:53.777ZCascade CMS is the university's primary content management system, supporting multiple web sites including all administrative offices, all Arts & Sciences undergraduate and graduate programs, and our four graduate and professional schools (business, education, law & marine science). The CMS currently has approximately 200,000 objects (pages, images and files) managed by about 1,000 web content editors.,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).,10,Prior to implementing Cascade CMS, the university had hundreds of sites with disparate designs maintained with a variety of tools. Since implementing Cascade CMS, the vast majority of sites are managed within a single system and have coordinated branding and designs.
Having a single enterprise CMS for the university affords us the opportunity to provide training and support across all divisions & departments of the university.,TERMINALFOUR, CommonSpot and Drupal,LibreOffice, Evernote, Gitlab, Teamwork Desk, Teamwork Projects, Dropbox,Developer,More than 10,000 pages,1000,15,We use Cascade CMS to create and edit content published to our public-facing front-end web servers.,10,Yes,Price
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Third-party Reviews,While not perfect, and certainly not suitable to everybody, we remain quite happy with our process. We had a home-grown system for several years, so we knew what we needed and what to look for; we had plenty of time to look for candidate products; we discussed our options with our web design consultant and several peer institutions using Cascade CMS as well as alternative products; and we got feedback and buy-in from a number of constituents across campus.,Third-party professional services,Yes,Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled,Time and effort. Opting for a high-touch implementation involving one-on-one meetings with each department/office required a higher commitment of resources (time and effort) than an automated transfer of old web site content into the new CMS. But that is the trade-off we chose, and we're happy with the result.,10,No,10,Yes,There have been a number of times when we've requested support that was beyond the scope of the traditional annual support contract.
For example, there have been specific cases where we wanted to query and/or modify some data directly in the database that couldn't be done via the Cascade CMS user interface. The Hannon Hill support team was able to help us craft the necessary SQL statements based on their extensive knowledge of the database table structure. (We obviously tested the queries in Dev before running them on Prod – but they've always worked as expected.),Yes,10Andrew BausermanThe Gold Standard in CMS Enterprises for Higher Education and More2018-12-17T16:52:33.222ZCascade Server is the primary content management system at the University of Hartford. Over the past 9 years our user base has grown throughout campus, and, with the launch of a redesigned site in 2019, it will be used to build out, or be the hub for, about 95% of our University's external website content. Cascade provides an environment where web content can be created, reviewed, edited, and shared in an easy and consistent way, without much internet experience. It meets our users' needs when and where they have them, and sets guardrails to keep everyone using best practices, such as SEO and accessibility.,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.,9,The first phase of our Cascade experience brought our University's web users together, and united the look and feel of our pages. We are hoping our next phase will provide the tools necessary to transform the way we market ourselves on the web. More to come.,,Siteimprove, Dropbox, Microsoft Office 365, TeamSupport, Google Analytics,Content Author / Administrator,1,000-10,000 pagesCraig CampbellScripps Research using Cascade for 9 years and still loving it!2018-12-01T20:02:06.321ZScripps Research uses Cascade Server across the entire institute, on both campuses (La Jolla, California and Jupiter, Florida) for both our external web presence and our intranet. We distribute web page authoring among our scientists and academic and administrative departments -- so the product is used for many different purposes and audiences. During 2018 we completely redesigned the external site using a professional design firm and their brilliant ideas were fully implemented with Cascade Server.,Templates
Distributed authoring,Overall we feel that Cascade Server meets our needs with a wide variety of features.,10,Cascade Server provides Scripps Research with tremendous value. When we look at enterprise-scale products, and contrast that to our utility/cost ratio, we are very pleased with the product.
Perhaps less frequently cited by other reviewers, information security for Scripps Research is a top priority, and we have been comforted with the security profile of Cascade Server, especially when contrasted to other products that are "easily hacked".
Another factor that impacts our "ROI" is the Cascade community and the training opportunities for our staff both for seasoned users taking advantage of new features, as well as new users to learn the basics.,Content Author / Administrator,1,000-10,000 pagesCary Thomas, MBA CMACascade is easy to use intuitively, coming from a place with limited HTML/CSS experience2016-02-17T17:21:43.744ZI was the primary user in my department, using it to update our department's website content very often. It was being used across the whole organization, and it was set up by our IT department who still controlled the back-end design and structural support. Certain departments had control over content and updates, and other departments worked entirely through the IT department for updates. Since our department had such high update rates, having immediate control was very important.,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.,8,Cascade Server had a very positive impact, because it was easy to switch permissions, easy to update, and that has made it very easy to keep our students and applicants updated on the goings-on.
Since it was easy to learn, it was easy to hit the ground running when I became the website manager, and became easy to teach others for when I went on vacation or was otherwise absent.
When a site-wide redo occurred, it was easy to switch things to the new format, including images and forms.,adobe d,Content Author / Administrator,10-100 pagesMallory Rice
Windows, Linux, Mac
Cascade Server
50 Ratings
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