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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
(1-25 of 36)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
February 23, 2020
Cascade Server rocks!
Cascade Server is miles ahead in usability and reliability. With DNN, I had to jump through hoops to add and edit content, and trying to customize was not easy.
April 24, 2019
Cascade Server Gets the Job Done
Fewer outages with Cascade. The templates are better and easier to navigate.
December 17, 2018
The Gold Standard in CMS Enterprises for Higher Education and More
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Our latest round of CMS evaluations we looked at OmniUpdate, Drupal, and Wordpress as possible CMS choices. It quickly became apparent that all of the upper tier products seemed capable of managing strong websites, but upon a deeper investigation of our needs Cascade rose to the top. The two largest considerations is that we had already been using it for 8 years, so most users were familiar with how to use it, and it didn't require inhouse developers. Secondly, since it wasn't open source it had an advantage with being secure out of the gate.
December 07, 2018
A robust CMS for all of your digital publishing needs
Cascade CMS focuses on managing content and gives you the tools to display this content any way that is needed. While it may lack some features/extensions found in other popular platforms, the user management, workflow and template engine are the best you can get.
December 01, 2018
A fully-baked enterprise web content management platform
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
There are several fine CMS products on the market, and each serves its purpose. For our needs, Cascade CMS is the best alternative.
While Cascade CMS is neither open source nor free, Hannon Hill is open to customer feedback and feature suggestions, provides serious documentation and support, and is very open-handed with their roadmap, devoting a full keynote session to it during the annual user's conference.
(Beware the notion that any CMS is "free" – it's likely as "free" as a puppy or kitten. The purchase price will likely be trivial in comparison to implementation and maintenance costs.)
Cascade CMS utilizes a fully-baked publishing model that isolates the CMS system where editing is performed from front-end web servers which may experience intermittent traffic peaks. This also allows us to upgrade the CMS without taking our front-facing servers offline.
Managing 1,000 content editors in 600+ groups with 200,000 assets published across multiple domains is a cake-walk for Cascade CMS. It's been a while since I evaluated other products on this criteria – but 10 years ago when we chose Cascade CMS, the competition didn't seem to have this level of robustness.
October 03, 2016
Cascade, Spectate and Your Web Site: A winning combination
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.
September 23, 2016
Cascade: What you see ISN'T what you get
Because the (bad) Cascade decision was made quickly by a small team, we have a larger team and a longer timeline, with a growing list of functionality that we expect a replacement system to have. We've been looking into a number of other products to replace Cascade. Highest on the list (so far) are Drupal and Joomla. We're also currently using WordPress for a few secondary sites, because it offers functionality that Cascade doesn't have.
September 16, 2016
Cascade Server is solid
February 17, 2016
Cascade is easy to use intuitively, coming from a place with limited HTML/CSS experience
- adobe d
I didn't have any input when it came to buying/using Cascade server. In fact, before using Cascade I wasn't aware that such a website management system existed! I imagined it was going to be much more complicated--editing individual code and CSS page by page, with very involved processes. Let's say I was pleasantly surprised when I was presented with something so easy to use.
February 16, 2016
Cascade in California
Hannon Hill was chosen because of the architecture with the Cascade engine being separated from the published pages providing stability and security. The company is also focused on primarily higher education, the user group and feature set. The releases are always well-documented and stable. It is very cross-browser and mobile friendly.
December 23, 2015
Cascade Server is Highly Customizable
- Sitecore Web Content Management,Wordpress,Ektron Web Content Management System,Gauss
The version of Sitecore that I use right now doesn't have a UI showing the assembled web page. That suits my current company's needs, but for most people, they want to see their changes within the tool as they make them, visible within their web page. Cascade Server does that very well. We also chose Cascade Server for its search engine optimization capabilities, since that was a big part of our business. Being proprietary, Cascade Server beats out WordPess in terms of security. We had several WordPress blogs hacked, but never had Cascade Server hacked. We didn't know it at the time of purchase, but Cascade Server's support was second-to-none. I don't think we would have been nearly as successful with Cascade Server as we were without their support. The Hannon Hill people were a true selling point.
July 14, 2015
Cascade scales
- Drupal,WordPress
Cascade scales better.
July 09, 2015
NIU Huskies
Very well. It works just for our purpose.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- TERMINALFOUR Site Manager
We felt the overall level of customization that Cascade Server allowed us was the deciding factor in our selection. Its users and groups management was also very robust and provided us a better system, and overall better access, for content managers in our organization.
April 17, 2015
Cascade Server - Great support and Flexibility
April 08, 2015
Power has a price
WordPress was never evaluated when we decided on Cascade around 2008. We looked for an enterprise level system that would have vendor support and had more developer resources at the time. Our resources have diminished so having plugin solutions like WordPress would solve many user requests. WordPress has a much broader community of users for reference material when trying to solve problems.
March 19, 2015
Cascade Server Rocks!
The most striking advantage of Cascade Server is the push vs pull technology. Being able to reduce the constant hits to the server and database for every page delivery makes better use of physical resources and allows us to server our pages quicker.
February 25, 2015
Cascade Server - The Agnostic CMS
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.
February 04, 2015
Cascade makes working online easy and efficient
I have used DreamWeaver before and that was much more difficult and stressful to use. Cascade Server is a dream (no pun intended).
December 30, 2014
Cascade Server -- Serves all your needs to its best !!
- WordPress,Drupal
Cascade Server provides more formatting features. It pretty much provides all the features that a standard web service portal has and the website is written in complex programming languages such as c# or VB .Net, JAVA, J2EE, JSP etc. At the same time, Cascade Server provides for the minimum work of just editing and uploading files, for the person who maintains the website.
December 18, 2014
Cascade Server - Just do it.
It is way beyond what LCMS is/was. Everything we wanted LCMS to do, Cascade did and did it perfectly.
September 06, 2014
Good But Not Great
Cascade Server was the software I was required to learn. I have no further experience or suggestions for this software, other than its usage in basic website development functions. AutoCAT software allows for immediate access to basic functions of design, as well as the introductory tour, which provided the necessary start.
September 05, 2014
Cascade Server review by student
- None
This is my first foray into web-content management, and I am using it simply because my supervisor required me to.
September 05, 2014
Cascade Server Review from a beginner user
I have not used any other products similar to Cascade Server at my current position.