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Cascade CMS

Cascade CMS
Formerly Cascade Server

Overview

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Cascade Server is a highly versatile content management system widely used by universities and colleges to manage multiple websites across …
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Cascade Server rocks!

10 out of 10
February 23, 2020
Incentivized
Cascade Server is the perfect CMS for our needs and is being used in several schools across the university. Cascade Server is powerful in …
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Cascade Server is solid

9 out of 10
September 16, 2016
Incentivized
Our Cascade Server instance hosts 185 sites, for several academic departments and programs across our entire organization. The ease of …
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Popular Features

View all 16 features
  • Publishing workflow (19)
    9.0
    90%
  • Role-based user permissions (19)
    8.0
    80%
  • Admin section (19)
    8.0
    80%
  • WYSIWYG editor (19)
    6.1
    61%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

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,…

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Features

Security

This component helps a company minimize the security risks by controlling access to the software and its data, and encouraging best practices among users.

8
Avg 8.0

Platform & Infrastructure

Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.

7.1
Avg 7.7

Web Content Creation

Features that support the creation of website content.

7.1
Avg 7.6

Web Content Management

Features for managing website content

6.9
Avg 7.3
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Product Details

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 Competitors

Cascade CMS Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationNo

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.

OU Campus and Drupal are common alternatives for Cascade CMS.

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(58)

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!

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

(1-2 of 2)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Andrew Bauserman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Cascade 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).
Cascade CMS is an enterprise system. It can handle many users assigned to specific groups and roles with very granular permissions. We have about 1,000 users in over 600 groups managing approximately 200,000 assets. It has the potential to be very user-friendly for content editors – but is dependent upon the system administrator and site managers tailoring templates and content types appropriately.

For a small web site with a few users editing a handful of pages, Cascade CMS is overkill. Grab a WordPress or SquareSpace theme and be done. But if you expect to have 100+ users and 1,000+ pages, where the latter options become unwieldy, Cascade CMS is best-of-breed.
Web Content Creation (7)
92.85714285714286%
9.3
WYSIWYG editor
100%
10.0
Code quality / cleanliness
100%
10.0
Admin section
100%
10.0
Page templates
80%
8.0
Mobile optimization / responsive design
100%
10.0
Publishing workflow
100%
10.0
Form generator
70%
7.0
Web Content Management (4)
85%
8.5
Content taxonomy
90%
9.0
SEO support
100%
10.0
Bulk management
80%
8.0
Availability / breadth of extensions
70%
7.0
Platform & Infrastructure (2)
90%
9.0
API
100%
10.0
Internationalization / multi-language
80%
8.0
Security (1)
100%
10.0
Role-based user permissions
100%
10.0
CMS programming language or framework
N/A
N/A
  • 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.
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.
1000
Mostly web content editors from across the university.
Some designers, managers and system administrators.
15
We have three web programmers for system administration and template implementation, plus three web content specialists maximizing information architecture and user experience. The six of us also provide university-wide training and support for Cascade CMS.

Additionally, our fifteen managers oversee Cascade CMS users, permissions and content in their respective divisions.
  • We use Cascade CMS to create and edit content published to our public-facing front-end web servers.
Cascade CMS is the best product in its class for our specific needs as a university-wide enterprise web content management system.
Yes
We replaced a home-grown web templating and CMS system.

The university was at a place where it made sense to migrate to an enterprise web content management system.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
  • Third-party Reviews
The single most important factor in selecting any CMS is its fit for the institution and purpose.

Cascade CMS was a good fit for our university across multiple specific criteria – and we validated this assessment by direct discussions with the vendor, an external web design consultant, and several other institutions already using the product.
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
When we first implemented Cascade CMS, over 10 years ago, we hired mStoner to handle both the initial design and the CMS implementation. We also used mStoner to assist our in-house web and design team with some design and implementation work over the first year or two.

Since then, all design and implementation has been handled in-house.
Yes
The first phase included a new design within the new system, Cascade CMS – into which we migrated the university's top-level content, plus the news, admission and financial aid sites, as well as two academic departments.

The second phase included the migration of all remaining administrative offices and A&S departments.

We launched an additional phase, respectively, to bring each of our graduate and professional schools into Cascade CMS – including design, implementation and content migration for each.

Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled
Planning, organization and communication are essential.

We worked one-on-one with each department and office to migrate their sites into Cascade CMS. This allowed us to ensure each site had an optimized structure and updated content. In the process, we facilitated many intra-departmental conversations that were overdue.
  • 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.
Woulda-shoulda-coulda... There are always things you discover during/after implementation that you wish you had known ahead of time, which would have changed specific implementation decisions. Overall, we were happy with the implementation – and have been able to make progressive enhancements and improvements over the past 10 years.

The key insight is to learn from the experience of others. Join the Slack group, go to the annual user's conference, and pay for some training and consulting from Hannon Hill or one of their partners. Holding the purse strings too tightly during initial implementation is penny-wise and pound-foolish – meaning you are more likely to follow a path that you could/should have avoided with a bit of up-front investment.
No
We pay an annual license and receive good support.
The support staff are all well-versed in Cascade, respond in a timely fashion, and provide excellent service.
Yes
Yes. Cascade CMS is updated, on average, every month or two. Problematic bugs tend to get resolved in the next release. Critical bugs sometimes warrant an additional update (e.g., version 8.9 was immediately followed by version 8.9.1 to address a critical bug). Less important bugs sometimes take a few cycles to get resolved.
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
Cascade CMS version 8 is wonderfully mobile-friendly and mobile-responsive, supporting virtually every function on iOS and Android devices.
Cascade CMS is completely usable on mobile devices, we can train our content editors in a single 2-hour session, and we support 1,000 users with a very small team.

There is a level of complexity for the system administrators, site managers and web programmers who implement templates and content types. But the complexity is neither arbitrary nor inconsistent – and once learned provides a powerful environment within which we can develop robust sites that are beautiful and powerful, yet easy for our content editors to manage.
July 09, 2015

NIU Huskies

Collan Davidson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Web Content Creation (8)
63.75%
6.4
WYSIWYG editor
60%
6.0
Code quality / cleanliness
80%
8.0
Admin section
70%
7.0
Page templates
30%
3.0
Library of website themes
60%
6.0
Mobile optimization / responsive design
70%
7.0
Publishing workflow
70%
7.0
Form generator
70%
7.0
Web Content Management (5)
58%
5.8
Content taxonomy
70%
7.0
SEO support
70%
7.0
Bulk management
40%
4.0
Availability / breadth of extensions
60%
6.0
Community / comment management
50%
5.0
Platform & Infrastructure (2)
60%
6.0
API
50%
5.0
Internationalization / multi-language
70%
7.0
Security (1)
50%
5.0
Role-based user permissions
50%
5.0
CMS programming language or framework
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
Cascade serves a great purpose.
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
Works great for what we are trying to do.
  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
Training was helpful.
Still needed that physical help
You really needed all training if you had never worked with it before.
Just right
Yes - we have added extensive custom code
It was easy to do with my background with code.
They are very helpful.
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.
Cascade is very user friendly.
I used it only a few times.
It was slow at times.
Does a great job.
  • Mobile
  • Javascript widgets
Not to my knowledge
Wasn't hard to use.
It works to your advantage if you know what you are doing.
Very helpful
They remained very communicative.
Long term commitment
Build those relationships
  • Faster service
  • Even faster service
  • New templates
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