Cascade Server - Easy to design, tough to bring down
September 02, 2014
Cascade Server - Easy to design, tough to bring down
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Cascade Cloud
Modules Used
- Calendar
- FAQ
- Default Modules
- Gallery
Overall Satisfaction with Cascade Server
Cascade Server is being used across all the departments at Syracuse University. It is primarily used for maintaining the university website and the websites for individual departments. The common IT department at the university holds the administrative privileges for defining and maintaining the style sheets and design of all the websites. This takes care of maintaining the uniformity among all the websites hosted.
- Dashboard - This gives the summary of all the major notifications and status updates. For example, the documents that are pending or need to be published.
- Saves draft of edited pages before publishing them. This helps in continuing the work back from where it was left.
- Assets can be uploaded from anywhere in the document. For example, while creating hyperlinks to internal documents, cascade gives you the ability to upload documents from that position without having to navigate to a different screen/page.
- If changes are made and published in one page, I've often had to publish the entire base folder to push forward the same changes and see them on the front end.
- Pages stored in cache memory can create some problem. I had to open a new incognito window and refresh the website to see the changes in the front end.
- The biggest problem I've had is ghosting of pages. If by any chance while moving or deleting the pages, Unpublish is unchecked the pages still remain in the backend and they are tough to find for deleting them. Because of this, they cannot be over written, old versions load on the website and new updates are not seen.
- One thing that can be done is display a popup of Unpublish checkbox or give a tool tip to explain what will happen if the user doesn't unpublish the pages while moving or deleting them.
- Well Syracuse University has had Cascade Server since long before I started working for them. But I did notice a performance increase when the newer version was upgraded.
- Website loading time is relatively less thus creating customer satisfaction
- Pages and modules can be edited easily.
It wasn't my personal choice to go for Cascade Server for my organization. But as I already said, Cascade Server is good for managing parent child websites which are uniform in design. I guess the level up to which uniformity can be maintained and traffic can be handled by Cascade Server doesn't match up to any other software. Hence, Cascade Server emerged as the winner.