Item: Acquia DAM (Widen)
Rating: 10
Author: Laura Beebe

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our team of in-house creatives manages the DAM system for three departments--leisure travel, sales, and sports/events. We create Portals for each of our campaigns to provide our internal stakeholders and agencies with the assets required for each of those campaigns. We also frequently share assets with our industry partners and although they are not considered stakeholders, it makes sharing of assets quick and easy and provides us with a record of who is using our assets and how they are being used. The system has also been convenient for our contributors to upload assets for our review and release.

Pros and Cons

Adding metadata and releasing assets is quick, easy and fully customizable
Duplicate content notifications and resolving those conflicts is quick
Advanced search options make it easy to quickly find a particular asset

Would love to see an option to rename assets upon download to accommodate media's specific naming conventions requests (they vary by publisher).

Features

Stakeholders can self-serve and we no longer get requests to find assets.
The ability to crop assets before download has been a time saver.
Any stakeholder can create collections for sharing outside our organization.

Return on Investment

Our in-house creative team is able to manage the assets as one of their routine tasks and only requires a few minutes a week to keep it updated. Without Acquia DAM (Widen), we had considered a full- or part-time employee to manage our outdated DAM.

We currently use only the DAM portion of the system since we have a separate project management system in place. We may consider the Widen Workflow product in future years.

Support Rating

We have quarterly check-ins with our DAM representative to discuss needs, performance and issues. My experience with the support team, when needed, has been positive. I've always received a quick response and they've always followed up to ensure my issue has been resolved.

DAM System Solution

As previously mentioned, the Acquia DAM (Widen), specifically the portals, ensures campaign consistency across all mediums, from websites and social media to advertising, regardless of whether those efforts are created internally or by one of our agencies.

Other Software Used

Adobe InDesign

Alternatives Considered

Extensis Portfolio

At the time we used Extensis, all assets were stored on our own server and we often experienced issues with asset retrieval. Most of our stakeholders found Extensis hard to work with and when they had difficulty finding the assets needed, they resorted to asking the creative team to locate assets for them. It required our team to search for the assets, download them and send them to the requester. For that reason, many internal users kept a collection of frequently used assets on their hard drives or on the network, resulting in a lot of storage use and duplication. We also lost all control over assets that should no longer be used due to licensing restrictions or expiration dates.

Key Insights

Do you think Acquia DAM (Widen) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Acquia DAM (Widen)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Acquia DAM (Widen) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Acquia DAM (Widen) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Acquia DAM (Widen) again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Having one source of approved assets has prevented our internal team from keeping a separate collection of assets stored on a network or hard drive. With the ability to delete, version, or expire assets, there is no chance users or agencies will accidentally use or share outdated or restricted assets. As mentioned previously, there's no easy way to change filenames upon download to suit specific naming conventions when those naming conventions differ from our own, as in media requests.

Acquia DAM (Widen) for the Win!

Overall Satisfaction with Widen