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Acquia DAM (Widen) is malleable for different needs and uses.
March 10, 2022

Acquia DAM (Widen) is malleable for different needs and uses.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Widen

We use Acquia DAM (Widen) to manage our marketing assets, as well as digitized and born-digital historical/archival assets. We use it to collaborate with contractors and consultants, such as our outsourced graphic designers. We also use it to invite donors to upload digital donations directly. We have only implemented it in the last year, so we are still exploring the ways it will work for our needs.
  • Ease of site administration.
  • Excellent support.
  • Brand flexibility.
  • Search functionality (advanced search for date fields stands out as strange; better/more clear Boolean logic - it defaults a certain logic but it is invisible so it is hard for users to understand what the search is doing).
  • More flexible hierarchies/dependencies for metadata fields.
  • Better safeguards to prevent accidental batch edits.
  • The ability to "lock" certain assets from users with editing capabilities once they are deemed complete (some options for this, but not granular enough).
  • Easier user and permissions administration - extremely confusing.
  • Collections, Portals, and Sharing.
  • Metadata export for report pulling.
  • Improved communication and delivery between us and contractors.
  • Staff improved ability to locate files.
  • Reduced duplication.
We would like to start embedding some portals on our website. We are working on training staff so they rely on Widen more than currently, and do not rely on the administrator for upload and metadata entry.
I get very quick and helpful support through the chat. There are some services that are limited to contract that I think ought to be more standard or the task should be possible on my end. This includes the ability to make large edits to metadata fields values - currently, I can only make those one-by-one which is very onerous when some of your fields have more than 700 options that need to be edited.
We have not gotten further than storing our marketing assets in Acquia DAM (Widen) at this point. It has helped us as far as maintaining old assets, like old logos, while expiring them so that most users cannot use any longer approved logo.
I was not on the team when Acquia DAM (Widen) was selected, I was brought on to implement once it was selected. I know they evaluated a lot of other DAMs and found Acquia DAM (Widen) to be among the most flexible and functional. I cannot find other products we use in the available software listings. We also consider more archives and museum-specific software, like PastPerfect and ArchiveSpace. None of these are perfectly comparable, but PastPerfect is known to be a relic and not very customizable. ArchiveSpace is very customizable, but it is open source and requires back-end knowledge to use it well. Acquia DAM (Widen) has customizability, an administrative user interface, and support going for it.

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

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

Yes

Would you buy Acquia DAM (Widen) again?

Yes

It is great if you need to develop a Metadata structure to suit specific organizational needs, although Metadata and dependency settings/capabilities are not always facile enough for a really refined and hierarchical structure. It is clear that it is more designed for more traditional asset management and marketing. We use it for archives, which is increasingly a way that DAMs are used, but they still have a long way to go to meet archival needs. One specific suggestion is that archives often do not know exact dates. Traditionally, they default to January 1 assuming they know at least the year because they have to enter something, but this is bad practice for archives. The option to enter empty parts of the date would be really helpful. We can use a combination of other fields to enter as much of the data as we know, but it compromises accuracy and searchability.