Item: Acquia DAM (Widen)
Rating: 9
Author: Pamela Lang

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Widen is where all our images are stored. Those given access (faculty & staff) can access head shots, PowerPoint templates, and photos for their everyday needs. The photos are searchable via meta tagging and organized by campus, college, activity, academics, etc. I presently work on Admissions marketing but also utilize the Widen DAL for fundraising, events, websites to name a few.

Pros and Cons

Search engine works great
Loads previews quickly
Tracks analytics of who is using what and how much
Is secure

Not sure if it's available or not, but the drag and drop InDesign plug-in was very helpful in previous versions (not seeing it in there).
Sometimes it takes too many clicks to get to my saved collections
Wish i could work on multiple collections at once, but you can only move selected images to one collection at a time

Return on Investment

We've been able to share collections with digital marketing companies for online and social media advertising (cross-channel)
I use it for all my print and web projects to find images
We only had one DAL previously that did not work as well, prior to that it was viewing images off a server via Preview, Lightbox or Photomechanic

Support Rating

They have always been great. We have had one on ones with them on campus. If there's any glitch, it's always resolved quickly. Our photographers maintain the DAL and our admin. so I don't have as much "hands on" in that area but if I'm having issues (running slow, stufff not loading) they reachout and it's handled

DAM System Solution

Much of the content is pre-approved for use so there is quality control over what is being used to represent the university. Not everything is available to all audiences and I believe they time-stamp some items so if images are outdated (such as an old building or person who left) can be removed, etc.

Other Software Used

Adobe InDesign, Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator CC, Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Teams

Alternatives Considered

Dropbox Business

They are completely different. Dropbox is better for cloud storage whereas Widen is more assets library driven. They are both faily easy to share content through but Widen is set-up better visually.

Key Insights

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

Not sure

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Acquia DAM (Widen) again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

So far, it's the best DAL I've used. I know the industry is rather new and everchanging. We were are thinking about using it for archiving jobs (when our old fashioned server was giving out and needed some form of cloud storage) but that never got off the ground since our project load was fairly large. This seemed to be better for archiving strictly photos, videos and some branding materials.

Frequent User at Our Institution

Overall Satisfaction with Widen