Item: Acquia DAM (Widen)
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to store and make our images and videos searchable and easy to find for Marketing, Recruitment, HR, and other Support Office teams. It saves us from keeping all images on a server and using MS Explorer or similar to try and search and find the image we want and the duplication of the images onto local machines and locations.

Pros and Cons

Custom-defined Meta Data.
AI tagging.
Search
Central source of truth.

The AI tagging is not very intuitive; if you upload 100 assets, you have to wait for ages to see if they have been tagged by constantly checking the field views over and over again. It would be good to have an AI tagging manager where you could submit and check tagging status.
For image downloading, it would be good to be able to select an image size rather than an aspect and then adjust the image to the size.
We would have jumped at the chance for SSO or Site Core integration, but the costs were so high it just was not worth it; we could have hired people to do it manually for cheaper.

Return on Investment

The central area for all images and videos is excellent. It has helped improve brand visuals and reduced requests on creative teams.
Due to our small user base (50), many features are not fully used by our business, the small user base is mainly down to costs and budgets set at the start of the year which is a shame as the benefits would be great but the step in costs is too great to transition effectively.
Uploading photoshoots can be tricky due to restrictions on upload and edit counts.

Support Rating

Every time I have asked for help it has been prompt and always fixed or resolved the issue/request we had, the only small issue I have had in the past was getting access to some AI support in UK time as the "support guy" was on US time.

DAM System Solution

We mainly use Acquia DAM (Widen) to make sure all marketing and support office users have access to our branded images and video; in this regard, it has been excellent and does exactly what we require; the only improvements have been noted in previous responses. Any integration function we would use is already there but not used due to cost implications, and the benefit vs. cost has not worked out.

Other Software Used

Adobe InDesign, Adobe After Effects, Ceros

Alternatives Considered

Digizuite, Sitecore Content Hub (Stylelabs) and Adobe Experience Manager

We decided to stick with Acquia DAM (Widen) in the short term but will be reviewing the options this or next year to better integrate with Social, Web, and Creative team needs. We use Sitecore for all our web services, so it needs to be compatible with that, Social also needs to integrate but is not fixed on a single system, but Canva would be a good fit. The creative team always prefers local storage to link to rather than the cloud due to speeds.

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

Acquia DAM (Widen) is clearly one of the top DAM providers but lacks movie AI tagging, which would be super useful with the increase in video usage. I would rate it over Sitecore DAM integration, but for the cost, I imagine many businesses in this situation would take the Sitecore DAM option and reduction in functionality. Thankfully we use it for more than just the web. SSO seems to be very expensive considering what it is; for us, it would be great to mark 50 users who can then use SSO to log in just. Our Privacy and Digital protection teams are always pushing this option, but the cost rules it out.

A great DAM solution and one of the only enterprise level solutions available.

Overall Satisfaction with Acquia DAM (Widen)