Widen's media collective is an easy tool to use, even for admins that are doing the setup and maintenance behind the scenes. I've found that the tool requires little or not training for many of our users. As an admin, I can approve a new user, and trust that they'll be able to use the tool without having to come to me for instruction. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Because the media collective has had success in our business, I have many additional departments and business units coming to me with the desire to upload an keep their content in the collective. I've struggled a bit to make sure all of them know the time commitments, processes and requirements involved with managing assets and a DAM before they have permissions to begin adding and managing assets. Because in order to keep the DAM organized and fully useful, the asset managers must be committed to metadata best practices and processes because the DAM is really only as good as the metadata. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Video Reviews
575 Acquia DAM (Widen) Reviews
I like that the platform is easy to use and is user friendly. Onboarding new users is very straight forward, and we have the ability to permission a lot of stuff which doesn't hinder users on exploring, and testing out the platform. If they accidentally delete an asset, we can easily restore it back.
However, with the Portals app, permissions are not that much and it is reserved for a much more experienced user. Having the customer chat option is appreciated because we can discuss the issues live. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I guess having less permission options for the Portals and Insights app. Also, with the recent company changes the communication when it comes to new updates or releases are kind of lacking.
Having less export options in the Pending Delete, since it is frequently used by our team right now during our asset clean up. Exporting as a PDF is kind of useless since it is hard to navigate through. A CSV file is much more appreciated. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I like the ease of use for users. I use the platform frequently, almost every day along with my coworkers. I enjoy the filtering options and the Acquia Team, specifically Aiden, have been incredibly helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I wish there were more template options for both portals and the dashboard. I think that would be incredibly useful. I enjoy the ability to customize it, I just wish there were some more structured options. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
My favorite part about Acquia is the ease of help- chat support is always available quickly and I like that they will get back to me if they can’t answer right away on the spot. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Some things seem clunky, like two views of assets. I also wasn’t the moooost impressed with our onboarding training, we had no idea what we were doing and I feel like the help wasn’t super customized to us, so we pretty much had to redo everything once we understood the dam better. And it’s been difficult to get someone to help us get our wrike integration working even though we’ve been paying for it since we joined Acquia. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I find the DAM to be relatively user-friendly. As with other databases, it does take some getting used to. There are a number of training videos to watch that are helpful. Once you get into the individual asset modification, there are a number of ways you can do that - through the system itself or by downloading a csv file where you can make the modifications off-line and then upload said document for ease on adding metadata. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Sometimes navigation on the DAM can be a bit annoying. Going back one level isn't the easiest thing to do sometimes. It almost feels like you have to start fresh with each "search." Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
My favorite feature are the portals and the ability to update one location and have the assets reflected across our website. It makes for one source of truth and a seamless experience for my sales team and customers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I wish the DAM had more ability to integrate with social media - some DAM's have the ability to create social media posts and schedule within the service. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I think the best thing for me as a designer is that clients can access the collective and source their own images. I used to waste HOURS sourcing images for internal clients. We set them up as a user, and click, done. Client is empowered to search and source their own images, and our brand is consistently presented to them with a customizable WIDEN interface. Life saver. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I think the only thing I can say negatively about WIDEN, is entering metadata. I loathe it. It takes time to think through possible metadata tags, but we share the workload, and it's a minor irritation. I wish it just knew what I was thinking. :) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
My favorite aspects about Widen is the implentation of the metadata. You are able to find any asset with ease and it take the load off the designers when assisting others with assets. We use Widen on a daily basis, either uploading or sharing deliverables. We use links from Widen and share them with other team members through our project managments software so everything is available in one place. Whenever you have any issues, their customer serivce works with to solve any issue and it is done quickly! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
My only dislike is that the metadata takes some time to upload every now and then. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Before Widen was acquired by Acquia, the training and customer support was incredible. Unfortunately there has been a steady decline in service since the transition. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
More and more technical issues and outages. Declining service. Dismissive and unhelpful during offboarding.
For internal reasons, our organization decided to pivot to a different platform that better met our needs for product information AND digital asset management. The service had already been declining for over a year, but once we communicated our need to offboard, the service became significantly worse. I was stood up for a meeting where I was meant to get instructions about backing up our assets (a service guaranteed in our contract). We were also told in our offboarding meeting that a short 3 month extension would be possible, but when I followed up for more information they said only six month was possible (and that 6 months was a special length). They were also going to charge 2/3 the rate of a full year for a six month extension.
This offboard experience has been especially disappointing because despite the decline in customer service and increase in outages, I would have still recommended the platform to others looking for a DAM, and I certainly would have considered them in the future. Unfortunately that is no longer the case. I hope they can identify whatever is happening internally that has lead to this decline. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The portals feature in Widen has been a realy helpful resourse for our team when it comes to sharing branding and marketing materials with other groups. It was super easy to incorperate into our current Widen set up and has been easy to train others in it's use. When we expressed interest in using the portal feature, the Acquia team was incredibly helpful in showing multiple case uses and how it could best fit our needs. We use portals frequently and can't wait to see how else it will help our workflow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
There isn't nessecarily a specific aspect of Widen that i don't enjoy. At times specific tasks such as adding Meta data to photos can be tedious and the interface in general can be intimidating at first glance. But with more use everything becomes clear and more familiar. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Advanced search ensures that I can always find the exact right asset, and it's wonderful having everything in one place and knowing exactly where to start. It majorly cuts down on the amount of time my team and I spend looking for things. I LOVE that there's a single source of truth for brand assets, and I can easily make sure that my colleages are using the correct things. It's so collaborative and easy to share both internally and externally. It's a pretty easy learning curve to get people set up as general users. I have our DAM system open all the time and refer to it so many times a day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I wish we had the ability to manually crop assets in the DAM and export them at the correct resolution, rather than having to download and then pull them into another program before using. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.