Widen Collective

Benefits:

We use Widen as an asset manager, giving our teams easy access to photos, videos, and illustrative elements. As the administrator, I can create different user accounts, letting some people have more access than others if they need it. I can also provide third-party contractors access to our resources too.

Drawbacks:

The admin side can be a little bit tricky to navigate, and it would be nice as the administrator to be able to change my view settings to spoof different levels of access, so I can quickly see what kinds of access my users have and make changes or alterations without needing to create multiple accounts for myself.

In sum:

I've had a great experience with Widen. I can easily upload assets of all types. Tagging them, filling out the metadata, and putting longform descriptions in each asset makes it really easy for people to find what they are looking for. It also helps me keep track on similar image types, or batches of uploads.

Benefits:

Speed. Since the beginning we've upload thousands of images and added hundreds of users across our company and partners. It has not slowed down with all of the added weight and burden. It's still as snappy and responsive searching for assets in the beginning. Narrowing the search results and downloading images is very quick.

Drawbacks:

Support. The support could be better. There has been times, not in a while, when it goes down, just like any cloud service. But it seems the first line of support are the on-site admins. It's a problem when they are not in the office. There's not an easy way to contact support when needed. There should be a chat feature to let them know when we are experiencing outages and get the issues solved.

Benefits:

This software is incredibly helpful for storing our vast collection of assets. It allows for easy organization and I'm able to find anything I need easily through name or metadata searches. It also has a relatively quick download speed for when you need something off the cloud in a hurry. Their Portals have simplified the way that we can show clients current campaigns and it's given us the ability to send individual commercials to clients with ease, and as a bonus, it's all available on mobile.

Drawbacks:

Widen just updated with a new upload mode, which would be fine, however, they completely removed the drag and drop option on the Widen homepage.

In sum:

Widen has allowed our agency to maintain our commercial assets easily and has streamlined my job allowing me to take on different responsibilities elsewhere at work.

Benefits:

Assets are served up quickly around the world and it is a very stable platform. When technical issues do arise, they are very communicative about their progress of solving the issue. I like the dedicated customer rep as well as access to new features and feedback through their Trello boards. I also like the ability to extract metadata from image IPTC metadata and map it to our custom fields.

Drawbacks:

I like the ability to create portals in order to highlight and add info to curated groups of assets, but there are some weaknesses in portal functionality and portal creation capabilities. It would be ideal to be able to create custom dashboards/homepage without extensive use of html. The current wysiwyg is extremely limited in design/layout capability. We'd like a better way for our users to be able to search for portals.

In sum:

We are able to archive and distribute thousands of marketing assets to a global audience very efficiently and with a sufficient amount of protection and guidance about proper usage. Portals have allowed teams to communicate out about curated groups of assets and instructions with a single url which has helped their ability to promote the most valuable and up to date marketing assets.

Benefits:

Beauty and brains - the dashboard is legit! You can personalize it to your needs, it's visually appealing without the clutter. The activity feed and the spotlight collection is useful for me and the other admins. Love the idea of the brand portals and can't wait until we can implement and launch it.

Drawbacks:

As an admin, I'd like to see asset thumbnails in the uploads and downloads tab instead of filenames. Also, the asset versions isn't as easy to use. If we have 3 versions of an asset, I'd love it if when you click on the asset, you can tile the assets to determine which one to download. Currently, you have a "switch version" button that gets lost in the details. Lastly, the batch edit tool sometimes doesn't apply to all assets in the batch.

Benefits:

Very user-friendly UI, free functionality upgrades, wider range of customizability than other DAM systems.

Drawbacks:

Minor cosmetic issues.

In sum:

I have been a constant user of the Widen Media Collective for almost 5 years and have no problem saying that it is the best digital asset management system that I have used in almost 20 years of DAM experience. Not only is their product superb, but what really sets them apart from other vendors is the quality of their customer service. When you become a Widen customer, you become part of the Widen family, and they take care of you. I honestly can't say enough about them.

Benefits:

I love that I can easily store all of my content in the system, then make a website like portal to share and organize my content in a neat way.

Drawbacks:

I wish there was a way to add hyperlinks to Asset Collections so that I can link out to other internal websites within my company or to an eCourse within Workday.

In sum:

We are using it as a one stop shop for our field team to have access to training, resources, selling collateral, company news and other helpful things. We also love that we can quickly update the versions when needed. The team has been less frustrated now that they have 1 place to go.

Benefits:

Ease of use, ease of empowerment for the user. I LOVE being able to share collections with clients. And I LOVE when someone asks for an asset, I just add them as a user on Widen, and tell them to find it themselves!

Drawbacks:

I'm still waiting for drag and drop functionality with Indesign. A small workflow addition that would make things easier!

In sum:

This software completely changed our office workflow. Finding assets used to be very painful, but with all of our assets in one location and users connected to the DAM it makes finding things easy for our office, as well as external clients. By empowering our users to find their own assets it frees up our designer time, for things like DESIGN!

Benefits:

Widen Collective is being used greatly by many individuals in similar roles in our company due to its many features that allow each of us to achieve our tasks with ease. I use this product for the sake of its archiving purposes, project and workflow management accessibility. The possibility to manage minor tasks, access controls and track employee milestones are important jobs I have to do which is made easy by Widen Collective.

Drawbacks:

Widen Collective is a broad software with multiple available features, with this is the difficulty to maneuver around this program at a first glance. It may take a few tutoring sessions and practice to be able to perform tasks with this software, especially if you are not that inclined with technology.

Benefits:

Widen is a fairly easy and efficient way to store, archive, and distribute photographic files. In the year that I have been using Widen, it has changed the way I work. Now when I receive a request for a specific photo, I don't have to resize it and make sure it is the appropriate size to fit into an email. I just choose the file I want, send it to the recipient and they download it directly from the site instead of through e-mail. This is especially helpful to those who are always battling an in-box size limit! It has also made it easier to work off-site. Say I am out of the office on assignment or home sick. If I see a request come in, I can log onto Widen from anywhere and send the requests files out at any time! The search features also work great for us. Users throughout the university can now directly search for whatever type of photo they are looking for instead of requesting it through our department by phone or email.

Drawbacks:

Though I love Widen there have been a few minor issues we have encountered. The first is that it is a little hard to understand at the beginning. The back end of the program seems complicated to a new user. However, we have now figured everything out and so this really is no longer an issue for us. The other issue I sometimes run into is that the processing can be a bit slow. There are times when I upload my files and then cannot see the previews of my files for quite some time. This can be a problem when I am trying to identify people in the photograph to add their names to the keywords. The only way around this currently is to be patient and go work on something else for a while.

In sum:

Overall I would definitely recommend Widen to any company that has a large amount of photo files that they need to store and easily be able to send to others, either internally or externally.