Acquia DAM (Widen) Reviews

Acquia DAM (Widen) system

Acquia DAM (Widen) is part of the Acquia company and a popular digital asset management software creator. The Widen Collective is a cloud-based DAM solution that lets users easily manage their assets by uploading, storing, downloading, and sharing them at a large scale with great accessibility across teams, regions, and time zones.

Acquia DAM (Widen) is a great pick for mid-to-large enterprises related to different industries, including consumer goods, retail, construction, hospitality, travel, and apparel. It offers extensive features that let a brand organize its assets in a centralized system. You can create branded portals for easy asset access and tracking as a business. It also offers workflow integrations, analytics, rights management, and other key enterprise features.

Widen utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS) to ensure on-demand asset access, which offers great accessibility and scalability. In addition, with automated features, users can manage their assets better with permission roles and easy publishing options. The dashboard also takes advantage of reporting tools, analytics, and vital asset information.

Moreover, you can also take advantage of the export functionality, which lets you easily export the required data. Lastly, Acquia DAM (Widen) also comes with excellent integration features. For example, you can integrate it with e-commerce platforms or other platforms to easily sync up and streamline your assets when required.

What is a DAM system?

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a process that helps organizations manage their media assets. DAM software is highly configurable to meet the organization’s specific needs. All DAM systems follow a systematic approach to storing, managing, organizing, distributing, and retrieving digital assets.

They are centralized and specialize in storing various digital assets, such as images, videos, documents, audio, media files, animations, graphics, and presentations. Additionally, organizations can store any other media file based on the license they have.

The benefits of DAM solution are:

These benefits make digital asset management solutions integral to modern organization workflow.

DAM solution works in the following steps:

How to use Acquia DAM (Widen)?

Widen lets you manage your content in the best possible way. Brands can use Widen Collective to upload, download, and share assets. All brands must upload the assets, provide context, and let Widen manage the library. You can add permissions-based access to users and protect assets from unauthorized personnel as an administrator. The search is also extensively refined to match the organization’s needs. Widen offers good documentation for organizations to get started. Apart from that, you can also take advantage of the community to learn how to use it effectively.

Widen Collective

Widen Collective is the main product created by the Widen company. As they do not offer pricing information, you can take a demo from Widen to learn what it offers. Moreover, Widen also provides trials for their product, giving you access to a working product.

Features of Acquia DAM (Widen)

Widen Collective is a feature-rich digital asset management solution. This section will take a closer look at Widen’s features. Widen provides extensive features that can help brands simplify their work process in managing their brand and creating product content while keeping their assets organized from a centralized place. We will review the key focus areas to understand better what Widen offers and discuss its features. Let’s get started.

Widen Collective lets you centralize your assets to know what you are working with. With Widen, you can easily manage and interact with your assets using hi-resolution previous and extensive file format support.

• Documents: Manage all your organization-wide documents, including sheets, reports, scripts, and legal.
• Brand guidelines: You can also manage your brand guidelines through Widen. You can set values, visual styles, and messaging through your assets.
• PDFs: Have PDFs? Widen can easily store them, including from the likes of slide decks, e-books, and whitepapers.
• Images: Widen supports all images, including logos, photographs, illustrations, 360-degree spin photography, and camera raw.
• Audio: Store different forms of audio, including music, sound effects, podcasts, and mnemonics.
• Product data: Organizations can benefit from storing product-specific data, such as measurements, specifications, ingredients, and feature lists.
• Work-in-progress: To ensure ongoing work is marked, you can store work-in-progress assets, including Photoshop, InDesign, and illustrator files.
• Videos: Lastly, you can also store final videos. Apart from that, you can also store shorter versions for comp reels, social, training, and b-roll.

Widen lets you store your digital assets and organize them to maximize the benefits of your content. As a user, you will get plenty of options to organize your content, including:

• Categories: With Widen, you can easily categorize your content with the help of the category menu. Users can use the menu structure to find out what they want, including templates, products, and assets.
• Faceted search: You can easily add powerful filters using metadata date fields, values, and numeric ranges.
• Asset history: Easily go through the asset history and learn when it is uploaded. You can also make changes to the asset by changing metadata.
• Predictive search: Use predictive search to easily find your assets based on category names, metadata fields, and filenames.
• Metadata: You can create a comprehensive and meaningful metadata schema for your content that reflects your business structure and process. You also get access to unlimited options to define the metadata per your company’s requirements.
• Related assets: Related assets let you quickly search associated assets based on metadata and visual style.
• Advanced search: Take advantage of advanced search by using specific metadata fields, file formats, date ranges, etc.
• Archive: Easily archive your assets to preserve them.

With Widen Collective, you can easily enrich your assets by ensuring how they are presented to the customers. Before showing your customers, you can quickly overview the assets and how they will look. The key features here are:

• Verify data completeness: You can easily verify the product data and see if it completes before approval.
• Import technical data: Import any technical data required to fulfill the product specifications, including creating upstream from PLM, ERP, or MDM system.
• Product history: Learn everything about the product using its history from when it was first created. You can review the changes and make adjustments if needed.
• Rich-text editor: You can also access the rich-text editor, which lets you add feature lists, product descriptions, and marketing copy.
• Associate assets with products: Manage your assets by associating them with products.
• Syndication: Make the most of your assets by syndicating them to different platforms, including online marketplaces, e-commerce platforms, and websites. You can also syndicate to other channels.
• Product variants: offer an easy way to manage your products using cascade values.
• Channels: Easily manage your channels by configuring them to export specific products or a range of products.

Widen offers extensive accessibility for organizations. This enables organizations always to ensure that their projects do not stop across different time zones and regions. In addition, the self-service access features include:

• Branded login page: You can control the user experience with a branded login page. Here, you can set a color scheme, logo, and hero graphic, providing a story to the users.
• Workflow visibility: Easily gain insight and visibility into your project.
• Dashboard messages: You can easily target a specific user with dashboard messages. It is done using permissioned access and offers customized messages. For example, admins can showcase brand guidelines to highlight key assets or product launches.
• Asset-level analytics: Gain insight into your assets with data like intended use, page views, embed code views, and downloads.
• Time-based access: You can easily control the assets by setting expiration and release dates.

Assets are not valuable if only stored. That’s why they need to be used in different activities, including sending them to marketing teams or support teams. As an organization, you may also want to utilize the assets for e-commerce operations. That’s where the following features come in.

• Share links: Easily share links through instant messages or email, readily giving access to your assets. The receiver can also do an asset preview before downloading it.
• Portals: Use portals to share your assets through a banded webpage without requiring coding.
• Create once publish everywhere: Maintain one master asset and use it to distribute your content everywhere you want.
• Embed codes: Utilize embed codes in an email, online sources, and web page.
• Templates: Create print and web collateral using your centralized digital assets.
• Global content delivery network(CDN): The global CDN ensures that your assets are accessible anywhere without any slowdown. It offers low-latency and up-to-date access to your assets and is shared securely using Amazon CloudFront CDN.
• Integrations: Easily integrate other services and use them to deliver your data across different software tools. You can connect your data to prebuilt connectors, managed integrations, REST API, and ready-to-use plugins.
• Data exports: Data exports enable you to gain user information, order and upload history, and export product listings and asset search results.

Automation is also a big part of Widen. Here, you can use automation to save time and automate manual tasks. The Widen Collective automation features include:

• Auto-tagging: Automate tagging with the help of the auto-tagging feature, which applies keywords to the files so that people can search them easily.
• Auto-upgrading portals: Enable to add new information, including campaign, format, personal automatically, and approved assets.
• Multi-stage workflows: Multi-stage workflows enable multiple people to work on the content anytime.
• Image conversions: Easily convert images, including crop, resize, DPI, color space, or format.
• Video conversions: Videos can also be adjusted based on frame rate, bitrate, pixel height, and width.
• Paths notifications: You can easily set up rule-based notifications without coding. These notifications alert users of different events through the product and content lifecycle.
• Metadata importer: The metadata importer lets you easily map metadata and perform batch processing.
• Proof: The Proof feature lets you compare proofs, annotate content, and aggregate team feedback.
• Upload profiles: Automate the approval process and asset upload by defining default profile metadata.
• Upload via Smart Workflow: Smart Workflow offers a drag-and-drop solution for easily managing files and folders. You can also use it to apply categories, metadata, and security.

The Widen administrative features let you configure your DAM software and enable your systems, the right management, and teams to maximize the use of Widen.

• Asset groups: Manage and control the assets by groups.
• Roles: Administrators can create permission roles based on different criteria, including department or job.
• Single sign-on (SSO): Improve the system’s security using the Single sign-on (SSO) feature. The integrations supported are Simple One-Way HTTP, SAML 2.0, LDAP, OpenID, and other custom integrations.
• End-user license agreement(EULA): Widen supports EULA, is completely customizable, and lets you configure download and order settings.
• Read-only data: Protect data from being changed with a read-only setting for data
• Watermarking: Watermark your assets with hidden or visible previews.
• Site-level analytics: Site-level analytics lets you track users and their actions, including search activity, login, and download.
• Enterprise security: You are protected using SOC-2-compliant Amazon infrastructure with enterprise security. All the data is transferred using SSL and is completely encrypted, with backups stored in cold storage.
• Conversion formats: The conversion formats can be shown on the assets when downloading or sharing.
• Asset release and expiration dates: Set asset release and expiration dates to better control who uses the assets and when.

Acquia DAM (Widen) Cost

Widen does not display its pricing information online. However, they offer demo options and provide pricing once you share your requirements with them. Therefore, the recommended approach would be to request a demo and proceed with custom requirements to determine the pricing for Acquia DAM (Widen).

Alternatives to Acquia DAM (Widen)

Plenty of Widen digital asset management(DAM) solutions are in the market. As a business or an enterprise, you want to consider the alternatives before deciding. The Widen alternatives include:

Acquia DAM (Widen) Review Conclusions

Acquia DAM, formerly known as Widen, is an excellent Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution that is ideal for enterprises seeking a reliable, scalable, and permission-based platform. Its version control, smart workflow, automation, and integration features provide efficient management of enterprise assets in a centralized system. Although Widen doesn’t offer pricing information, they do provide demos and trials to showcase their features and capabilities.

In conclusion, Widen is a great option for medium to large enterprise companies looking to manage their assets in the best possible way.