Widen Collective reviews

It's so easy and intuitive to use. The metadata search boxes on the side help narrow and refine the search. And the customer service can't be beat!

I don't like how the collections can't be edited between users. We have had to figure out a workaround to be able to share and edit the same collections.

As someone who loves to have everything neatly organized and labeled, I really appreciated the ability to easily organize, categorize and tag all of my organization's digital assets. It's a daunting task-hundreds or thousands of images and video files, all had to be housed in a cloud in a manner that was intuitive and retrievable. Yet, Widen Collective helped me make that happen.

As with any software, there is a learning curve. But, Widen offers comprehensive training and excellent customer support. Don't let this hold you back!

Customer Support is friendly and quick to respond. This is especially true when the issue can be solved relatively quickly. Marketing team uses social media tools to create a community of Widen users.

More complicated issues are not able to be solved by Widen Support. Instead, I was advised to submit ideas for upgrade for consideration. It has been over 6 months and I still have not had a response.

The software is limited in functionality compared to other available DAMs. The interface is not intuitive to basic users without significant training.

Collections and collaboration tools are weak to non-existent.

Metadata and 'filters' applied to assets once in Widen do not write back into the asset when downloaded.

Very little is able to be branded or customized without large additional costs.

My favorite things about Widen’s DAM software include an easy to navigate interface, very intuitive searching capabilities, customizable metadata fields for great detail to be attributed to assets, the ability to download files in multiple files types (fairly quick conversion depending on size of original file), the ability to customize your login screen and home screen (keeping everything on-brand is important!), and their customer support team is amazing.

I feel that the asset sharing options could be expanded upon. Currently, you can type an email in and send a set of assets. I would like to see additional options implemented because it feels fairly limited currently.

Easy to use. Secure. Excellent support and development teams. Flexibility of features

I could really use the ability to link raw assets with compound documents. This is currently a manual process and time consuming.

The user interface is so simply we can add new users quickly and easily and they can find assets with a minimal amount of training.

Some of the role permissions arent explained ver well. There were a few settings we needed to have turned on in order for users to be able to use the system effectively.

The tag and search functionality. We no longer have the chief marketing officer instant-messaging our team to find awards, accolades, images, and illustrations. Other departments can self-serve as their needs dictate, and we can track usage of key assets with Insights.

The Insites analytics are not intuitive to use. I would like deep practice, usability, and best practice webinars and or forums to better understand the power this feature.

Customer Support, website functionality, ease of uploading new assets and then finding them later, user control, sharing capabilities including the file type selection. Love the zoom feature!

Honestly, it's not with Widen itself. My biggest complaint is with my own team because I keep having to reset people's passwords for the site because they forget them. Luckily, it's really easy to do in the Admin functions!

Widen was already easy to use, but their improved upload feature has made updating asset metadata much more efficient.

Sometimes when updating individual metadata can be finnicky or time consuming

I like being able to search for multuiple product skus

I would like WIDEN to tell which product MID's are not showing results in a group search

Our DAM houses all of the images we use in our catalogs and online. I love it's ability to organize and tag image in order to search for them with ease.

I think the one thing that I struggle with was the update on how to upload images. My retouch artist and I are usually the main uploads, and we enjoyed the drag and drop feature that used to be on our main page instead of having to click through the Upload Wizard.

It makes keeping things organized (which is a complicated job) super easy.

It works really, really well, but as with any asset management tool, there is ongoing maintenance and auditing that has to take place. That can get tedious at times, but we realize that it has to be done to keep things current, delete outdated/redundant assets, or just to check things that might have been uploaded with incorrect metadata, for instance.

I like the ability and flexibility Widen offers to integrate the digital media content with our applications and websites. It also offers nice tools and functionality to add, maintain, organize, and secure content.

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.

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.

What I like most about this software is that I can easily see the newest items that have been added to the collective. The search tool also works really well for finding specific items.

The most challenging part of using this software is that apparently the administrator that adds items to the collective is not required to add all the meta tags that would help users find what they need easily. I don't think it's a fail on the part of the software but maybe if adding all meta tags were required it would make searching easier.

The aspect I like the most about the Widen platform is the portals feature. The ability to customize content around branding just elevates our brand presence and provides us with exactly what we need to best serve our accounts. An easy to navigate and integrated feature such as portals has served us very well.

The difficulty we have faced most is the metadata issue. Because we offer so many products and styles when uploading it can make the process cumbersome and ultimately we don't utilize the metadata as best we should because we simply don't have the time or manpower to manage it efficiently.

Widen staff was there to help us every step of the way and the overall functionality of our site is top notch because of it. My team is able to quickly find marketing materials with just a few clicks, saving us time and money.

There really isn't a single thing that I truly dislike about the site, but it would be ideal to be able to view brochures and catalogs as e-catalogs on Widen.

The customer experience team and help desk teams are great and make you feel like a real person instead of a cog in the giant machine of software life. The portals. The PORTALS! Portals rule. They really do. Best way to organize brand stuff.

I'm waiting for workflow to become even more robust for it to become a Workfront killer. Which I hope that it does.

The Admin GUI is an intuitive mix of front-end and back-end Admin Tools, with STRONG client support accessible via Chat, email, demos and structured training sessions.

Lack of an XML generator (so, no ability to create an MRSS feed for distro to 'New Media' platforms such as STB's and smartphones), and lack of a .csv ingest manager for direct 'Custom Metadata Import.'

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

Minor cosmetic issues.

Our organization has been using Widen for a year and it has transformed the way we share information both internally and with our external business partners. The system makes it easy to load and maintain content. Unlike our former proprietary system which was prone to system errors, Widen makes uploading, sharing, and downloading content easy. Widen has truly been one of the most impactful changes to our internal communication over the past year and I am looking forward to continue increasing our use as a company. Thanks for everything Widen!

One area for improvement would be increasing the variety of image types that can be downloaded from our image collection.

Easy to learn and easy to use.
A great combination of OOTB design and customization that it can meet many companies' needs without being overwhelming OOTB.
The new UI upgrade also came with a boost in performance that is felt in every step of using this product.
The analytics tool is also much improved and now offers greater insight into my users' activity within the system.

There are certainly a limited number of cons with the system. Perhaps the largest is really rather minor, and that is some of the taxonomy can be confusing. For example, deleting an asset from your cart is actually deleting the asset, not just removing it from the cart. While their taxonomy makes more sense, it conflicts with major sites like amazon.com and therefore offers some confusion.

Easy to use and customizable. Very rarely goes down and is always reliable. Easy to teach people how to use

The only thing I do not like about the software is how hard it is to figure out what the most important insights are. I love that we have all the information but I would like to understand it better

Being able to choose multiple files to download and to see the files you've selected.

Occasionally not being able to download an alternate file type from the original version of the file. For example, sometimes it won't download a 1000x1000 jpg of a file that was originally uploaded as a PSD.