Cascade CMS Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 5.5 out of 10

Score

5.5 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Cascade CMS are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Time-saving Tool: Users have found Cascade Server to be a valuable time-saving tool for monitoring stale content and broken links on their public site. They appreciate the automatic handling of version upgrades on the cloud, which has been lightning fast and only takes about half an hour to convert a site with a large number of assets.

Intuitive Permissions: Setting permissions in Cascade Server is described as intuitive and easy to set up at both high or granular levels. Many users have praised the CMS for its ability to track assets and links when moved, deleted, or renamed, as well as its capability for allowing relational publishing of all affected assets.

Great Integration with Third-Party Products: The integration of Cascade Server with third-party products such as Google Analytics, SiteImprove, and WebDam is highly valued by users. They specifically mention the excellent customer service provided by Hannon Hill, the company behind Cascade Server.

Reviews

44 Reviews

Cascade Server rocks!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 23, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cascade Server is the perfect CMS for our needs and is being used in several schools across the university. Cascade Server is powerful in its versioning, ability to check-in/out assets, provide the workflow, and cross-site sharing. On-boarding our users to update pages on the websites is super easy and helpful to me as I would not have time to do all of the content updates myself. The problems it solves for us are managing several sites in the same place, easy to approve content, and version control of all of our content. We even use Cascade Server as a content repository for staff to find information quickly and easily during the workday.

Pros

Versioning
Multiple sites

Cons

More robust reporting and ability for end-users to create various reports.
The online help through the knowledge base is hit or miss. Some pages need to be updated, and some of them are hard to follow.

Likelihood to Recommend

<div>Cascade Server is well suited with it's WYSIWYG editor being better than most editors that I have used in other systems. In context, editing makes adding content easy compared to the last CMS I used where you had to wing it and view the page outside of the CMS to see if it was correct. The ability mix HTML, CSS, and the Script of your choice anywhere and with ease.</div><div>The scenarios were Cascade Server is less appropriate would be in the use of compilers or programs like Visual studio. You need to go out of Cascade Server and go to other environments to perform tasks and then copy the result to Cascade Server. You can write directly in Cascade Server, but it's easier to do in and editor that is specific to a function.

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Verified User

Professional (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Cascade Server Gets the Job Done

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 24, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We manage content from across hundreds of university web pages with Cascade Server. It allows us to implement a consistent style and others meet other guidelines in a central location, as well as assign different roles and levels of access to different people.

Pros

Simplified page layout.
Allow quick editing and previewing.
Use templates and apply CSS.

Cons

Image uploading and linking can be cumbersome.
Users posting in div tags and inadvertent coding into content HTML can mess up page design and navigation display.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is pretty easy to use, has limited downtime, and is somewhat customizable but is also able to control how users can modify the look and feel of webpages.

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

The Gold Standard in CMS Enterprises for Higher Education and More

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

December 17, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cascade Server is the primary content management system at the University of Hartford. Over the past 9 years our user base has grown throughout campus, and, with the launch of a redesigned site in 2019, it will be used to build out, or be the hub for, about 95% of our University's external website content. Cascade provides an environment where web content can be created, reviewed, edited, and shared in an easy and consistent way, without much internet experience. It meets our users' needs when and where they have them, and sets guardrails to keep everyone using best practices, such as SEO and accessibility.

Pros

Version upgrades on the cloud are lightning fast. Only took about half hour to convert our site, with about 50,000+ assets.
Setting permissions is very intuitive and easy to set up at a high or granular level.
CMS tracks assets and links when moved, deleted or renamed, and allows for relational publishing of all effected assets.
Integrates directly with many third-party products, including Google Analytics, SiteImprove, WebDam, and many more.
Great customer service!

Cons

There aren't many options in who can assist with developing sites, as there aren't many Cascade developers available. We contract most of our development work with third party vendors.

Likelihood to Recommend

Cascade Server is a great system for institutions that don't have employees with web development skills on hand, and the budget to build their site. Once a website is set up to meet company needs and goals, the bulk of the work will shift to content contributors, with little development necessary. Whatever cost that could have been saved on developing an open source system will be recouped in a year or two.

Craig Campbell

Director of University Web Communication in Marketing at University of Hartford (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

View profile

A robust CMS for all of your digital publishing needs

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

December 7, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cascade CMS for our institution's main website. While it is primarily used by the Communications Department to manage the visual display, most other departments have a presence and update their own content within the system. A major benefit is Cascade CMS's workflows. Workflows allows content contributors to make changes that are then approved by their supervisor before being published online.

Pros

Cascade CMS makes no assumptions about your content. Templates control how the content gets displayed.
Workflows are intuitive and allow for one or more people to review content before it is published.
The published site is static (no database connection) which allows for faster page loads and reduced risk of attack.

Cons

Upgrades require some technical knowledge; there is not a one-button upgrade.
There is not an integrated backup/restore. Our IT department manages backups for this server.

Likelihood to Recommend

Cascade CMS is great for working with large quantities of content that can then be reused across multiple sites or other apps. The workflow system is robust and completely customizable. Managing users is easy with available custom authentication options like LDAP.

John Dezember

Web & New Media Specialist at Cleveland State Community College (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

A fully-baked enterprise web content management platform

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 1, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cascade CMS is the university's primary content management system, supporting multiple web sites including all administrative offices, all Arts & Sciences undergraduate and graduate programs, and our four graduate and professional schools (business, education, law & marine science). The CMS currently has approximately 200,000 objects (pages, images and files) managed by about 1,000 web content editors.

Pros

Cascade CMS uses a simple folder–page paradigm that our content editors can quickly grasp, as it parallels the drive structures they find on their Mac and Windows computers and the URL paths within their sites.
A powerful and flexible Content Type system allows site managers and administrators to simplify complex page structures and user interactions into manageable fields and WYSIWYG content blocks our content editors can maintain.
Cascade CMS implements a fully-baked-publishing paradigm. This allows public-facing web pages to be served by an arbitrary number of front-end web servers, while isolating the CMS itself from any spikes in external traffic.
Cascade CMS provides granular control of permissions/actions pertaining to non-publishable (administrative) and publishable assets assigned to users, groups and site-specific roles. Additionally, optional workflows, asset-naming criteria, file-size limits, spelling and accessibility checks, and other restrictions/automations can be applied and enforced.

Cons

Cascade CMS is not an out-of-the-box pre-built system that you can install, turn on and expect to be serving sites and pages on day one. It's not a blogging system like WordPress, or a drag-and-drop system like SquareSpace (both of which I've used for their own purposes). You need to have someone tasked with management and system administration – and if you implement the on-premise self-hosted version, you ought to have several people. We have the university's IT shop handling infrastructure (server hardware, containers, clustering, operating systems, load-balancing, DNS, database servers, NAS/SAN drives), our Web & Design team managing Cascade CMS (system settings, sites, templates, permissions) and managers coordinating each respective academic unit (A&S, business, education, law, marine science).

Likelihood to Recommend

Cascade CMS is an enterprise system. It can handle many users assigned to specific groups and roles with very granular permissions. We have about 1,000 users in over 600 groups managing approximately 200,000 assets. It has the potential to be very user-friendly for content editors – but is dependent upon the system administrator and site managers tailoring templates and content types appropriately.

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</div><div>For a small web site with a few users editing a handful of pages, Cascade CMS is overkill. Grab a WordPress or SquareSpace theme and be done. But if you expect to have 100+ users and 1,000+ pages, where the latter options become unwieldy, Cascade CMS is best-of-breed.

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Andrew Bauserman

Senior Web Architect at William & Mary (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

View profile

Scripps Research using Cascade for 9 years and still loving it!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 1, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Scripps Research uses Cascade Server across the entire institute, on both campuses (La Jolla, California and Jupiter, Florida) for both our external web presence and our intranet. We distribute web page authoring among our scientists and academic and administrative departments -- so the product is used for many different purposes and audiences. During 2018 we completely redesigned the external site using a professional design firm and their brilliant ideas were fully implemented with Cascade Server.

Pros

Templates
Distributed authoring

Cons

Overall we feel that Cascade Server meets our needs with a wide variety of features.

Likelihood to Recommend

We use a variety of navigation techniques depending on the audience and the department that is presenting content. Cascade Server accommodates that variety easily.

Cary Thomas, MBA CMA

Chief Information Officer in Corporate at The Scripps Research Institute (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

View profile

Cascade, Spectate and Your Web Site: A winning combination

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 23, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cascade Server as our centralized web content management system, for both our external facing public web pages as well as web accessible internal pages through our portal. We find it easy to use, and our content editors find its interface intuitive. In addition, the support that Hannon Hill provides for the users of Cascade is outstanding. That Spectate, which allows for personalization of web content, easy form generation and lead tracking, is also included with Cascade Server and integrates seamlessly with it, just makes an exceptional suite of web content tools.

Pros

The content contributor interface is much like Word, and easy for our content providers to use.
The company is highly responsive to suggestions and input when building out versions.
Spectate comes free with Cascade.

Cons

With the roll out of the newest version, many improvements were made.
They could extend versioning to other pieces within Cascade.
Extending integration with other platforms, both for pulling information and pushing information (which is on their roadmap already).

Likelihood to Recommend

Cascade is well suited for a web content management system, whether centralized or not; it's very adaptable to different environments, and works just as well for a small shop as a large one, for education, large businesses, or small non-profits. With the flexibility it offers, I can't think of a situation it would not fit; however, to set everything up someone in your team has to know some programming - or you can work with outside companies to help get you up and running. Their training is good, though, so if you have someone with a programming background they can be brought up to speed quickly.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

Cascade: What you see ISN'T what you get

Rating: 1 out of 10

Incentivized

September 23, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cascade is the server used for our university's main website. It was originally setup to allow all campus departments to keep their sections up to date. But it's not intuitive for users, which (even with training) has led to fewer and fewer users. This has resulted in my department going back to doing most of the website updates.

Pros

Security is decent
Organization (allowing use of a folder tree) is helpful
Backups of page versions works well

Cons

Plain and simply, this is not a WYSIWYG editor - not matter how hard they market it as one. What you see on the backend is NOT what you see on the front end. You have to know at least basic coding to get things spaced correctly, and if something is more complicated - you need to know more than basic coding. Want to add a picture into the main body of a page? Text formatting, image cropping... it just doesn't work as well as it does with other products. Example: Better know how to add space around the image in Photoshop or be able to add spacing in HTML. Otherwise the image will sit directly against the text.
Functions that you're used to seeing on most websites, like comment capability, 'posts you may like,' tagged pages, and website searching is either missing completely or is difficult to implement and (therefore) doesn't work.
Updating to new releases doesn't mean everything actually gets updated. You have to do A LOT of backend work to make new functions work. or you'll have missing functionality and issues like styles not looking the same from the backend to the frontend, etc.
iframes! Video can only be embedded through iframes, there is no capability to use third party widgets unless you can make it work in an iframe, etc. And don't even get me started on forms.
After years of repeated trainings, everyone completely abandoned the web calendar, because it was way too difficult to use. It was literally blank for a year before we replaced it with an outside system - which we had to embed in an iframe. (See above.)
There is no open graph integration. So if someone shares one of your webpages on social media, Facebook, Tumblr, etc won't recognize images, title or description. Unless you code each page separately when you create it.
No login capability for frontend users. So forget about user forums, or other info that you'd want to require a login to see.
Sit search capability is pretty sad. Can't tag or keyword pages to help with searches, can't designate landing pages to come up first when their topics are searched, and can't search specific sections of the website.
Side blocks are sometimes cutoff - and some just don't show up at all on mobile devices.

Likelihood to Recommend

Even though we know that switching servers would be a HUGE project (especially for our small team) I can't wait to get started. Cascade just doesn't keep up with open source options. I'm very tired of telling people "that's a great idea for our website, but we can't do it with Cascade."

Verified User

Professional in Marketing (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

Cascade Server is solid

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 16, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our Cascade Server instance hosts 185 sites, for several academic departments and programs across our entire organization. The ease of use, allows us to offer a self-service tool for our end users that is easy to use without web management experience. Cascade helps use provide a solution for departments and programs that wouldn't have the technical resources to build and maintain their own site.

Cascade Server is a powerful CMS that is flexible, adaptable and scalable.

Pros

It's easy to use, even for non technical end-users
Technical implementation can be as simple or as advanced you need

Cons

The amount of clicks can be reduced in order to speed up the user experience
Can't query the database directly

Likelihood to Recommend

Cascade Server is well suited for medium to large scale organizations, due to their ease of user and site management.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Make your work efficient and counting.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 17, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is being used at California State University, East Bay. The entire website is managed through Cascade Server, for educational purposes.

Pros

The asset management is one of the best features.
Creating individual blocks to complete a web page with different lines of code makes it simple to display.
The help guide provided by Hannon Hill is nice to have when you're learning on your own.

Cons

Improve the browser support.
Enhance the block features.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Employee (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Reviews and Ratings

A fully-baked enterprise web content management platform

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 1, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Cascade CMS uses a simple folder–page paradigm that our content editors can quickly grasp, as it parallels the drive structures they find on their Mac and Windows computers and the URL paths within their sites.
A powerful and flexible Content Type system allows site managers and administrators to simplify complex page structures and user interactions into manageable fields and WYSIWYG content blocks our content editors can maintain.
Cascade CMS implements a fully-baked-publishing paradigm. This allows public-facing web pages to be served by an arbitrary number of front-end web servers, while isolating the CMS itself from any spikes in external traffic.
Cascade CMS provides granular control of permissions/actions pertaining to non-publishable (administrative) and publishable assets assigned to users, groups and site-specific roles. Additionally, optional workflows, asset-naming criteria, file-size limits, spelling and accessibility checks, and other restrictions/automations can be applied and enforced.

Cons

Cascade CMS is not an out-of-the-box pre-built system that you can install, turn on and expect to be serving sites and pages on day one. It's not a blogging system like WordPress, or a drag-and-drop system like SquareSpace (both of which I've used for their own purposes). You need to have someone tasked with management and system administration – and if you implement the on-premise self-hosted version, you ought to have several people. We have the university's IT shop handling infrastructure (server hardware, containers, clustering, operating systems, load-balancing, DNS, database servers, NAS/SAN drives), our Web & Design team managing Cascade CMS (system settings, sites, templates, permissions) and managers coordinating each respective academic unit (A&S, business, education, law, marine science).

Likelihood to Recommend

<div>

</div>

Andrew Bauserman

Senior Web Architect at William & Mary (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

View profile