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.
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.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Higher Education company, 10,001+ employees)
Cascade is being used across the entire organization. Most units are managed by the central web group, however larger units like the one I'm in have dedicated web development staff and have more access than others. Over all it helped unify the organizations' web presence and branding.
Pros
Unified templates
Dynamic data definnitions
Reusable data
Xslt and velocity scripting
Bulk publishing
User/group permissions
Cons
Scheduled publishing jobs
Interface rendering speed
System resources
Likelihood to Recommend
It is great for a hierarchical, large scale, data heavy website. Less so for a highly dynamic and agile website. It is frustrating to have to publish the entire site to "cascade" a change.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (Hospital & Health Care company, 5001-10,000 employees)
We use Cascade Server to build and maintain the http://law.hofstra.edu Website. The product allows us to easily expand and customize our website on a daily basis.
Pros
We can customize the edit screen to add form fields which allows us to then customize the output.
We can set permissions to view or edit content on a very granular level.
We can customize the site template as needed.
Cons
Cascade has few pre-built templates or plugins, so our site is a fully customized build.
XSLT formats can be challenging to edit.
Likelihood to Recommend
Overall, we have found Cascade Server to be an excellent CMS for an enterprise level website. We have segmented our news and events content onto separate platforms, WordPress and Helios, due to ease of use and to mirror the web architecture at our university.
My department uses Cascade Server as the main software to create webpages, following our institutions guidelines. In fact, Cascade Server is available to our entire organization. It allows any individual, study, or department to create their own website without much need for interventions from our IT department. The ability for any individual to create their webpage themselves is a big cost and time saver.
Pros
Easy to learn
Simple controls
Point and click functionality
Ability to use more advanced options
Cons
Cumbersome file layout
Certain instruction manuals can be difficult to find
Lots of clicking to get simple things done.
Needs to be more streamlined
Publishing files seems redundant often
Likelihood to Recommend
Cascade Server is well suited for large institutions to release the burden on an IT department and website development groups. It allows the individual within your organization to create and manage their own website with very little oversight from web development teams. If you have basic computer skills and understand file hierarchy, then you can use this program to create your own website.
I used Cascade Server when I was managing my residential housing website. I found that while I was able to input text and pictures quite easily, I found the other features less accessible. Facets such as, background design and enhancements, were difficult to navigate and took away from the overall experience of website development. At another position, I used the software for a similar purpose, but again I was not pleased with the ease of use. As an individual who is at a beginner level with website management, I struggled to produce the creative ideas that I wished to implement. I would prefer an interface that allows for easy transitions and apparent features.
Pros
Text editing
Picture implementation
Basic display functions
Cons
User interface
Media implementation utilities
Basic start-up guide
Likelihood to Recommend
Cascade Server has its appropriate uses and its faults. I would recommend this software to a beginner level website developer. It is necessary for the basic functions of marketing, however, it lacks intricate tools to further progress advanced innovation. My biggest complaint with the system is its lack of accessibility to its users. I would prefer a software that can be easily managed on another interface, and provide the necessary skills for immediate usage.
Currently, our university is using Cascade Server for our website, including creating new pages and making edits and updates on existing pages. It is very helpful to have a single application that everyone working on the website can go to, and I like that there are limits to what different pages are accessible to certain employees.
Pros
Organizes pages- The organizational chart that Cascade has is very easy to navigate and makes it easy for employees to quickly find the page they are looking to edit.
Simplicity of design- I appreciate that everything is very straightforward on Cascade when it comes to making edits, viewing pages and so on.
Size of Cascade- there is plenty of room on this server to create as many pages as the website needs.
Cons
Spell Check- I would love it if Cascade could learn to recognize names; it would be one less step I'd have to go through, but it is not a significant issue that causes me to believe Cascade needs improvement.
Although I use Cascade Server regularly to update the website, the edits I do are not complex enough to reveal any problems at this time, so I don't have any suggestions from room for improvement.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Cascade Server is a great program to use when it comes to creating websites; however, I'm not sure where it would be less appropriate. As I was not the decision maker for the purchase of Cascade Server, I have no comment as to what the key questions are to ask during the selection process.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Social Media (Higher Education company, 1001-5000 employees)
We use Cascade Server 7 to develop the College of Liberal Arts’ website. Each department’s web designer develops and services their site independently but reports to the IT manager. I serviced the Department of Learning Design and Technology last year. I used Cascade to display information about programs, faculty, academic groups, department's activities, and to make documentation accessible for prospective and current students and faculty.
Pros
Stable (server never went down on me).
Their online documentation makes it easier to solve (daily) issues you may face.
Does not have a steep learning curve. You only need some hours of hands-on instruction.
Cons
The WYSIWYG can be improved. Extremely basic for widely used CMS
Image editing can be improved. Pictures need to be uploaded as you want them to see. Cropping or size reduction are not handy.
The HTML editor can be improved. The HTML editor is simpler than Microsoft Wordpad. Taking into consideration that front end users just edit the pages, you need to have an intermediate-to-advance command of HTML
Likelihood to Recommend
From a front user perspective, Cascade Server is easy to use as long as the templates are carefully developed. I know that other departments and universities use it. I think that Cascade Server is best for displaying information. Also, Cascade Server can be a more appropriate tool when multiple users need to update the same documents and pages.
VU
Verified User
Former Employee in Information Technology (E-Learning company, 10,001+ employees)
Cascade Server is being used by the whole organization to develop and maintain the main university website and the individual department websites. The Communication Department of the university takes charge of maintaining Cascade Server for our university, and there are a whole bunch of employees including developers, managers, administrators etc. who have done a tremendous job in developing and maintaining the web and mobile version of the college website. I work for the Architecture Department of our university, and my job is to create templates as per the department requirements, and I feel proud of being a part of this.
Pros
What I personally like about Cascade Server is the fact that it does its best as a Content Management Website by providing minimum work of just entering text and uploading files to the department people who have to maintain the website but have no programming and development background.
The Asset factories, Metadatas etc. makes it much more easier for the people who maintain their websites using Cascade. It makes every feature available in just one click.
The above points were from the maintenance point of view. Now, as I developer, I would say, I enjoyed working on Cascade as it provides an easy way to write and execute your code. Also it provides the upload feature, where in you can simply upload the existing code file onto Cascade and use it as is or edit it if required.
Also, I like that Cascade Server automatically generates code for some complex features such as index blocks.
Cons
Personally, as a developer I feel it would be better to have a facility to see the page source directly from Cascade, rather than publishing the entire page and then looking the page source code, as sometimes looking at page source becomes important while debugging.
Also, Cascade provides detailed documentation on how to implement different features provided by Cascade, however, I felt a little more documentation should be provided about what each features does, what is it exactly for. This would help the naive developers to understand the workflow easily. It took me sometime to understand what are content types for, why do we need configuration set, data definitions, format files etc.
Apart from these, I find everything else perfect and easy to use, both as a developer and a website maintenance person.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well, I would say Cascade Server is well suited for universities and organizations, where you will find different departments, some of which do not have an engineering, programming and development background. For such departments, creating, developing and maintaining a website from the scratch would require hiring people from a relevant background. Instead, using a content management website such as Cascade Server would make it easy for them to maintain their department website efficiently even without having coding and programming knowledge.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Higher Education company, 1001-5000 employees)
We use Cascade Server across our entire university web site. It allows us to maintain consistency with branding while allowing individual departments to take control and ownership of their content.
Pros
It is very easy to customize to your needs as well as your users needs. You can build out custom editors for different departments based on what kind of content the need to display.
It is really easy to use one editor to populate multiple pages not only in the same site but using different sites as well.
Since you can have multiple publish points, it is really easy to test out different design options when working on a redesign.
Cons
A bit of a learning curve from administration stand point if you don't have any programming knowledge.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is a perfect choice for a university with both a small web team or a large web team. If you want a product that is easy on your users as well as administrators, Cascade Server is the product.
We use Cascade Server at MSU Infrastructure Planning and Facilities. It hosts the website for the unit and will soon host a few smaller websites that fall under our jurisdiction. While the Communications office (my office) is the main user, other departments have contributor access to certain parts of the system to be able to update their own departmental content (but not publish it). The product helps us manage the massive amount of web content in a smart way.
Pros
It is very customizable provided that you have a good development team. You can make it work best for your content.
Levels of user permissions and workflow allow you to give just enough access to employees in your organization so that they can update their own content, thus taking some work out of the admin's hands, while still requiring an approval process before publishing so that content can meet the Communications/PR office's standards.
The system can be used to run multiple websites while your users have the same user accounts for those different websites.
Cons
Workflow steps are clumsy. While workflow itself is good, there is a separate screen after the "Submit" button for users to add comments. The screens should be combined or developers should have an option to turn the comment field off.
The notification e-mails Cascade sends with workflow steps are horrid. They contain no information about which page the e-mail is notifying you of. Due to this, our office had to come up with a standard for naming workflows after the page we are editing.
The default interface text size is quite small. I always hit "Ctrl +" a few times before I start working to zoom the screen in.
Likelihood to Recommend
How many types of content (page types) do you plan to have on your site? If many, do you have a developer on staff that is either trained in Cascade or willing to learn it?
VU
Verified User
Strategist in Marketing (Higher Education company, 1001-5000 employees)
