Cascade CMS Reviews & Insights

Score5.4 out of 10

59 Reviews and Ratings

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.

Cascade CMS Reviews

20 Reviews

Information Technology

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 (Higher Education company, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Cascade: Easy and Quick

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 20, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cascade Server is currently being used across our whole organization to provide support to an online journal. Our online journal is the main product of our organization and is hosted on a website that is completely reliant on Cascade Server. Therefore, editing our journal requires extensive knowledge of Cascade's features. The server allows our online journal to be thoroughly edited, from the placement of text in strategic locations on the webpage to the addition of images and graphics to enhance the look and credibility of our online journal, all the way to the addition of important documents to serve the journal's main functions. Cascade Server allows our online journal to be easily and quickly edited, reducing the time it takes to edit features on the webpage and adding important documents that need to be instantly added or removed due to the current state of the journal.

Pros

Cascade's display interface is very similar to the interface one uses to navigate the files in their computer. An experienced computer user should have no problems navigating through Cascade's interface to find webpages and files.
Creating new files and pages is as easy as finding the appropriate folder and hitting a couple of buttons. A new user can easily figure out how to create new files and folders without any training.
Cascade ensures that no two editors publish the same draft at the same time. When one is ready to publish a page, Cascade informs them if there is another draft of the page available to be published. This feature helps save unnecessary time and confusion that happens when more than one person is working on a webpage.

Cons

Although Cascade's interface allows for easy location of files, the font and folder sizes can sometimes make navigation and identification of files and folders uncomfortable to a user's eye.
Except for deleting and renaming files, Cascade does not allow for much editing of multiple files and/or webpages simultaneously. This can sometimes cost valuable work time.
Cascade does not have a clean and organized system for users to leave comments to each other and/or on specific webpages.

Likelihood to Recommend

Cascade's file management interface is very similar to an operating system's file management interface. In other words, navigating through Cascade Server's files and folders is as easy to do as navigating through one's computer's files and folders. A new Cascade user should be able to easily locate files and webpages without much formal training, if any.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (Online Media company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Cascade scales

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

July 14, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology (Hospital & Health Care company, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

NIU Huskies

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 9, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cascade Server is used as our main web client for NIU. We use it campus wide, especially in the Marketing and Web Communications Department. It helps us maintain our NIU website.

Pros

Analytic data
Web content
Storage

Cons

Loading speed
More custom templates

Likelihood to Recommend

Collan Davidson

Web Administrator in Social Media at True Value Company (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Cascade Server is Highly Customizable

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

June 30, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Michael G. Wagner

Webmaster in Marketing at Hofstra University (Higher Education, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

11 years of experience

Easy to start and great for beginners, experts will be frustrated by point and click nature

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

June 30, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Curtis Travers, MPH

Biostatistician in Research & Development at Emory University School of Medicine (Hospital & Health Care, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Good But Not Great

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

September 6, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Alexander Christian

Undergraduate Researcher at Northwestern University (Higher Education, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Cascade Server review by student

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 5, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cascade Server as a content management tool for managing the websites for the Purdue University College of Science. There are several departments within this reach (Math, Stats, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Computer Sc.), plus the College of Science itself. We manage their websites according to their requests of new information, new design of their websites, or delete old information. Furthermore, we also look for broken links and errors by making use of another software called InSite, and try to fix them. Mostly, we manipulate the individual web pages to include new information by using their HTML scripts. There are only around 5-7 of use in charge of using this system for the College of Science, three of them being full-time, and the others including me being part-time since we are students.

Pros

Content addition including pictures, text, video
Template creation common across various pages, thereby greatly reducing time
Making header and footer blocks
Managing the left and right panes

Cons

Individual pages need to load faster
Publish message sometimes takes a long time to be pushed across all machines, perhaps increase the speed of the publish message
There is a problem with the hierarchy of the publish message pages, in other words, we have to publish the individual pages before publishing the page that calls them. This is a little confusing. Perhaps this could be addressed.

Likelihood to Recommend

Some key questions to ask about Cascade Server are:

1. Is it easy to pick up?
2. Is it reliable?
3. Does it ever crash? If yes, how easy is it to recover?

Pranjit Kalita

Website Upgradation and Management in Information Technology at Purdue University College of Science (Education Management, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Cascade Server Review from a beginner user

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 5, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Verified User

Employee in Social Media (Higher Education company, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Cascade Server: The Right Tool for Higher Education Web Content Management

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

September 4, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Verified User

Former Employee in Information Technology (E-Learning company, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience