CadmiumCD Review

I have used Cadmium's Scorecard Abstract Portal and Harvester Speaker Portals for several years now and am a very huge fan, so when exploring virtual conference platform vendors, I was very supportive and excited to try out Cadmium's products. With the recent shift from live events to virtual conferences, I learned that they really put in a huge effort to gear up 2 years of development work of this capacity into months in order to accomodate the new need of virtual events. I was able to check out some websites from other clients and was really pleased with how clean looking their templates were and how customizeable and user friendly the over all system seemed to be for both attendees and admins. 

It was very obvious that they were being overwhelmed with work at the time we were speaking with them, so there were definitely some rushing and miscommunications that took place. For example, when reviewing the product they showed a great platform that could be used to be live streamed.  I had explained to them that my intention was to do a pre-recorded live playback and had thought that I could use this live streaming tool in order to do this but afterwards learned that it was actually for only a live event being streamed and my pre-recorded videos could not be played back live but rather the link could be uploaded with an on-demand button.  There technically was the ability for attendees to engage with each other using this tool, but there was no ability to control the program as users had the ability to launch the content at separate times.  We ultimately wound up working with Vimeo who was able to embed a player into a static page on Cadmium and they were able to do the pre-recorded live streaming with audience engagement tools we were hoping to achieve originally.  However, the functionality did work well for our on-demand portion of the event. Also, the video chat tools were a really great feature and really enhanced our event overall. 

Another thing to share is that we had a variety of customer service experiences with our project managers for each product we used.  There were quite a few individuals that we worked with who were extremely responsive and even one person who suspected I was confused and went out of her way to call me and stayed on after hours to make sure I had everything set up how I actuallly wanted it. I was sooo unbelieveably grateful for her support!  We had another project manager who seemed extremely overwhelmed and was very slow to respond.  Also, we were really upset that he was on vacation the week before and during our live event when we needed the most support. We also didn't love the support ticket tool that made it difficult to get quick resolutions on issues when we were running out of time right before the event. I understand that it is to help keep track and records of discussions, but it also caused a lot of additional stress. 

During the live event, we received tons of compliments on the Cadmium platform and how user friendly it was and were told that we set a pretty high mark on what the standard of expectations of what a virtual conference should be.  For this reason, I would recommend Cadmium's virtual conference tools for consideration. Hope this helps!