IBM Datacap Reviews

I have worked on many projects at this company. The first project was primarily web services. They have a separate service, so we need to validate the account number. Datacap is a scanning tool. If a person enters their account number, that will be validated by a separate server, and we use web services to validate that. Once validated, it'll connect to another server to fetch that account number based on the customer's name. We do all the validations via web services. 

We are slowly moving into the cloud, but they are still using some mainframe technology. We plan to move all applications into the cloud in 2022. First, we'll do all our development on-premises then move to the cloud. IBM has its container environment called CP4BA, so we'll use that to migrate our development applications.

Datacap's main advantage for the user is the validation part and its ability to implement any kind of page. Say, for example, we have a scenario where a financial company is processing many loan documents. When they scan a page through our application, it'll automatically detect based on the page identification. Datacap matches the text according to the application settings, and it works quickly.

I like Datacap's integration with FileNet because financial companies use that export. The second part is web services integration, which is effortless to implement. 

We don't have any issues with web services integration or any email format, whether it's tape images, PDF, or even Excel, so we can implement those in our applications. Recently, we've been using XML files to validate the account number through web service. We can edit and implement those XML files in our application.

IBM could improve Datacap's navigator. The company implemented Taskmaster starting in version 8.0. We're using the Taskmaster web interface, and our main issue is the navigators, especially in the new CP4BA environment. The application is slow, so we face issues with the navigator and the new plugin. 

There are also some bugs in the features they added in 9.1.7, and the fixes they applied are still not working, so IBM still hasn't rectified some issues. The navigator plugin makes the application a little heavier. That needs to be improved.

The financial team I'm working with always compares their old application with our new one. They have been using that application for the last 15 to 20 years, and they're not happy with the UI. They think the layout isn't user-friendly. From a user perspective, I would like all the buttons to be easily labeled.

I've been working on Datacap for the last 11 years, and I haven't seen any massive changes aside from the navigator plugin and the mobile application. However, IBM needs to make many small changes to keep this scanning solution up to date.

We have page requirements where some values must be copied on each page. For example, say I need to scan a bunch of documents, and the name will be a field on every page. We don't have a default functionality in Datacap to copy the field value on the first page to all the pages. That feature would make the documents easy to prepare.

I've been working on IBM tools for the last 11 years. Mostly, I work on the enterprise management tool for FileNet called Enterprise Content Management. In terms of scanning solutions, I worked on Datacap and GoFax. One of my current clients is a financial services company from the United States, so I'm working in the financial sector using IBM tools. I mainly handle the IBM Datacap part.

Datacap's navigator is a little heavy. We have two configurations: one on the Taskmaster web interface and another on the navigator site. I feel the Taskmaster web configurations are more straightforward than the navigator. Sometimes the changes are not refreshed, it's slow, or it requires a user-ready password to log in. Many configurations are necessary, but Taskmaster web is a simple, easy, lightweight application where you can make all the changes.

You can have a stable environment with different roles on a server and many Taskmaster servers, so Datacap is scalable.  

IBM's Problem Management Report team isn't that effective. Sometimes we don't know stuff, or the end-users ask for more information about whether something is possible or not. We expect a high level of information from the PMR team, and I feel they don't have it. They're not helpful at all in some cases.

They take a lot of time for new things, too. For example, if I ask for a change, they have to check with the support team to see if it is required. It can take two to three weeks to escalate to a higher PMR level.

There are two ways to deploy Datacap. If you have multiple servers, we can use the Datacap deployment server, a new service IBM provides. You can also deploy it the traditional way, where we zip the file, add it to the main server, map it with our application manager, and update the XML file where all the application names are listed. 

Once we successfully authenticate with the database—Oracle, Access DB, etc.—we connect with the Datacap studio to test that the application is working fine. We later map the application inside the Datacap navigator. 

After that, we add a repository with Datacap that includes all the details using the LDAP authentication or a normal username and ID, and we create a new desktop. If there's an existing desktop, we export and import the desktop on the same server, add the repository inside the desktop's menu, configure all the menus. Finally, we can start with our application.

I work with an onsite architect, but I'm the only developer here, so I'm primarily handling the deployment process.

I rate IBM Datacap seven out of 10. This tool can be easily integrated with the Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or IBM cloud. In addition, they have a mobile app you can use from iPhone or Android to scan your documents and upload them to your repository without any user intervention. This is all straightforward from a user perspective. Also, there is less need for customization from a technical point of view. It has all these out-of-the-box actions that can be used in your applications to make them more mature.

We use Datacap for scanning Proof of Delivery and Proof of Pickup from our delivery agents and drivers. We have a defined workflow in Datacap, and we process these documents into our imaging system and PODs or POPs for paying the drivers and agents for deliveries.

Datacap provides remote users with the ability to scan documents using some plugins. Internal customers can scan their documents and define their workflows, like where the document needs to be sent and how it needs to be indexed. That is one thing I like about Datacap. Several documents get scanned during the day, and they come from agents, drivers, internal workers, and customers. 

While we are doing indexing, we tag the document type. It's programmed inside of Datacap to automatically detect the document based on a given template. It auto-indexes that document, which means that it automatically tags the correct document type to the scanned document.

Datacap's workflows are helpful. 

When I scan a document in Datacap that has a watermark or the document is a little distorted, the image output is poor. It either becomes completely black, or there is so much distortion that we cannot read the numbers or the addresses mentioned in the POD. When we scan a document, we expect the output to be at least 95 percent accurate. If IBM could work on that particular thing, I think it would be fantastic.

I've been using Datacap for around 10 years now.

I have seen complaints on the older version, but we haven't had any issues with the new version so far. However, it's only been a week since we did the upgrade. Versions 9.1.4 had performance issues. For example, it used to take an hour to complete a batch job.  

IBM support is good. We open a ticket on the forums, and our questions are answered in a couple of days. So I wouldn't say it's bad.

I wasn't around when Datacap was deployed, but they have done two upgrades since I joined the company. The process was tedious. We needed to upgrade the server and the client. If it automatically upgraded the client when we updated the server, that would be fantastic. 

When we updated the client, we lost all our settings, like the shortcuts and preferences. Those settings go into an XML file or somewhere. The upgraded client should retain that file. It should not be completely deleted. The user has to set it up from scratch, which is frustrating.

I would rate IBM Datacap seven out of 10. If you're implementing Datacap, you need to understand the solution from end to end. In other words, you need to know how the server connects to the client. If you think there is a clear delineation between the server and client, you'd be wrong. 

There is a lot of dependency between these two, and you need to make sure the configuration XMLs are in place before you implement anything. You should also ask the Datacap technical support team about every attribute they're going to touch. Otherwise, it's going to be a nightmare.

With Datacap, use cases are really across the board. Accounts Payable seems to be a really popular use case in terms of invoices, but we do everything from insurance to financial services, to state and local government. The great thing about capture is that every company has documents they need to capture in some format, so use cases are pretty versatile.

For the customers we work with as a partner, a lot of times the solution is geared at introducing efficiencies for the mailroom. If you think about an insurance company, where they're getting a lot of paper coming in, they traditionally have to scan it and have someone sit there and key from that image. 

Datacap can take a document, maybe not having seen it before, and can classify it automatically. It can do OCR, extract all the data from it automatically. With it, they're really introducing real cost savings because the documents go straight through, don't have to be touched, handled as much, can go to the back-end systems more quickly. There is real efficiency that gets introduced through technologies like Datacap.

The user experience. One thing that IBM did a few years ago was they standardized all of their ECM products on Content Navigator, including Datacap. If you're an IBM ECM customer you have FileNet, you have Datacap, you have StoredIQ and you have a consistent user experience, user interface. It's all web-based. They moved to the cloud. They're doing things like containers. They've got a roadmap that's pretty "emerging" in terms of where they're going, that gives you that complete solution.

Reporting and analytics seem to often be something of an afterthought. With Datacap, they've started building out some dashboards, but one thing we hear from our clients a lot is, "Well, gee, we really love reports. What Datacap has is not really helpful. We'd like something better. We'd like more dashboards." That's one area where we've seen some feedback that the product could do better.

It's a stable product. We've seen other capture products on the market and our view of Datacap is that it's best-of-breed. It's a complete solution. It has its areas where it could improve, but it's reliable, it's scalable.

One of our largest clients, a large insurance company that you would know, they're ingesting 500,000 pages per day through Datacap, a really high volume. They've scaled it out to over a hundred servers, but that's the way it works. That's the design of the product: it can scale out as much as you can add servers to it.

The setup is getting better. IBM has introduced some more configuration wizards and the like. But what we always advise customers is, if you're just starting in with Datacap, bring in a partner like us to do the first one, because we've been working with this type of technology for many years. It's becoming easier to set up but you really want to work with someone who knows it, knows how to optimize it, knows what the best practices are to really make sure that you're getting the most ROI from the investment.

I think it is top of the market but there's always room to improve on it.

I work for an insurance company, and we use Datacap for document processing.  

Datacap has performance issues when processing large volumes of documents. We're doing 18,000 pages daily. Scanning takes almost 20-30 minutes, but it normally takes one or two minutes. We informed IBM and opened a ticket for that. They forwarded the issue to developers but didn't give a specific timeline for it to be resolved. Version 8.1 is already at the end of support. 

We would like to see Datacap transition to a cloud-based solution with cloud storage. There is a web interface, but it isn't easy to use. 

I have used Datacap since 2014. 

The response times are slow. 

We used Kofax long before Datacap. I believe the last time was 2007. I prefer it because the configuration is straightforward, and the backend is also good. 

Configuring Datacap is a little complex. The time needed to configure it depends on whether you want to create a new profile or a new job. You have to put in a request to the vendor, and they will create the profile in two to five days. 

Datacap's price is high, but we purchased it in a bundle with our IBM Finance package, so we're not paying the market price for the individual solution. 

I rate IBM Datacap six out of 10. 

Its main use case was to turn papers into electronic documents and extract data from the document.

The administration of the application following an error is most valuable. We are able to know easily when something is stuck in the system.

There should be an increase in the capacity of the workflows. Datacap is a little limited in this aspect. So, you cannot really implement all the possibilities. 

I started using it about 8 to 10 years ago, but I have not been using it all the time.

It is scalable.

I would rate them a four out of five.

Its deployment is quite fast. It's easy to set up, but it can grow quite easily. It can grow quite complex. You have a lot of options and possibilities.

It was done in-house.

For the development teams, it's not the easiest solution in terms of understanding how it works and how to develop things around it, but once you get the knowledge of it, it's quite fast. So, there is a steep learning curve at the beginning.

To read through the paper documents and get them to how you want, Datacap is not the best tool in terms of configuration. Datacap aims for bulk operation. It has a lot of possibilities and capabilities, but there are some products that are more focused and narrow in scope and are better. IBM has a couple of them as well. That's why I would rate it a seven out of ten. It's broad and you can do a lot of things, but on the downside, you are losing the abilities of a specific and narrow solution.

We use it to capture documents issued from the business processes. For example in the sales department during the exhibition of our business process, we procure a huge amount of documents that are in paper format. To make it easier, we use Datacap to use the OCR in order to extract data from the documents to make the research of the documents easier for our clients. I have around 40 people on my team who are in charge of digitizing the documents. We have to start with the existing documents to make the gap smaller between the past and present documents. Once we finish with one department, we have to give them the means to digitize the work and the ability to do it themselves and continue the work. 

I am dedicated to code digitization which concerns too many documents at the same time. The batches are very heavy. In the same batch, we can have up to 14 folders and each folder can contain up to 1,000 pages. It's different than classic capture in which the employee has one or two documents and wants to implement them in the solution. 

I like the features that we just started using. The 2019 project was an as-is migration. With Captiva, we had a basic recognition process that was based on the indexation of each document apart. 

In tier one for example, in Casablanca, they are dealing with 2,000 folders per day. On each team, I have four people and each one is in charge of preparing the documents to review these days. Second-tier is in charge description of the documents. This discussion is made on an Excel sheet and then it generates descriptive documents that go with each folder. So we have a main page in which we can find all the metadata related to this document and so on. We ingest all of the folders in the system at the same time and the system is able to recognize all those folders and automatically classify them on Documentum. What I liked about DataCap and what made us decide to move to Datacap instead of Captiva was the licensing. With Captiva we had to pay for each page, the licenses, there are a number of pages. For Datacap we have a licensing model which is based on the number of users. We are not limited in the number of pages. This is the first thing we liked about a Datcap.

The second thing that I like about Datacap is the fingerprint capture which is easy to configure on Datacap. From the form of the document, if a document is redundant in the same department, we can configure the capture based on the form of the documents. We tell Datacap to bring this information from a certain day and then we have a symantec capture which is the ability to read the page and identify amounts based on the meaning of the phrase. For example, if the sentence says that the total amount of this operation is $2,000, for example, it will understand that $2,000 is the amount and put it as meter data.

The interface can be more intuitive. What is in common with the big solutions like EMC tool, OpenStack, IBM SharePoint, et cetera is that the platform and the interfaces are not generally user-friendly. They are powerful. This is common in between all of those solutions. It's hard to customize those interfaces to be intuitive and to be user-friendly. We have to create a new interface up to par of these strong solutions to make it user friendly. I tried many solutions in my life and I never had a beautiful solution that is powerful. 

We have been using IBM Datacap since 2019. 

It's not very stable. We use IBM support to resolve some issues but they're not huge issues. 

We use it daily on several sites.

I would rate their support a three out of ten. IBM support is one of the strongest and maybe after the quarantine they will be more reactive. 

It is easier to set up than Captiva. The configuration doesn't depend on the technical admin. The business admin can handle the configuration. In the past, we had billions of documents. For each type of document we have to configure the system to apply the security and it's important to configure each document apart. When we had Capatra we had to go back to our partner and configure the document. Now we can add members of documents without asking for support from the IT department.

To deploy a departmnet took two months without much customization. For the standard deployment, it won't take more than three months .

For a company that wants to install Datacap, make sure to choose a suitable person to manage it. It can't be a regular IT person. You have to check the laws in each country before implementing Datacap. We have to know the law for a retention policy before starting to implement it. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

Datacap has all of the features that we need. 

I work for a bank in Tunisia and we use Datacap for extracting information. We are partners of IBM and I'm a data and AI technical specialist.

I like the Rulerunner that can run Datacap Studio; Datacap Navigator is also a great feature and both help us develop apps. 

Third-party integration is slow especially through API calls because if you want to integrate between Datacap and BPM, it can only be done in that direction (and not BPM to Datacap). One of our customers needs it the other way and we had to make a development app for that to work. There also needs to be additional support for the Arabic language as the translation doesn't work well. Finally, I'd like to see an interface update in the next release.

I've been using this solution for three years. 

We use the solution continuously and stability is fine as long as the product has been installed with best practices.

We have between 200 and 250 users so the scalability is good. We carry out all our own maintenance, updates and fixes. 

I've contacted support many times, initially when we carried out the implementation and then again when we were in the development phase. They were very helpful and patient. 

If you're doing a custom deployment, it's easy. But if you're wanting a personalized setup then the initial deployment is complex because it requires a lot of research and there are numerous problems. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We support clients who make use of IBM Datacap as an imaging solution where they scan forms and capture information in the system. Our clients have significantly improved efficiencies when opening accounts for end users. This solution has also helped in eliminating the manual process of getting documents signed and approved. 

The feedback from our clients that this solution has increased their efficiency and their turnaround time on opening any account for end users, thus attracting more customers.

The best features of this solution include auto-indexing. Using optical character recognition, it recognizes what is contained in a scanned document and indexes the information. There is no need for manual intervention.

Recognition between certain numbers and letters could be improved. Sometimes this solution misreads five with an "S" for Singapore.

I have used this solution for six years. 

The latest version of Datacap is very stable. Older versions of the solution used to get stuck but the overall stability and performance of the solution has been improved with version 9.1.7. 

This is a scalable solution. We are able to add additional Rulerunner servers if our business users or user base increases. We are able to have multiple nodes for the front-end and for the Content Navigator. We have total of 3,000 users across the United States of America.

The technical support from IBM is good. I would rate it an eight out of ten. 
There is sometimes a delay in getting support from the IBM team and we receive inadequate answers. If it is registered as a critical issue, we receive a response from IBM after one day which can cause our clients to lose business. 

Positive

If only one person was working on the deployment of this solution, it would take one to two weeks. 

The first step in setting up this solution is to install all the prerequisite software from IBM. Once installed, we run the installer on Rulerunner servers and on Taskmaster servers. We then install the IBM Content Navigator for use in the front-end followed by creating the default desktops of IBM Datacap.  The final step is to customize the solution using any plugins or any widgets based on our client's requirements.

IBM could offer more competitive pricing. This would allow them to attain more users. Some of our clients are considering moving to a different solution called Encapture which is similar but offers more competitive pricing. 

This solution is mostly used by financial organizations. I would recommend this product to all financial organizations who are looking to improve and eliminate their paper process and improve workflows. It could assist in reducing overall SLAs of manual processes.

This solution requires maintenance including the updating of patches, which have been released by IBM. Once a month, we complete a recycle of the complete Datacap setup and system maintenance. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.