IBM ECM Reviews

The most valuable feature of Content Manager is its flexibility in handling a lot of documents and document images; being an IBM product, I like that. It's not designed to just use DB2, which is another IBM product. It's flexible enough that you have the choice to choose a different back end. We use Oracle, which is a different database back end.

It's not that easy to figure out for a newbie, but I managed to learn it in the past few months.

It's made the management of document images much easier. We're using a product like Content Manager instead of managing ourselves millions of files, whatever that entails; moving them around, figuring out file names, allocating storage, assigning indexes so that we can search for documents easily in terms of document types, whatever is contained in a document or whatever we can think of to tag documents. For example, this is a form, this is a loan document, this is a proof of income document. Using Content Manager, we're able to classify documents with attributes like that.

I would like there to be more documentation. A lot of the knowledge that we have gained has been from calling IBM support people, or Googling things on the web and then learning from experiences of other users. I would like there to be more formal IBM documentation. If you do a Google search for anything, you don't know how official the results are or if those things are even supported. If you do things this way, you might be doing things that are not recommended by IBM and you void some kind of contract with them or something. I would feel better if the searchable knowledge base is actually IBM's. I would like them to provide that.

As far as the product itself, I don't have many major complaints. So far, we've had to develop a custom program that we have for searching and viewing; basically, an interface in front of the users. I've heard a lot about Content Navigator, which is their own interface and would probably replace of our custom one. I was going to mention that I wanted something out of the box that we could immediately use for searching, viewing and indexing documents, but I guess they have it. It's just that I haven't had any experience working with it. They promise that Content Navigator is something that you can use out of the box without coding, quickly slap together and the users can just run with it.

However, I've heard from other users, other IBM customers, that's not necessarily the case. Nothing out of the box can really be used immediately. You still have to do some kind of customization. I'm thinking that's almost like what we have done already. Why move to Content Navigator and throw away our development to do other development? I am holding my verdict until I have hands-on experience with Content Navigator, because what I’ve heard is only hearsay. I don't know myself if it's really that difficult or that useless.

I think it's fairly stable in the sense that we have been running it for more than five years. Once a year, if at all, we would get some kind of failure. Once you get it up and running, it's pretty stable. The complexity lies in the setup and the administration.

Right now, the only area of scalability I'm exposed to is the storage of the images themselves. The setup we have has been around for 10 years or so. The number of documents has grown more in the last two years than in the eight years prior to that. We've had to add more storage to house all those files. I thought that it would be a humongous project, a big endeavor to do that, but Content Manager made it easier for us. All we had to do was allocate another drive and tell Content Manager about it. That's it. It took over from there.

It's very scalable.

The initial setup and implementation is complex. I don't know if we're unique in terms of IBM's customers having this kind of setup. We have a bunch of servers that are working together. Some are Windows and some are Linux. Each of the three major components of Content Manager – the library server, resource manager, and the custom Java API – are on a different server, whereas some customers might have all of them on one server. I don't know how unique we are in that sense, but I think the complexity was a result of that, in terms of trying to make them work together.

For a new setup, I would advise employing IBM's help at the earliest possible stage. Don't try to figure everything out by yourself. Of course, a lot of research beforehand would be beneficial, before even starting to put hands on the keyboard. I think a lot of planning is required. As I’ve mentioned, employ IBM's help early on, don’t include them only after you're having trouble already.

As a group, we are thinking of employing IBM in more of a hybrid approach. As far as I know, we have not finalized any strategy yet in terms of usage of cloud. We are fairly new to that space, so I think that's where that's coming from. I don't see any technical hindrances from our side as far as going to a full-blown cloud solution, but the nature of it is, we're a big organization. Things happen more slowly, or more slowly than other, more agile organizations just because of the nature of our size. That's why I think it's more of a hybrid. We want to go to a cloud solution because that's where, I think, things are going, but doing a hybrid approach allows us to get our feet wet first, then go to the final product.

I’m not aware of any new analytics applications that we're now able to provide for our organization as a result of using this solution, right now.

There aren’t any existing services that we're able to provide better than we were before. We have been using IBM's Content Management suite of products for a while now. I don't know if we have anything better, aside from moving to newer versions every time they come in. We're reaping benefits from that, but I'm not sure if anything major has improved in the last few years. I'm not aware of that.

We definitely have plans to include mobile. We are seeing a lot more business users requesting that kind of capability, where they can search for documents, they can view images using their mobile device; maybe even capturing documents, scanning them from a mobile platform. I hear a lot of demand for that kind of thing.

In the last few months, even within the last year, I have seen that more users are going to our Content Manager custom application for things like researching legal requirements or figuring out what is involved in some kind of audit request for documents. Before, they would rely on more traditional approaches, such as going to an engineer who is responsible for databases. That engineer would search in the database and would figure out where the corresponding documents are. Within the last few years, we have enabled those users – whether in the legal department or somewhere else not related to loan origination, which is our primary user base for my small team – to use our custom application. Instead of those lawyers or legal personnel requesting things from us, we can say to them, "Why don't you just go to the source?" They can do whatever search they need to do.

Usability is okay. As I’ve mentioned, once you set it up, once you have it up and running, it's fairly easy to figure out, to maintain, to keep running. I don't have any complaints around that.

When selecting a vendor to work with, we want someone who has the resources to stick around and be available for any kind of support, such as for production issues or for major upgrades that we are doing; to help us out in setting up; and also someone who's committed to helping customers, not just sell to customers, and help them use their products to their maximum abilities, to take advantage of all its features and so on. I think IBM is doing a good job with that.

My rating comes from a place where I have grown more familiar with it. I've grown more comfortable with how it works. I appreciate the complexity of what it's trying to do. Granted, it's my first experience with anything related to content management, so I'm a little biased because I haven't seen anything else.

The most valuable feature is being able to just capture the different pieces within a document, being able to classify them and get the document going into the right back-end solution.

It has allowed us to take all of our faxes and put them directly into our systems versus having to print them off first and then scan them in. It's greatly sped up our front-end processing. It's made us a lot more efficient.

We are not considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions, at this time, although we are starting to look at it. We don't have the latest and greatest Datacap. We're hoping to be able to see some of those on the cloud, and be able to say, "Oh yeah. That's what we need," and then work, kind of as another extension of our systems. We have a test system, a QA system and a production system, and we would like to be able to see a system with the latest and greatest of Datacap and then ask, can we use it?

There are definitely new analytics services that we're able to provide to your organization now. We’re now able to see our documents going through, the process, how fast they’re going through. Some of our documents are time-based, so we're able to say, "Yup, they made it through the system in this amount of time."

Some of our SLAs on our documents have been greatly improved. We're able to show and prove that our SLAs are working and that we're getting our documents in on specific times.

The documents we're putting through the system has greatly increased. Our internal and external customers are using Datacap in a totally different way. Their jobs have changed tremendously because in the past they were doing a lot more indexing and so on, and now they don't have to.

We do not have plans to include mobile, at this time.

Datacap is a very complex system. There are Taskmasters, there's Rulerunner, there are all these different pieces. It seems to me that these pieces were written by different people, although I don't know the newest and latest and greatest; we're on 8.1. It would seem that they could kind of converge them into one big package. Save on one screen is not necessarily a save on another screen, right now anyway. Make it comprehensive and the same across all parts of the tool. It is very much an ease-of-use issue.

It's very powerful, but it's also very complex. Make it easier to use.

Our Datacap system has been great. It's stable; very, very stable. We've had one down time and IBM was able to step in and get us up as quick as they could. It was a very good showing of IBM's capabilities of helping us.

We're able to scale. We've got two Rulerunner servers now. We're going to add two more; very easy to scale.

We have used technical support a few times. It’s very good; excellent on their tech support.

I was involved in the decision process to invest in Datacap from the technical side, but not as an overall yes or no kind of a thing.

We were previously using a different system, RRI, that actually got bought out by a bigger company and they made it very difficult to actually work with. That's why we ended up looking for something else.

Initial setup was complex, but I think it was the BlueCross side that was complex, working through all of our security and networking, and so on.

It's been a while since we did the research. We actually brought Datacap in before it was bought by IBM. We've had it for a while. I know we looked at it and a few other solutions. I think Documentum was one of them. I don't remember, and I don't know necessarily why. The architects liked the technology of Datacap enough that they decided that was where we should go.

It was BlueCross that slowed down the decision-making process. We were looking for a system that could do some of our documents all on its own in the background and Datacap was able to do that: take in our faxes; turn around and do stuff with them that no other system could do; and then just get the data we needed off of them and send them on their way, without us having to do anything with them.

I think it took six months to a year to decide what we were going to do with it.

We did not consider building a solution in-house.

Depending on what you’re looking for, I think Datacap does a really good job. I'm looking at some of the mobile stuff and it looks very cool. I wish we were getting into more of the mobile because I would like to see that. Depending on where or the way you are looking, I would say, look closely at Datacap. I think it's a really good tool.
It's very powerful. It does what it's cut out to do.

Speed of the build and being easy to work with are the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with. They don’t have to be local; that didn’t seem to be an issue. Our last application was built by IBM and professional services did a great job.

Basically, we can govern our documents and all types of content securely with proper retention and disposition schedules, as well as provide access to all those who need it and to manage those.

It is usable. We like the Navigator platform. We plugged a number of things in that have been custom or unique to our line of business. It has worked very, very well.

We spend less time at filing cabinets. We spend less time searching for documents, wondering what the status of something is because it is on someone's desk or they are out of the office. Who knows where it is? We are looking for it in an in-basket, in their mailbox.

Everything is digitized, everything is online, it is accessible and you can get it immediately. It's just a time saver, which saves money.

We have considered IBM on cloud, hybrid, or box solutions, and we've implemented that because of some governance requirements that we have to keep certain documents on the premises of the country in which we are doing business. It has to be physically stored there. So, we do cloud, where those servers are hosted in that country. We are doing that.

There are absolutely new analytics services that we provide for your organization. Now that you have that data, especially for business processes, when does the document get submitted? How many times it was touched? Who touched it, where were the delays? Where were the bottlenecks? We can really find efficiencies in our processes, and make a difference in being more efficient.

We are able to provide all of the above existing services better than we had been able to before. One thing that really works well is self service. It seems like we are constantly generating new content, constantly developing new processes, where someone can launch a workflow or ingest a different or new type of document and bring that up to speed very, very quickly with the proper security, with the proper retention and those legal requirements. It's done very efficiently, and we can get the analytics on top of that, to say, what is going on with these documents? Where are they going? Who is touching them, the audit log, and so on.

We have included mobile with the Case Manager Mobile App. People are very, very busy. They are on the go. They are always in meetings. They are not at their desktops anymore. To have that data at their fingertips on their device of choice, where they are going lean, more lightweight, with a tablet or with a phone, not carrying a laptop around. You have to have an app that will search, find and deliver that content wherever they are.

I think we need to see less dependence on Java, and get away from those applets. Those things need to be fixes. They have the HTML5 viewer, but there are other aspects in Content Navigator that need to be elevated and moved off that to newer technology.

The print function, email links and so on are based on little Java applets. Process Administrator is all Java, so that's no longer going to be supported on Firefox; it’s no longer supported in Chrome. It's those types of things that need to be updated. I think that is on the road map, so I'm preaching to the choir.

Stability has been wonderful, absolutely wonderful. We have had no problems, whatsoever.

It’s absolutely scalable. We are a worldwide organization, operating in hundreds of countries. It's a big deal to be scalable.

We have used technical support just with PMRs and so on. Then we have our sales engineers that have been assigned to us that really have been wonderful and integrate with us well. Things are going very, very well. We have been pleased and it's been a wonderful partnership.

We were previously using an end-of-life product, Vignette Records & Documents. It was purchased by OpenText, and it was no longer being continued. We evaluated a number of different software options, partners and things, and finally it landed on being IBM FileNet.

Obviously, we were on another content management system, so we needed to migrate all of the old content to the new system, build those solutions, as well as capture solutions for those and all those kinds of things. It's been a good long journey, but very, very successful.

Initial setup was complex because of our requirements. The solution can be as simple or complex as you require it, depending on the business requirements. Ours were extensive and very, very complex. IBM was a great fit because of that, because we could handle a variety of processes that were very complex, and make those work.

We considered other solutions, but it has been so long, a few years, that I can't recall which ones, and things change. We have been pleased with IBM.

It was a just a matter of having a good decision process that consisted of knowing our requirements, plugging those in and seeing who came out on top. It was a process of about 4 or 5 months. It was quite extensive, a lot of research and due diligence there.

We thought about building a solution ourselves – we do have a robust IT shop – but we wanted an industry standard, we wanted to align ourselves with professionals that had been in the industry, that have worked with large corporations that knew more than we did, and we wanted to leverage that.

Know your processes, know your business requirements. It's one thing to technically be able to do something, but why do you need to do it. What is the business justification? Know those requirements and that will guide you to the right software, and the right implementation and the right partner.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the relationship is very, very important; that they respect what we do and understand our business. Also important is the industry reputation; that they have that experience, that they have that connection and are developing features that we don't have to request or customize it. They are built into the product.

The experiences of our internal and external customers have absolutely changed since implementing the solution. I think it is a pleasure to use the system, to manage the data. We are more organized, we are more agile, we have more information and we can react to that information better.

Our primary use case is for policy-holder documents. We're using Enterprise Content Manager 8.5 and we're serving up our documents to our agents so that they can service our customers.

We also have applications that are internal, for different financial and personal products lines, for internal workers. We're serving up their documents so that they can do their jobs.

It has been performing really well. We're enjoying the suite of products that we have.

It has definitely improved the way our organization functions. It has made a lot of our in-person interactions with paper a lot more seemless; we don't have to have as many touch-points. It has improved the electronic routing of information.

The scalability, that we're able to display our documents to so many people.

I think it's already getting away from Java applets. A lot of our users struggle with keeping up to date with Java versioning, so a lot of the functions they're doing, like printing, emailing, and even some of the viewing, they're struggling with.

It seems to be stable enough. We have not had any issues to date.

I have not used technical support for this solution.

We've always been an IBM shop in the ECM space.

We have a very strict vendor selection process. We have vendor management come in. A lot of it has to do with the security and the stability of the company, and where we see it going.

I was involved in the initial setup of IBM Content Navigator, that was my first project coming into ECM, replacing Webby with Content Navigator. It was pretty straightforward.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. There is always room for a little bit of improvement, but it's functioning very well.

I would recommend not going with ECM 8 and going with FileNet instead. It seems like that is the future of the lower-volume repository. It seems like they are moving away from ECM 8.5 so I think we're going to have some challenges coming up, getting off of that technology.

The most valuable feature is its flexibility: the ability to expand and scale the application and to integrate it with current applications that we have for business solutions. We are able to expand, add functionality and integrate with other IBM applications and their flexibility to resolve business solutions.

It's given us compliance. It's given us the ability to go to cloud or to stay on-prem. It's at the forefront of technology. It always has new products that come out that give us new functionality, which give us new business capabilities. It's reliable. Sometimes you deal with smaller companies and they don't have the support, but IBM has fantastic support. They've supported us over the years. We use AVP and they've been fantastic. It's a reliable solution.

With Datacap, the development piece should definitely be improved; the usability. It's a little hard to use. To do a Datacap application, you have to go to several different places in the application to get it to do what you want it to do, as opposed to linking those things into one UI. There are Rulerunner server configurations. There are Taskmaster server configurations. There are application configurations. There is integration. For each of those things, you have to go to different places. It should be better integrated. For instance, there’s a generic flavor that you can just start with and then customize it. Even the generic flavor is difficult to customize off the shelf.

It's a little confusing when you start to add in different objects into the application, as to which object to use or what are the best objects to use. Sometimes there are too many options. That's what would be better. I heard it's better with version 9. I haven't played with 9 too much, but I heard it's better with 9.

With the cloud solution, probably our biggest issue would be the customization that we would need to go along with the cloud solution. I haven't really gotten into that yet because I haven't had approval for cloud, for Datacap. I recently attended a conference to look at using Datacap in the cloud. We haven't tried it yet. Right now, we are just evaluating whether or not we want to go into the cloud for Datacap.

With FileNet, I think there is room for improvement with the ability to use it. It gets complex on how to integrate some of the solutions into what we currently have. At the end of the day, it’s just IT.

With Datacap, what would earn it a perfect rating is definitely the ability to create applications. Creating applications in Datacap is kind of cludgy. If they had a better way of doing that, I think I would probably move it more towards a perfect rating.

We couldn't run the silent install scripts.

Stability is great. It's actually gotten a lot better over the years, to be honest. We do have issues where, it's not the fault of IBM, but we integrate and customize things to work with the IBM products, which is sometimes hard to manage. Actually a big concern about going to the cloud is, how do we move those custom apps or custom batch scripts and things like that into the cloud as well? How do they integrate into the cloud? It's been a topic of discussion for us.

Scalability has always been fine. That's something that's planned upfront. We've never had an issue with scalability. With cloud, it's going to be easier, of course. When you have it on-prem, and you're using physical or virtual servers, it's more of a plan-ahead thing. With cloud, it's expand as you go, which is nice. Scaling has never been an issue as long as you have good planning upfront.

We usually go through our representatives and they, in turn, will use tier 2 and tier 3 technical support to help us. We get excellent service from them.

FileNet was already onboard when I started at this company. I was part of the decision process for Datacap only. We were not using something else. We were using Capture and we had to create a tool. We had to write our own application around Capture before it became Datacap. When we were scanning documents, we were creating batches and indexes based upon human input, as opposed to IC or OCR, which Datacap gives you. I was part of that decision.

I was involved in the initial setup of Datacap, but not with ICN. It was straightforward, even though the installs didn't install the way the instructions said to install them. We were able to work around it. We just couldn't install it silently. We had to install it manually, but we have 57 servers for the total solution, so it took us a little bit more time than we cared to use to install it. I'm not sure if that's fixed with the new version.

We considered another vendor’s solution, but I forget the other vendor's name.

We chose Datacap because it integrated with our current IBM system. We can go from Datacap right into the content engine. Our data has connectors into the content engine or to image services. At the time, it just seemed to make sense, to use something that can easily integrate with what we currently had.

I think the decision-making process took around three months. I wasn't involved with the other client. I was mostly involved with just the Datacap IBM piece of it; just only as a consultant. It took about three months to make a decision. I think the process took the normal length of time; it didn't go fast and it didn't go slow in my opinion.
We already had an in-house solution; what we wanted to get away with is not having our own in-house solution.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are definitely stability, the ability to integrate, scalability, security, and ease of deployment. How easy is it to integrate with what we currently have?

Do the same route that you normally do. Do the evaluation and what works best for you. I don't really have any specific recommendations, such as saying, "Oh, it's better if you go this way or that way." Not all things are for all people.

You have to be very careful about what you choose because that's what you're going to have to live with. You want to make sure that it's configurable to what you currently have. Unless you're starting from scratch – which hardly anyone does these days – it has to integrate with what you currently have.

I haven't used other products because we chose these, but for us, the support and IBM’s ability to move the product forward has been great in my opinion. If someone were to ask me, "Can I recommend another product?", I probably couldn't, for what we use it for.

We are considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or Box solutions to reduce cost and to add functionality. Also, we are currently looking to expand our data centers and, as opposed to expanding physical data centers, going to cloud will give us the same ability to expand data across multiple data centers, as well as applications.

As far as new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for your organization, what we are implementing through Datacap is the ability to read script and signatures, to work with Docusign. We have it implemented, but not the new features of 9.0. We're also looking at implementing Box along with that.

We are doing a lot with Datacap. We are looking at unstructured data, not just scanned data - our unstructured data that comes through digital content, such as email - as well as scanning in previous documents, older documents, like contracts, that are usually written in paper. We're going to start incorporating those into Datacap, so that we can scrub them for data, do analytics on it. Datacap, for us, is becoming more of an integrated solution, not only just analytics, but also capturing and storing documents for the long term.

Regarding existing services that we're now able to provide better than before, we are just now bringing on Content Navigator. Content Navigator is going to be the forefront of pretty much everything. We use image services. We use PA. We use Datacap. Content Navigator is going to be at the forefront of that. For our image services solution, we're looking to go to the cloud. ICN will be on-prem, but it will be used for everything in the book; the cloud and what's on-prem.

We do not have any plans to include mobile, which is not to say that my clients don't. Mobile is not new to us. It's just that before, as an IBM solution, we haven't had the business push us to use mobile.

As far as how the experiences of your internal and or external customers have changed since implementing Datacap, I think it's really sparked their interest in learning, in knowing that there's more functionality out there that could be used. There’s more functionality that could be used with the application and looking at those functions. What we started to do is create services around those functions. Our clients have been very eager to start using those services. It has added something new, something it didn't have before.

Content Manager OnDemand for z/OS ingests stuff from the JES spool automatically, quickly and easily. All you do is put the output where you want it and code what you need. We use the destination for our report name, and it goes in, stored automatically.

It's an archive for reports. We can access our reports immediately after they're run. We went paperless; you don't have to print then, but you can print a page or pages as needed.

We’d like for it to be able to ingest reports that were created on the distributed side and get them into the same repository, where you have one repository for all reports. We run CMOD on Z and that might already be there; it's just not a feature that we have used. We don't have that right now. One part of that is, these new distributed applications often come with their own archival type system. It would be nice to be consolidated.

We've used CMOD or its predecessor for 25 years. We've been a CMOD customer for a long time, 10 years or more, since CMOD became CMOD. We were an old RDARS customer before that. We've had it for a long time. We do provide our statements to customers by CMOD.

We've used CMOD or its predecessor for 25 years, so that's pretty stable. You can't get more stable than that. We do not experience down time or anything.

It’s on Z, so it's scalable by design.

Technical support is very good. It's not a widely used project, the CMOD on Z, so whenever we call, we usually get the same guy.

It a natural progression from RDARS to Content Manager OnDemand, which was running on Z on CICS. It was just a natural progression.

We ended up using IBM services to migrate from the old on-demand version two, which was strictly mainframe CICS based, to the Content Manager on Demand, which had the web front end interfaces. It took several months, but it went well.

Pricing is not a problem for CMOD; it's pretty reasonable.

We did not consider anyone else at that time; just an upgrade. We did not consider building a solution ourselves, in house.

Any advice I might give depends on where your reports come from.

I'm sure there's always room for improvement in things, but we've used it for so long and are so comfortable with it, we're happy. I would give it a perfect rating if it had a little more ease of use with getting the distributed combined into one repository.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are good support; a strong vendor that's been around a while, that's steady; and, in this world, cost has to be a factor.

As far as how our internal or external customer experiences have changed after implementing CMOD, in the beginning of our first instance of internet banking, we just had a text-based statement, the data that our service provider gave to the customer. We sent them a file and they provided it when the customer asked. Now, we send them a link, they pick the date, they come back and get the statement; it looks just like what would be mailed.

Usability is very good. We've been using it for a long time and it works.

We are not yet considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or Box solutions. We are still in the discovery phases. I attended a session at a recent conference about movement to the cloud. I said, with being a bank, we are not quite there. We do not have a good cloud strategy, yet. We are not looking to move anything to the cloud. That would be an advantage to have the same product on multiple platforms.

There aren’t any new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for your organization, yet, but we are looking at analytics on CMOD.
We do not have any plans to include mobile at this time.

We have been using it for awhile for the content management purposes of some of the bank's co-functionality.

We have not seen many issues lately, thus, so far, so good in terms of performance.

The content management is all about you as you can make the same content for minimal purpose solutions applications. 

The vertical scalability, as we can use it across some of our applications. However, there is a lot that we must to do as a bank and we have not used some of the features yet.

I would like to see seamless application integration.

Stability is quite good.

I have not tested scalability out, but I believe it is good.

Not to my knowledge. Probably my technical people are using them.

I recently joined the bank, therefore I was not involved in the initial setup.

Reach out to local IBM partners.

We evaluated IBM and a couple other vendors as well.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Local support.

We found that this solution was very easy to use for our customers. So, the interface of this solution was the best one for us.

It's a good solution for ECM control. We have evaluated a lot of other solutions and found that this was the best solution to provide to our customers.

The stability is very good. We didn't have any problems in this regards. Our customers are very happy with the stability.

It works with a few users up to hundreds or thousands of users. We didn't have any scalability issues.

This is a good and stable solution. It is a solution that you can trust and is, indeed, the best solution that we found out there.

We try to search for vendors that provide good support for our development and also, we look for out for those vendors that have great cases and other clients, that we can compare with our case.