IBM FileNet Reviews

We use IBM FileNet to store state government-related documents, and conduct workflow processes to channel information between the knowledge workers.

We are very happy with the efficiencies that it has gained, and the customer service that we are able to provide back to the citizens.

It provides us with a solid place to store our records in a structure where we will be able to find those records efficiently. It improves the time when providing customer service to our constituents.

• It is a stable environment.
• It is feature rich.
• It' has a good user interface.

We would like to see, in FileNet, the ability to manage video and audio.

For the most part, the solution is very stable. Once it is a fully-baked application, it is stable.

It scales very well. We are housing 89 million records and 16 terabytes, and the performance is fine.

We have not had to use their technical support. We have done a lot of the support ourselves internally. We have not had to use professional services for a very long time.

We were not using anything in the document management/document capture industry until we purchased FileNet.

We were running out of physical space to maintain records, and the cost of processing documents manually had gotten to be too high. In an effort to reduce our physical storage space and our costs, we decided that a solution was needed.

The biggest benefit to purchasing it was prior knowledge. The prior knowledge of the product: It did what it was supposed to do. It provided a stable environment, a good way to put your documents in, and get your documents out.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I was not part of the evaluation process.

We have been running FileNet for 18 years. It has been a very good relationship.

This product requires that you take a long look at it, because it provides a good solution. It is used across many industries, and it has a solid reputation.

Most important criteria during the evaluation process: Familiarity with the product. The people who were doing the selection had a prior knowledge of the product from a prior company, and it had a very good reputation at that point, even 20 years ago, and the product has maintained that reputation.

The most valuable features are that it is very well integrated and connected. To deploy many new applications and solutions it may sometimes not be very easy, but it is very robust, at the end of the day.

The benefit is a shorter time to market, especially.

In the next release, I would like to see features for how to move it to the cloud and enhance functionalities as you are developing new products.

Also, I come from a Spanish-speaking country. Sometimes, you have to work with people that don't speak Spanish and that makes that the overall solution a little trickier to implement, because of the language barrier. So, I think that a strong knowledge of the technical issues by people that also have good knowledge of the mother tongue of the country, that would help a lot.

Usually, IBM products are stable, although some of them require some changes or some upgrades for minor bugs, but the overall quality of the solutions is OK.

FileNet has helped us a lot with the customer documentation information and I think the solution is very strong.

Actually, right now, we are moving to the new version of FileNet. We are doing all the scalability right now to have more processes involved with the FileNet platform.

The technical support is good. I think that the guys have provided us with the solutions that we needed.

We didn't previously use any other solution. We decided to invest in a new solution because we understood that it was a benefit for us and our customers to have the solutions that FileNet, in this case, provided for us.

The setup was a little complex. Even though some of the projects or the solutions are not very complex, you have to integrate them with the company's old system. Some of the systems are not complex, so the overall solution sometimes requires effort, that if it's not on the FileNet solution itself, it's in another module that's integrated.

We were checking out other vendors. We were looking at Oracle, Microsoft and some smaller vendors that were developing some specific things for us.

When I'm selecting a vendor, I look for a vendor that you can trust, with whom you can have a long-term relationship, and you know that they are also on top of the technological wave. What you are going to implement is going to be constantly changing with new developments in the future.

Make a very good design at the beginning, understand what you need and also prepare the different phases of the project to ensure that you finish the projects. Have a clear view. Draw the lines of the software you need.

We use IBM Case Manager as our platform for deploying our telemedicine solution. The use case is delivering connectivity between patient and doctor without any third parties. The cognitive capabilities of Case Manager and how we're able to create a case, which is a patient, are very valuable for us. Everything that goes into an object is about the patient, versus it being event driven.

The most critical benefit has been ease of use. It speeds along our development, helping us go to market a lot sooner.

It's cognitive capabilities and scalability. 

I'd like to see more cognitive. That's obviously where all of our world is going. I think if we can have more of those types of features and functions as a core, out of the box, that would be very helpful for us and our space.

Excellent. It's probably one of the most mature pieces of technology that IBM offers. 

I believe we built it on that platform because of its ability to scale to whatever size we need to go to.

We're consistently using technical support and they're doing a great job to this point.

We started with IBM Case Manager after doing our research on some of the other ones, just sampling them. We saw that the other ones didn't have the scalability and were very easily breakable.

For me, the most important criterion when selecting a vendor is trust.

There's a level of complexity, but our exposure, for starters, has been with the IBM Concierge, where the solution is fully loaded already, Case Manager on all of its platforms. But when we try to do it ourselves, that's not as smooth. 

We started with considering doing a peer, mobile-first type application. Obviously, from a mobility perspective that's great, but you need a lot more heft from data storage and otherwise. 

I will rate it at eight out of 10, because I think some of the technical pieces, when implementing it ourselves, were something of a roadblock until we discovered the Concierge. Those are some things they have to work on. We'd like to be a lot more independent for something like that. But outside of that, from what it delivers in terms of functionality, it's great.

My advice would be, respect the maturity of the solution if you're trying to go to a huge scale. Most new stuff breaks.

It's very robust. We have been using it for the last 15 years and we've never had any opinion to change it or not use it. So far, we have been very happy with it.

Slowly, we are streamlining all our document management systems. We are including all other departments into FileNet who were not using FileNet as a document management system.

The user interface for FileNet can be improved. It was not very professional, you could say, in the beginning, so we developed a custom user interface. With the new ICN, they have come a long way, but they still need to work on the ease of use for the user/customer. So, the user interface is one thing where they're lacking.

It's very expensive, so they could make it a little cheaper but still, it's good.

We never had any stability issues.

Scalability-wise and robustness-wise, it's awesome.

The technical support is very professional and efficient. So far, we have been very happy with it.

Before we started using FileNet on our own, we were subcontracting with other departments using their FileNet. So, around 2007, we decided to move to our own installation and our own system, rather than using the county's system.

I was involved in the initial setup. It's very straightforward, as long as you know what you're doing.

It's on the expensive side.

If someone is comparing FileNet against other solutions like SharePoint or open-source solutions, I think they should be looking into the scalability, robustness and the whole document lifecycle features.

When I look to work with a vendor, the most important criteria is their in-house expertise, how competent they are, the resources they have in their organization; and then, price. We always have to look at which vendor is good and cheap.

For our custom projects, we outsource to a couple of vendors, such as Imagine Solutions. We work with them. They are vendors for FileNet solutions. They don't compete against FileNet. They help us in upgrading FileNet. Those type of projects.

Right now, we're trying to roll out our automation to our branches. It's very, very important for us to do the re-engineering our business process right now from manual to automation. That's pretty much the most important feature.

Automation is one of the best parts of FileNet; second, of course, is the repository being able to actually archive all our documents in there; and then, records management, which we implemented about a year ago.

There are some tangible and intangible benefits. The tangible part is the cost savings and all that; the intangible is making everything more efficient, and being able to access the documents across the board, anywhere in our bank.

I've been working with our business partner on what we can improve, more on the presentation layer, on our content, as well as being able to provide us with more recommendations when it comes to how we apply the technology such as DataCap or Case Manager into our business right now. We're not quite getting that on the presentation level, because we need someone who will be able to present to us the latest and the greatest when it comes to technology, when it comes to ECM, so that we could present it to our business and say, “Hey, we have this.”

We're in our baby steps on this. After we have implemented a solution, we do a review and see how we can make it efficient. In that respect, I’ve mentioned the presentation. We're in banking, so there's a huge need to be able to see our search results and images, rather than just a text result panel. We're implementing that right now. I know ICN just came out about a couple of years ago. I wish they were fast enough to develop APIs for that. The presentation site that we use through our business partner is not quite developed yet. I wish that was developed already. I think the responsibility for that falls on both IBM and our business partner, but more on our business partner.

There's always a need for improvement. As I’ve mentioned, I wish the ICN part that our business partner is actually developing right now was already complete because we ended up purchasing an application that sucks. We're looking to replace it with the ICN.

I might give it a perfect rating if I was able to use DataCap as promised, definitely.

It is actually very stable. As of right now, the only negative feedback I have is on the capture piece, the DataCap part. We have actually piloted that. It didn't quite work out. I’m kind of hesitant to use the DataCap technology because of the unreliability. However, I heard that the current version is actually more reliable.

It is definitely scalable. Right now, we're planning to move most of our departments over and I don't see any issues at all, infrastructure-wise, being able to accommodate most of our departments.

We have a business partner that we go through, and then to IBM. The technical support we receive through our business partner is excellent. We have very good relationship with them. They provide and recommend solutions to us and how to make our setup more efficient. If we have a business case, we're set up to go.

Do your research. Don't listen to the vendors all the time. Make sure you have a reference about using the technology and are able to get feedback from those customers.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are knowledge, being able to support us and availability.

As far as I know, we do not have any plans to consider IBM for cloud, hybrid or box solutions.

Regarding new analytics or content management services that we are now able to provide to my organization, we haven't really gotten that far. We're taking our steps slowly, right now, because we are just trying to convert all of our departments into ECM.

Automation and capture were existing services that we are now definitely able to provide better than before.

We have plans to include mobile. That was the reason I attended a session on it at a recent IBM World of Watson conference. We're not sure yet how we're going leverage the mobility part. I just wanted to see what technology we need. According to their content, it looks like we have it; I just wanted to see how they use it.
Usability is excellent. The API website that we're using right now has everything. It's really good because it presents all the functionalities that we need in order to search and retrieve documents, as well as in workflow.

The feedback has always been positive regarding changes to our internal and external customers’ experience since implementing FileNet. A lot of our businesses right now are going to the next level; meaning, automating their business process right now and being able to use e-signatures and all that; integrating with FileNet.

We provide the content management platform for the company for official and unofficial records for all business processes.

We consolidate the content management. We've become a central repository for the company and are able to migrate content from our business units into the central service, especially as we acquire other companies. Thus, we can simplify our technology portfolio.

The standard spaced interfaces and features that any content management platform would provide, plus the API's extensibility. 

We are also moving into using the newer user experience provided with the product.

We would like to have more automation of rollout solutions. We've done some of this on our own. We've created what we call a repository builder that will build out a standardized solution meeting the needs of most of our customers initially. This has saved us a tremendous amount of time. We did this using the APIs the product provides. They just don't always provide those same sorts of tools. 

The user interface is also extensible through programming. Although, it's not easy to set up, so some improvements along these lines would be good too.

At its core, it's stable. In its basic implementation, it's stable.

Scalability is where we run into some challenges because we use it to scale where most customers don't. Therefore, we sometimes have unique problems or find some product limitations that other customers don't.

They're always very responsive. Though, sometimes we have to dig a little to work through the layers of technical support in order to get the people with the right level of expertise.

It was a fairly straigtforward implementation. 

Though it has so many options, we have to be discerning about what we will deploy because each option will require additional support for our customers.

We have also looked at Documentum, OpenText, and SharePoint.

I would recommend the product with the its core and standard interfaces.

We purchased our product directly through IBM.

Our company continues to reassess what it's doing with content management. We're involved enough in the sort of richness of the feature set that it would be difficult to replace.

We're in the process of implementing it for what we call a product plan approval process. It's going to be used by project managers to submit their product plans to our department that will then go on and approve them.

For example, if they want to produce a pamphlet, or a website in support of a particular objective, they will hit our product plan system to input what they want to do, what they want to produce, and then it will go through an approval process. Then they'll be able to produce it in whatever languages they decide that they want to produce it in. It's more an approval workflow that we're using it for.

We will also use it for integration back to our product lifecycle management system, as well for our materials management division.

It's a lot simpler than us doing in-house development of it and managing it, so that's part of it. But the overall improvement I'd say is through the ease of automation, it takes away a lot of manual processes.

The workflow. I would say the workflow is pretty good. Also, the flexibility of being able to create custom objects with a lot of domain-specific attributes that we follow.

One of the things I know is a bit of a challenge for them - because I know that it lives on top of FileNet, so it's not necessarily living on top of a relational database, per se - is that we also are using it as our system of record for our language management and our language definitions. I know that that was a little bit of a challenge, just because of the underlying architecture.

So far, so good, but we're also very new, in this implementation particularly.

I still don't know about the scalability yet.

We've been using an implementation vendor to help us get rolling with it, a company called Vega. They've been very helpful.

I was involved in a lot of the planning, and specifically for the technical aspects of it, integration and data migration. It seemed pretty straightforward.

When selecting a vendor what's important are the 

• product
• service, response
• name and reputation.

We definitely look for somebody that we can trust, that understands our vision, that is reliable, that really is going to do their best to kind of help meet our needs without necessarily trying to push us into a corner.

I would give Case Manager a seven out of 10 at this point, because I think there has been some challenges with trying to get the language library. I know that we do have some individuals that do need to come up to speed on it technically, and the only onsite training for Case Manager is in Europe, there is not a lot of US-based training. So they have to do all their training online rather than being able to go and have a good bootcamp-style training somewhere nearby.

In terms of advice, I would say use our partner, Vega, because they've done a really good job. It's been, honestly, one of the quicker implementations that I've been part of, overall. They've done a really good job coming in and understanding our business scenario, our business case; the speed of delivery is actually really impressive. We're going to be going live either end of this month or beginning of next month. It's been six months to replace something that has been broken into two different pieces that we're merging into one, but that have been parts of solutions that have taken us much, much longer to put together.

It is primarily used for storing documents and other content in our repository for underwriting purposes.

I have been using it for a little over two years now. I think it's been working out great for what our needs are.

Case Manager is a web-based application. The product we were using before Case Manager was a desktop application. We had a lot of issues with that product. Ever since moving over to Case Manager, it's been really easy and simple to use, and it's just perfect for the job.

I think it's valuable that users are able to create their own content, and they can manage their own sets of tasks, to work at their own pace and get their jobs done.

In terms of upcoming releases, I was in a couple of sessions on the IBM Case Manager roadmap, here at Think 2018. I think it's really cool that they're now taking the time to listen to their customers, and bring features in that customers have been asking for, for years.

One of the features that I thought was very cool is that you can edit your documents within your repository straight from your desktop, from your device. You don't have to have a special editor. It will just connect to the native application that the file works with, and you can just check right back into your repository. I thought that was very cool.

In my opinion, it is very scalable. We have couple of smaller solutions that are maybe 20 to 30 users, and then we have bigger solutions - we're talking hundreds of people using it at the same time. I think it's pretty scalable and stable.

I have been using IBM technical support to work with IBM to hash out their glitches, bugs on the product. I think that IBM has been very helpful. They are very professional when it comes to working with their customers. It's very helpful.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

The only way to really tell is to try it out, see how it works for you. I think it's a great product.