IBM FileNet Reviews

The Workflow feature is the most valuable feature of FileNet, and then the content management and storage. These give users the ability to quickly store items, retrieve items, and then run workflows on the items and the content in the storage.

It's made using the wealth of the content a lot better; a lot faster for users.

One of the things I'd like to get installed is the Content Navigator. That offers a little bit more scalability for the users. It's not as clunky. It's a little bit more user friendly, with anything that reduces the number of clicks the user needs to get to the content.

Right now, I'd like to get upgraded to the 5.2.1 environment. We're kind of behind the curve on that with the rest of the country. I know you don't need the 5.2.1 environment to employ the Content Navigator. You can deploy it with 5.1, but it is something that we're going to move forward with.

One thing I'd like to have is SQL 2014, but we really can't move to that until we're on 5.2.1. Our current version doesn’t integrate with it.

It's very good. It's very stable. It's just like anything else; it's built up on the foundations. As long as your foundations are strong and sturdy, the application's fine.

Scalability-wise, it's incredible, especially if you deploy it either on a WebSphere or application server. You can build it as big and as small as you need it to be.

Technical support is very good, as long as you're providing the information. If they slack a little bit, just make sure you give them a call and remind them that it's an important issue to you.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I was involved in subsequent upgrades, rollouts, improvements, moving to different configurations with fixed content devices and using Hitachi content platforms and SAN units. Those were a little complex; the more pieces you put into a puzzle. That was more on your end; making sure that the third-party apps work with the P8 system.

I have recommended FileNet to friends of mine at other companies.

Make sure you know what you want to do with it, how you're going to do it, and plan.
Nothing's perfect, but it's very good. It's above average.

I might give it a higher rating if it cost less; as with anything else, licensing is an issue. Anything with business boils down to money.

With anything, the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is cost, system stability, features, and different components and third-party apps that'll work with it, for any company that has existing storage and hardware.

It’s possible that we would consider using IBM in cloud, hybrid, or box solutions. We are looking at cheaper ways to store items; faster retrieval. Maybe in the future, making the items more cognitive; getting the wealth from the data, the value that we have in the data.

At this moment, I don't have any plans to include mobile.

I'm not sure if there any new analytics or content management services we're able to provide for our organization. I'm not in that position, so I really can't answer.

There are existing services we're now able to provide better than before: quicker response to customers in the data center, when they call in, to answer questions about forms and medical records that they've received from us.

The usability is great. It's not difficult at all.

It's used for content management. It's not for business process automation but for digital, electronic archives: documents, folders, and access to the client's native IBM content. It's an IBM content manager, especially for IBM BPM.

FileNet has many features which support our clients' compliance and governance requirements.

The most useful feature is its persistent storage. Also, the full-text search and attribute searching are valuable. It shows a preview of documents, and makes possible small, event-driven automation: creating documents, editing documents, deleting documents, and others.

For end-users there is a lack of administrative features. The interface of basic FileNet is not very good.

IBM is doing a lot of work to combine the abilities of its major products, BPM and FileNet, into one product, either IBM Business Automation Workflow, or Digital Business Automation. These are two major offerings from IBM. These products are very tightly integrated. I'm waiting for the moment when, in one or two years, it will be only one product which will combine the major strengths of these products. This is the right way forward, from my point of view. IBM is moving quickly in this direction.

I haven't seen any problems. FileNet is stable software as long as it is installed correctly.

The installation of FileNet is not very easy. It requires a very experienced administrator. But if the program installs correctly, it works. It's stable. It takes two to three days to install FileNet in high-availability mode.

Talking about the cost is difficult because IBM has offers that combine different products, and each of these offers has different types of licensing. IBM also has a policy that the actual price for a given customer may be very different from the stated book price. It's hard to say whether it's expensive or not.

I didn't do a deep comparison. Previously, I compared FileNet with some open-source enterprise content systems, especially Alfresco, but I realized that this product is for a different type of customer. FileNet is for enterprise customers, but Alfresco and other open-source BPM products are for small or medium-sized customers.

In terms of a comparison of the features, the open-source solutions are really are missing a lot.

Create a solution combining the strengths of all of IBM's products: IBM BPM, FileNet, or IBM Case Manager, a product which sits on top of IBM FileNet technology.

We have banks as clients with 3,000 to 4,000 employees but the FileNet users number between 100 and 200.

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.

The most valuable feature is seamless storing and retrieval of documents irrespective of the format of the document

Our current document management solution has limited capability in terms of the type of document that can be stored. With Filenet and Datacap we can accept documents in various formats seamlessly without user intervention.

We are in the early stages of implementation of this solution. We have not encountered any stability issues

We were looking for a data solution because the other one was sort of cramping our style. It could be accessed only via limited workstations, so we were looking for another data storage solution.

We evaluated a few other products

Digital business automation is the primary use case.

This solution is not used by business users in our organization.

One of our clients, a customer of IBM, rolled out and replaced their existing ECM system with FileNet. Their productivity has increased pretty dramatically. 

The Enterprise Records plugin helps with compliance and issues around that. Thus, we have clients who are using it specifically for that reason.

• Extensibility
• Customizability
• The API
• It has a very broad market share and a lot of people know about it.

The usability is fair. It could be a bit better. It could be better designed. They could put more effort into the user experience and do a better job of integrating other components, like Datacap, to be a bit more seamless.

I would like to see more integrated support for records management functions. I would like to see ICN be more integrated from a desktop standpoint with records management. Especially since, compliance and issues like privacy, which IER is uniquely capable and designed to handle, are becoming more important for users, things like advanced search and the ability to find data with privacy issues. Some work on that type of interface would serve everybody well.

It is very stable. The maintenance process has been greatly improved over the past few years. It seems like there is maturity now to the product which didn't exist even four or five years ago.

It is very scalable. You can deploy multiple WebSphere nodes and use clusters to do all sorts of things. It is enhanced now with the support for containerization, like Kubernetes and Docker. It is highly scalable, which is great.

The technical support is pretty strong. However, I still have cases of APARs which have been left open from many years. Therefore, the technical support is not excellent, but it's good.

The initial setup is complex. There are many different components to it. There are a lot of decisions which have to be made: architectural decisions, platform decisions, and team personnel decisions. These have to be made before you go ahead and implement something like this. It is a huge undertaking.

It takes a lot of time to roll out.

I am the consultant for deployments.

My customers have seen ROI. There have been productivity gains, time savings gains, and things that they have been doing much more efficiently in a more modern way than they were before.

The solution has reduced operating costs for our clients.

The product is worth considering. It has a lot of support with a lot of pedigree. Make sure your ducks are in a row, as far as understanding what your user requirements are and what your processes are around your content management needs. Then, once you have that done, definitely consider this as a very viable option.

Take your time and be careful with your planning phases.

We have integrated the solution with Enterprise Records. We have written our own custom interface that sits on top of Content Navigator. We have also written integrations to databases for lookups.

We are not using the solution for automation projects yet.

I would rate it a seven out of ten for its stability and maturity as a product. However, because it is so big, it is sort of slow to catch up to trends and things like privacy by design.

Our primary use case for this solution is document storage and retrieval - Workflow.

IBM FileNet has given us a much better platform than our previous ECM platform. It's more stable, more flexible and more powerful. The only downside is that it takes a dedicated staff to maintain it and the learning curve is pretty steep.

The features that I have found most valuable include the Data Capture and Case Manager features.

Simplifying both training and maintenance would be an improvement.

We did not have any stability issues.

It's very scalable.

IBM technical support is pretty good.

We were previously using a different solution but the previous platform was obsolete.

The initial setup was fairly complex. You will need help from IBM or a third party.

We implemented through a vendor team. We did not have a great vendor experience initially based on not having a clear set of deliverables.  

Hard to calculate since the old system was so bad.  A couple of improvements were noted immediately:  

1.  Training time was cut for the new system by 80%, 

2.  The business unit was able to absorb a 30% increase in workload with adding staff or overtime, and

3. Processing errors dropped by 40%.

1. It will be more expensive than estimated to setup.  
2. You will need to double the staff while you are running the old system and installing the new system.
3. Depending on the number of documents to be migrated, make sure you understand the potentially massive amount of time and effort required to migrate the existing content to the new platform.

We looked at multiple vendors: Perceptive, Hyland, and Dell EMC.

Do not underestimate the staffing component or you will fail.

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best I would give IBM FileNet an 8 out of 10.

We use it for content management and to manage documents. It has performed well.

It allows for multiple people to access content at the same time.

It is very flexible.

It is stable as long as you create the right environment. We have had issues at times, but just because of configuration issues.

It is very scalable.

Document storage and workflow.

It improves the usability throughout the enterprise. We are able to find the proper documents which are needed for business processes.

• The scanning automation piece.
• Being able to capture documents for retrieval.

There is always room for improvement.

The pieces that I have been looking for are becoming available. I am learning they are either on the roadmap or already been released. I am just not in a version of software that is capable of using it yet.

It is very stable and reliable.

I was a consultant for 15 years and had several customers, who I thought were large at the time, until my current employment which by far dwarfs it. So, the capability and the size are definitely scalable. I have seen from tiny installations to my current library, which is 1.5 billion documents and petabytes of data.

The technical support at IBM is knowledgeable and responsive.

The initial setup is complex. Though, it is straightforward for me since I have done it for so many years. It is complex because there are several pieces of software that have to be installed in the right order to make it work alright.