IBM FileNet Reviews

We use it to store and transfer large amounts of files between several various locations that we serve. It is an excellent document storage facility. 

The excellent document storage repository: It is good at what it does. 

The technical support that we get from IBM. 

I would like to see the dashboard be a little bit more robust and a little more user-friendly. Right now, unless you truly know FileNet, you do not know what you are looking at in the dashboard. From what I understand with the latest release, which is what we are getting ready to go to, a lot of that has already been solved, but I have not seen what it really looks like yet. 

It is an extremely stable platform, if it is built right. 

We are looking to expand and scale up quite a bit right now, because our current system is completely overloaded. We are looking at doing an upgrade and an in-place expansion. However, I do not know how the scalability is performing.

If we run into problems, which is inevitable (and we run into problems all the time), we get quick responses and good solutions back from the technical support. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Due to the way it is designed, we worked with IBM quite extensively to do our original architecture. Going that route, it has been immensely stable. However, we have now gotten to the point where we have outgrown what we originally designed. 

Look at what you are looking to get from it. If you are looking for just a small open source, understand that you will get what you pay for. FileNet is not cheap, but you absolutely get what you pay for. 

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.

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.

It really has improved our organization, because it's the repository of all our documents, PDF, etc. That's where we are archiving and storing all those documents, so it's critical.

The natural interoperability with IBM Datacap, that is a key component of our solution, as well as with BPM, and WebSphere Portal. That's why we prefer FileNet instead of some other, less world-class solution.

Support is good. When they have to escalate internally, in order to get some more expert advice internally, they do so and it's okay.

No problem. We've were helped by IBM. That is, you always have problems on a project, but what I ask is whether the solutions have been solid. Yes, they have.

The straightforward approach to the install.

Stability is really good. We fairly recently upgraded a version of it and have not been having any problems. The resources seem to be really good with this version; it is a little easier to troubleshoot issues. We do not have many issues with the newer version.

With the upgrade, it was a bit more improved.

I have not personally used IBM's technical support, but there are other members of my team that have used them. I have not heard any negative feedback.

While I was not involved in the initial setup, my team was. From my understanding, the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

I was not involved in the decision-making process.

This is a straightforward install, and it works well. It has been very hands-off and seamless in terms of supporting it. In terms of researching it, these are really good considerations.

The most valuable feature of FileNet is the capability to manage a large number of various documents, dynamic documents. In our case, we are using mostly transactional documents. It provides the ability to attach all documents related to transactions that we want to manage and provides guaranteed support to the transactional aspect with unstructured content.

It supports and provides the capability to expose content to line-of-business applications.

FileNet is mostly internal for us. It is very interesting because it is providing capabilities that, in the past, we would have had to retrieve boxes of paper documents, and so on. It's easier. We are in the process of straight-through processing and the digitalization of processes. Of course, content is a major part of that. We definitely want to investigate that and leverage content into transactional and improvement of processes.

I would like to use the analytics features more. That's part of the solution; it's already there. However, for the ECM part, we don't have any experience with the analytics. That's something we can envision and would like to consider integrating into the solution. However, at this time, it's not part of it. It’s definitely something we're looking for to provide value and more intricate information that we cannot consider with the basic connection process.

When we compare it to other vendors, there are some capabilities that we might improve.

We have some applications that we can build on and an API is also available; that gives us some capabilities.

We don't have any stability concerns for FileNet. IBM manages it on our site. IBM is our outsourcer. Stability’s OK on the site. We don't have major failures, or anything like that. We are considering a different approach for DR. But otherwise, it's okay.

Scalability’s something that we want to consider. With the cloud offering, that's something that we can definitely leverage. In terms of scalability, cloud offers us something good and new. We discovered at a recent conference that IBM has an interesting cloud offering.

We have not used IBM technical support for FileNet.

Initial setup was done a long time ago. I was not at the company at that time.

The cloud could be really interesting, as soon as you don't have any constraints regarding the regulatory aspect, sovereignty, and so on. We have some IBMers in charge of operations, upgrades and reliability of the environment; I think that's very interesting.

A hybrid solution could be something that we can consider. We have some regulatory concerns. Because it's mostly sensitive information that we have on our repositories, we need to find ways to securely involve cloud capabilities. That's something we need to consider but, of course, we are interested.

There are no new analytics or content management services that we're able to provide for your organization, yet, but I'd like to have some more, mostly for the capture part of the process. I'd like to have some more analytics capabilities to classify or extract content, and to structure content from the unstructured content.

We have plans to include mobile as well; that is part of it. We have a few line-of-business applications, so we need to consider it as an integration. It's mostly for supporting documents that we want, too. The IBM Box offering could be something that we can leverage.

With all applications that we are using, we are going to leverage Content Navigator. That's one thing that's very interesting. Case Manager, Datacap, and all of those products are interesting.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are robustness, the fact that they understand our business, they are willing to accompany us with various strategies and various solutions we can implement; not only with IBM solution, but with third parties as well.

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.

We use it mostly as our content management system. It is our system of records, so it is where we store all our engineering, HR, admin documents, etc.

Instead storing our documents offsite (physical documents), we are storing all of our documents electronically. Therefore, we do not have an outside storage fee.

• Document storage
• The ability to search
• Check in/check out

I would like to see expanded search features, like content search. The search needs to be improved. 

Stability is perfect.

It is very scalable.

Technical support is very good.

We previously had an in-house solution.

The initial setup is a little complex. The installation and configuration to start up needs expert level knowledge.

There are lots of components to the product. Make sure before you invest that you know which components you need.

It is a very stable, scalable system, but it needs a little improvement. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Price
• Name
• Expertise
• Reference.

Reference is very important for us, because we are a government agency and prefer to have a government agency reference.