IBM FileNet Reviews

The most valuable features for FileNet are the ability to do information governance, compliance, and implement case-centric or content-centric workflow solutions; to provide enterprise search capability; and we have Content Navigator. Those are a few.

It has provided our users the ability to conduct their business processes more efficiently. They're able to search documents faster; integrate with the external systems. We're still at a point where there are a lot of improvements that can be made through newer versions of the newer FileNet platform that is coming from IBM.

We are looking for real-world capabilities within mobile, which has annotation features. We saw a lot of things at a conference but we are looking for more advanced rule-based – or, even if not rule-based, a better – cognitive approach that can be applied to cases.

Those things, and we are also looking for an improved mobile experience for our customers.

I haven’t rated it higher because of the workflow engine. I believe it can be improved upon, looking at other workflow solutions like Pega and Lombardi. FileNet has room for improvement there, as well.

We do have certain concerns about stability, especially with large volume, even within that, around web service APIs. That is something we'll try to prove out in a lower environment. Outages have become a regular thing, especially with our C-MART on-demand APIs, not so much with the FileNet. We are having some memory leak issues. We are working with IBM on that, but we are looking for alternatives to see how we could mitigate those.

If you implement the infrastructures correctly at the beginning, it's a pretty scalable solution. The platform is scalable, both vertically as well as horizontally.

I have used technical support a lot. A lot of times, it is 10/10; sometimes 8/10; sometimes 5/10. That's how I would evaluate it.

We have a good partnership and we get a lot of good support from our IBM sales partners and through our PMR support, but occasionally we run into certain issues where I'll evaluate it a little lower.

I was not involved in the initial setup of FileNet at my current organization, but in the past I have and we are right now, as I’ve mentioned, working on a road map and that will require a setup of FileNet in the organization.

From when I set it up in the past, while not exactly straightforward, if the methodology is followed, it is pretty streamlined and not so complex.

It does most of the things that an ECM platform can do.

In the future road map, we are looking at mobile, the cloud, and those kind of things. We plan to use mobile in 2018. First, we want to try out search and retrieval with Content Navigator, possibly, and maybe through DataCap Mobile. Either one of them would be the first.

We’re also considering employing IBM cloud solutions at some point, but there are certain regulations and compliance that we have to factor in before we can do that. But we're thinking in that direction.

Cloud gives us benefits; for example, the infrastructure will be handled more efficiently. The cost can be reduced. We are also looking for a partner. It will also provide a partner who can manage our lower infrastructure rather than us having to keep upgrading ourselves and putting in those patches and stuff like that.

There aren’t yet any new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for our organization, but we were looking at those at conference, looking for cognitive solutions for Case Manager and DataCap. And we'll see an opportunity there.

We are actually at the onset of a transformation. We are looking at services we have not yet provided. We are looking at those opportunities as we do, what we are calling, our ECM transformation starting next year.

With the new Content Navigator platform, the usability has become a lot better and it has become integrated. I think it's becoming better with the new mobile integration; it's getting better and better.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for me are scalability, security, and that we also have strategic partnership with the vendor, somebody who can meet our roadmap objectives.

We use the Case Manager component of FileNet, itself. It helps with the business process, mainly; incoming documents; and then collaboration of the underwriters or adjusters. Besides that, we consolidate all documents within FileNet, so nothing is going to be left on a file share or somewhere that is not going to be found down the road. It's very important for the company to have something like that in place, to control every asset of the documents within the enterprise.

Documents used to be everywhere; anybody's desktop or shared file systems. Now, everything is in one location and people can share or view the same document at the same time, without waiting for each other to finish a folder, paper or document, to go ahead and work on them again. Basically, that's it. You can have many people using the same document at the same time, sharing it without any problem; annotating on them, if need be; having it all in one place; and being easily accessible.

I would rate it higher if they improved the usability, because as a product, it went through iterations and things like that. If it was supposed to be a perfect product, Content Navigator would have been developed earlier, so that people would have been using the system much, much better. We still have lots of customers that are used to using XT; migrating them from one environment to another always causes issues. Training them again on the new product for the same backend, for the same solution, that always creates some issues. It's the response from the customers, mainly; the end users. When there's a change, there is always resentment. You have to deal with all of those things.

It would have been better if things were what they are today five years ago or seven years ago. The product could have matured quicker.

Because it's a content management solution, they could start providing an analytics component on it. They already have the content, so they could start adding components. Usually, they rely on third-party or external products to do those things. If they start doing the analytics, that would make it easier for me, instead of implementing other products, but I guess that's the trend now. You have to go with that. It's something that we don't currently have that I would like.

The way I see it, IBM is going more towards cloud-based solutions; more towards Box being a content management solution for the cloud. Even with the delay, how that's going to fit with the Case Manager, I don't know. I don't know what the future is going to be for content management.

They could have done things differently or better. No product is perfect 100% of the time.

It is stable. We have no major issues.

It's an enterprise solution. Everybody, from coast to coast, is using it. It's not only departmental or one geographical area. It's enterprise, coast to coast, and it’s being used.

My advice wouldn’t be positive because, as I see it, everything is going cloud-based. Everything is going in a direction where content management is becoming like the database products used to be 10 years ago; they are in the back room and nobody knows about them anymore. They do their job, day in and day out, but they are in the dark now. That's the trend I'm seeing with the content management. They're going to go in the back room and nobody's going to be dealing with them. They will just sit there and do their job; collect the content and then do nothing else. That's where it's going.

Just because it's not sexy doesn't mean it's not good. Everything runs on the databases but they just sit there; nobody cares about them anymore. The same thing goes for content management. That's my impression. That's my gut feeling about what's going to happen.

We're looking into the IBM Box solution, for cloud collaboration with external vendors, external users and external suppliers. That would make it easier for them to come in, send documents or upload documents, without having to go through emails, which is currently the case. It makes the work process easier, document management easier.

As far as new analytics or content management services that we are now able to provide our organization, we are doing some proof of concepts but nothing in production yet; mainly content analytics, not streams or anything that's coming in from other sources. We're doing analytics on the content that we already have. We're looking into the sentiment part of the documents that are coming in, to see if it’s something people are going to be using, or to escalate it to be looked into right away, or it's something that anyone can view anytime they want; there's no urgency on it.

Regarding existing services that we're able to provide better than before, it's easier to respond to documents that are coming in or are requested; coming in from brokers, for example. It's easier to work on them. It's faster to work on them. Turnaround time used to be two or three days; now, it's minutes or less than an hour.

Mobile is probably going to be part of the Box solution coming in but nothing has been decided yet.

As far as usability, it's user-friendly. Now that we're using Content Navigator, it's easier to use and easier to present it to the users. Training-wise, it's much easier because you teach them on one application so everybody knows how to use the next application that's going to come on as a solution. That's a plus.

The most important criteria for me in selecting a vendor to work with is how accessible they are; how support is available, especially IT or technical support; and if we're doing development, how fast they're going to respond for problems that we encounter. Those are the things that are important.

Since we implemented FileNet, the users are happy with the experience. The users are using it on a daily basis, especially when they don't deal with paper. Whenever they need, it’s there and they don't have to worry about paper. It helps them in their daily work and job.

We recently upgraded to P8 Version 5.2.1. We find it to be incredibly stable at this point. We find it to be incredibly fast in our particular implementation.

One of the best parts of it is definitely the stability. We have a lot of outside entities that attach to our FileNet infrastructure. Because a lot of it deals with court cases, it's absolutely vital that someone be able to access the information when they need to.

It has definitely made it easier to become a paperless organization. Just within the last year, we have removed eight million pieces of paper from within our organization and digitized it into our FileNet infrastructure.

Technical support is amazing. With our upgrade, it was massive project and I had to interact with three different IBM personnel. The wealth of knowledge that they were able to give me took so much of the hassle out of that implementation.

With our new implementation of a database based ObjectStore, there is not a great deal of documentation in regard to installation/implementation of database based ObjectStores. I encountered quite a few issues with that particular ObjectStore that required a great deal of assistance from our DBAs to resolve. I was consistently referred to our DBAs to resolve database issues during the implementation, because the documentation should have been either more readily available or handled by whomever was handling the PMRs that were open in regard to it.

It's just amazed me how we were able to scale it, the size of it and its stability going along with that size.

Going forward, it could be made a little bit easier for the end user. We're a DB2 shop. Our implementation against DB2 could be a little bit cleaner in some ways. Not every shop is necessarily going to have a DBA in house that can handle those duties. In some of the FileNet implementation, I saw that there was a fair amount of database work that needed to be done and that wasn't clear at the outset.

I felt that support often times “dropped the ball” during our implementation. I will add that other than the database related issues of our implementation, the support I was received was excellent. However, the database related support, or lack thereof, stands out.

An older version of FileNet was already in place when I took over my position.

It was a very complex installation and upgrade because it was a forklift upgrade, but IBM's assistance was invaluable.

When we decided to invest in the upgrade, no one else was considered, to my knowledge, because we were already on that path and we saw a lot of benefit to upgrading. It was a natural step to upgrade.

In general, the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are stability and excellent support. When something breaks for us, it affects thousands of users. It can cost us thousands of dollars and man hours. Since no product is fool proof, excellent support is an absolute must.

I have a former colleague that works for another governmental organization and they are also a FileNet shop. They have a slightly different architecture than our own, but when he asked me about the particularity upgrade from 4.5 to 5.2.1, I did tell him it was completely worth it; that he'll have so many additional benefits into how he could manage his object stores and all of his data; and that it is completely and absolutely worth it.

We would potentially consider employing IBM cloud, hybrid, or box solutions. We're trying to find other ways we can add to our FileNet implementation to better service our end clients.

As far as new analytics or content management services that we are able to provide to our organization, we are looking at Case Manager and Box as additional implementations to our current FileNet instillation.

There are most definitely existing services that we are now able to provide better than before. Our document imaging services are much more stable than they used to be, especially given our recent upgrade.

Potentially, our plans could include mobile. We're trying to find every possible way to make it easier for our clients to interact with us.

Regarding how our customers’ experiences has changed since implementation of the solution, there are far fewer calls from the field, from all of our users. The times we have had problems, it has not been FileNet related. It has usually been some other piece of our infrastructure that touches FileNet that might be developed third party or in house. Over the last six months, since our new implementation, none of those problems have been FileNet related at all.

As far as FileNet’s usability, the new component, the ACCE, is a little slower compared to the old FEM, the FileNet Enterprise Manager tool. I see a little bit of room for improvement, especially in the area of searches. Overall, it is nice to have a web interface versus a client that has to be installed on a system.

In some areas, the usability could be a little bit smoother, especially for someone that is not an active developer or a database administrator. Other than that, we're really happy with the product.

FileNet is very robust and it’s scalable. It's unlimited as far as size and file types that we manage. It's very accessible. It really works for us, for what we use it for.

In ECM, the M is management. Before, we didn't really manage very well. We had shares with files stuck over here; a laptop with some important files on it over here that are important to our enterprise. FileNet has allowed us to have a true enterprise system for all of our employees, customers and so on.

I would like to see a hybrid cloud, where we could have a cloud solution behind our firewall and use the benefits of the cloud without exposing it to the outside world. I would like a private cloud in conjunction with an external-facing cloud, like the box solution that they're talking about now. We don't have that right now.

We have a different use-case for our ECM solutions than most. We are a government lab with high security requirements. I probably would never house much of our data on an external cloud. The access that administrators would have to data does not meet our security requirements (i.e., Security Clearance for the US Government and ‘need-to-know’ requirements). However, I feel that cloud technology is a much better way to secure and share data. I would like to utilize cloud technology that we could implement on our own servers behind our firewall in conjunction with an external cloud for storing data outside our firewall or maybe in a DMZ to enable collaboration with our sister labs and customers in the government and industry.

It's very stable.

Scalability is unlimited; it really is.

Technical support is good. We rely on them a lot. We think of them as a partner. They're excellent, for the most part. We've had a few times when we were stuck and never had a solution. It was because we were way outdated on our system. For the most part, IBM, they're good. They're really good.

I have given it a high rating because we've analyzed other systems; compared everything out there. We do that because our CIO's office wanted us to. There just isn't anything better out there for what we use it for, for ECM.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is that they deliver what they promise; not just a white paper but actually implemented it and it's working. If they do what they say, I think that's most important.

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.

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.

The most valuable feature of FileNet is the storageand records management capability. It allows us to records manage our content properly.

It's allowed us to consolidate content all in one spot, to make it easier to pull out all of the customer-related content for a single customer. We provide better service to the customers. It can be more efficient, if they're not looking in various places.

We've talked a bit about Content Navigator on top of it; some improvements there right now. We use a customized viewer, because ICN doesn't have a couple of features we need around security, restricting content; who can see what content within the repository. We want to roll that out.

We’re also looking at other solutions that work with FileNet. It's a pretty bulletproof back-end solution, but we want to look at what else can we use, the cognitive and so on.

It’s lacking from our standpoint. We haven't done it. There have been different priorities. With things like box and so on, they're rising to the top because we need those types of solutions to go with the mobile or with the customer interactions.

It's been great; very stable; very few issues.

No scalability problems at all.

We have not used technical support, because we have an IBM service team that we use directly. They're not the actual tech support guys, but we do have an IBM team that does a great job.

I do not find it particularly expensive. We're having some discussions around licensing for external customers, and some of the licensing seems pretty expensive; the records management piece of it that's layered on top. You can get enterprise agreements on that sometimes. For smaller companies, it might be a pretty big ticket, though. If you're smaller, cost-wise, maybe it's not something you need.

If a colleague asked me for advice, from my standpoint, I'd certainly recommend FileNet as an option. I'd want to understand what else they're running, because it depends on what else is integrating with it; do they have workflow, do they have capture, what is it, how well does it play in the sandbox with FileNet? From what I understand, almost every vendor I talk to has out-of-the-box connectors for FileNet, which tells you it's a pretty big solution.

Relationship is the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with. How do they react to problems? You don't expect no problems; you know you're going to have problems. It's about the reaction to them; how fast are they, how quickly can they get it done, what do they do to address the root cause, and so on; being more of a partner than a vendor.

Also, with working on new solutions, helping me identify what's out there in the market, not just their solutions. I have a big Kofax deployment, and IBM supports us having that. They are not trying to sell us DataCap, because they know we have Kofax. It makes sense, so they support that decision. They integrate well. We have an internal layer that's in between; it's not a native integration. We built something in between, unfortunately; that just complicates integrations. It's another layer, something else that can break. It's customized for us. We're not quite sure why it does that. I think it's because, if we ever went away from FileNet, we wouldn't necessarily have to change the front-end applications, but we have no plans to do that.

We are considering employing IBM box solutions. Right now, IBM hosts our FileNet for us, but we're looking at box as a potential option, so that we can interact with external customers, without having them get into our firewalls, mainly.

Right now, there aren’t any new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for your organization. At a recent World of Watson conference, we were looking at some of the solutions. We have Cognos running, but we're now starting to look at the more advanced solutions.

It’s hard to say whether there are any existing services that we're able to provide better now than before because of the implementation of FileNet. I’m not sure.

As far as how the experiences of your internal or external customers changed since we implemented FileNet, we implemented it a long time ago, so that’s hard to answer. Nonetheless, as we've gone along, customers will see slower but steady progress in terms of knowing more about them and being able to retrieve the documents. We used to have a big problem with not finding a customer's document, often. FileNet makes it easier to find, so it gives the customer more confidence.

We've launched mobile applications. Most of the launches so far have not used FileNet, because the deployment of the app was the most important thing. They didn't do a proper back end solution, and now they're following up for the proper back end. They’re catching up, but we'd like to get to a point where we're deploying with them upfront.

I'm not that close to FileNet, but I haven't heard anything negative about its usability.
It's been a really solid product. I've only had this area for about a year, but it's been a really good product; very few problems. We’ve had some technical production issues, that might have to do less with the product, and more about how it's deployed, but nothing major; enough that I haven’t given it a perfect rating. I'm not sure I'd give anything a perfect rating.

The most valuable features of FileNet are the document management, records management, and integration with other solutions. We want a system of record and that's what it supplies us with, a system of record that's well supported.

It's given us the ability to organize and apply an actual system of record to it, so that we're tracking and making sure that things are disposed of when they need to be. We know where things are. We're applying a real taxonomy to our environment. We're taking many disparate systems and merging them all into one system, and it's now our system of record.

I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as SharePoint; that would be a key one. IBM knows that we want that. Integrations with that and other solutions, in general – other records management solutions, other document management solutions, including those from competitors; that is key for us. While we're trying to coalesce everybody into one system, for the most part, there are other systems that we still have. We still need the connectors to go out to them and connect up everything.

Also, their integration between their own products, such as Watson; things like the Content Collectors and so forth. It would be much better if they made all that work seamlessly together. We've had some troubles with FileNet working with Content Collector, working with Watson and working with Classification. You would think that these things would work seamlessly together but the bridges aren't there. All of the connections aren't in place. It's taking time for that to happen.

One of the key reasons why we went with FileNet is how stable it was. We're very happy with the stability of it.

Scalability-wise, we're really happy with that, as well. It's a system that we built with scalability in mind. We went highly available with it and we know exactly how to branch out for every single node that we want, every component that we've got.

We have used technical support quite a bit. We're heavily engaged with the Lab Services on a regular basis. We have a lot of enhancement requests that are going out and so forth, and IBM has been very responsive to us.

We had a lot of different systems. We wanted an industry leader. At that point in time, they were one of the top ones in the Magic Quadrant from Gartner or Forrester. We did look into this with Gartner and Forrester. We tried to stay as neutral as possible in this decision, and we were looking at several different companies. They just worked their way up to the top, eventually.

We were a very siloed organization. We had different systems in different regions and so forth. It was very difficult to find information, so we knew we needed one. We also knew that there were new government regulations on how we handled our records, and we needed to have something that we could really leverage to facilitate all of that.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with has to do with the size of the organization; what they're able to bring to the table, as far as the number of people and so on. We've dealt with small groups, where there's 1-2 people working for a company. That can make it difficult for us. It's the personnel, the power of the people that they can bring. That's really critical for us.

Also, experience, obviously; that they know what they're doing. I've also dealt with vendors where they come in and they learn with us. When we started with our implementation, ICM was brand new. When we were sitting down with our vendor, we realized quickly the vendor was learning it as we went. So, having some experience with the product is obviously key.

We're a pseudo-governmental organization and that means that we're a slow ship to turn. The decision-making progress takes a long time. There are a lot of different policies and procedures that are in place to gate us as we go through that process. It just naturally takes us a long time to get through it. From strategy, through an RFP, to getting to the point where we made a purchase, it probably took two years.

We did not really think about building an in-house solution. There are components of this that you could probably do on your own. We looked at things like platforms such as SharePoint and so on, and realized that there were limitations. That's why we wanted an enterprise leader; something that's already pre-built that we didn't have to build from the ground up and support. That's not to say that we won't build certain things going out. We've looked at connectors and what we want out of those connector products and we've toiled with the idea of actually building it from the ground up ourselves.

In addition to myself, we also brought in others who have consultant experience, so we knew how to do this from the ground up. If you threw someone new into it, it's very complex, very difficult to do, but since we had lots of experience, we knew what we were doing. It was still complex; not an easy thing to do. You have to have some people with some pretty decent experience to build it up; not only that, but also understand how your customers are actually going to use it. It's one thing to build up a foundation that they can use, it's another thing to make sure it actually does what their business needs.

Really listen to your customer, your users, and what they need. Understand what they need from a records management perspective and what they're going to be migrating from and coming into this with. With these solutions, there are a lot of dials to play with and some of them handle that better than others.

It's a very stable platform. It's obviously a leader. When used properly and the customers understand what it's to be used for, it's an excellent product. Whether or not it's as customizable and user friendly, that's where it starts to drop a little bit as far as I'm concerned. When you compare it to the flexibility and what users can do with SharePoint or some of the competing products like OpenText and so on, it seems like there's a little bit more flexibility on the user side for them to do more with those than what you can with FileNet when it comes out of the box. Now, I do understand, IBM is changing that. That's the reason behind my rating.

We are considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions; a little bit of everything. The box solution is a nice way for us to work with outside agencies such as banks and so on, when we do reviews of them and so forth. We would look at the cloud for development systems and things of that nature. I don't see us moving any of our production-level data out to the cloud at this point in time. An in-house cloud, that's different, perhaps.

We’re now able to provide analytics and content management services for my organization that we weren’t able to provide before, because we didn't really have a complete system before we had this system. We're now a records management system for a central bank.

Document management is probably the key existing service that we're now able to provide better than before. As I’ve mentioned, we had disparate systems, many different search engines to find all that data and now we're all kind of coalescing into one.

We have plans to include mobile. It's a little bit further out and, being a central bank, we have some restrictions as far as what we can do on mobile devices and what they can do to access their network. That makes mobile difficult.

The experiences of our internal customers have changed quite a bit since implementing FileNet. As I’ve mentioned, they've got one area to go to find all their data. For the customers that are using it, they like that quite a bit. Being able to leverage new workflows to improve their business processes is fantastic. As far as external customers, we haven't allowed anybody external. We have no external access to it. That's where we might use something like box down the road.

There's an ebb and flow to usability, as far as what you're willing to customize on the user front end. Coming out of the box, it's difficult to say that it's very usable for customers until you get in and really start customizing it for their needs and understanding how they're going to use it in their day-to-day practice. ICM out of the box is OK from a document management perspective, but it's very generic and it needs to be ironed out and customized. I'm not referring to custom coding, but really going in and tweaking the settings to facilitate what the customers want.