IBM FileNet Reviews

We have created document types for various types of documents, such as invoices (both incoming and outgoing), and normal posts in German. This involves automatic content detection, where the content itself goes via scanner to the content store. Links are then sent to the user, where they can find the documents.

IBM FileNet as a solution is very good for midsized companies and offers a compact solution where content can be stored in an IBM DB2 database. It requires minimal management effort, provides alerts when the database exceeds a certain capacity, and offers a control center over the ECM system.

FileNet provides a compact solution for midsized companies. It allows content to be stored in IBM DB2 database blocks with minimal management effort. Additionally, there are alerts to monitor the database capacity and ensure a manageable space. FileNet also provides a control center over the ECM system to monitor states and transcripts.

IBM does not do very good marketing for FileNet. Initially, after IBM acquired the product, there was good marketing support, but this has dwindled as IBM has lost personnel. More could be done to highlight the benefits to customers. Additionally, there are no visually appealing interfaces or apps for the product, which can influence customer buying decisions.

We have used IBM content management solutions since the year 2000.

We have not experienced stability issues with IBM FileNet. The database and the product itself have been stable for our needs.

Most of our customers do not want to move their sensitive internal data to the cloud. However, the solution's scalability within the IBM cloud has been very well maintained, and clients do not face issues.

Customer service is very good. I would rate it between eight and nine out of ten.

Positive

The setup process of IBM FileNet is straightforward and well-documented. There is a good online interface to configure parameters.

As IBM partners, we typically handle the deployment process for our customers as they may not have the required expertise.

Content management has been a cornerstone of our company since we started with IBM solutions, making it difficult to quantify the direct return on investment given its integral role.

It depends on the business partner providing the solution to the customer. We have an ESA contract with IBM which allows us to offer the solution at a competitive price, providing added value when combined with our expertise.

In anticipation of AI solutions becoming more prevalent, it is necessary to manage content storage efficiently to enable effective use of such technologies. We advise customers to consider a consolidated content store approach.

We use IBM FileNet for content management purposes.

The application's processing engineer needs to be more advanced.

We have been using IBM FileNet for two years.

I rate the platform's stability a nine out of ten.

We have more than 500 IBM FileNet users in our organization. It is a scalable platform, and I rate the scalability a seven out of ten.

A third-party services vendor, a gold partner certified by IBM, helps us communicate with the technical support team.

We are working with many products for content management, including SharePoint.

Our team didn't encounter any difficulties in implementing the product. The installation process takes a week to complete, whereas it takes around six months to create the content. We have a team of four technical engineers to work on deployment.

We take assistance from a third-party vendor for implementation.

The product generates around 30% benefit.

The platform is inexpensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten.

The operations management team primarily utilizes IBM FileNet as the foundational tool for content management. It offers a range of modules with additional functionalities for tasks such as daily maintenance, yearly maintenance, and quarterly maintenance. It has broader capabilities, and the team has tailored its usage to meet specific content management needs.

The platform efficiently streamlines the handling of documents and content in our organization. It is a user-friendly system and easy to manage for anyone with basic knowledge.

It has been leveraged effectively in our existing workflow, particularly concerning third-party components and directory services.

The security features work effectively in managing sensitive information and ensuring confidentiality.

I rate it an eight out of ten.

We usually use it for document management in insurance or finance companies. Some of our clients are using the workflow for insurance cases. In these companies, FileNet is ingesting a lot of documents and a lot of insurance claims.

In terms of automation, we're using IBM Content Collector and we have started using RPA a bit. We're using ICC for some of our customers to ingest and automate the upload of multiple documents in bulk. We've just started using automation with RPA but not with the P8 system; rather for other functionality that customers need.

Ninety percent of our customers in the insurance industry, here in Israel, are working with FileNet.

Most of our customers use FileNet on-prem.

Filenet saves time in terms of clearance of insurance claims. Building a claim, from the customer side, is often easier as well. Not everything is perfect but it's good enough to work in most of the big insurance companies here in Israel.

Most of our customers are not using some of the most valuable features, like analytics, text search, or case or workflow features. They are generally not used by our customers because they're using other programs that are built-in to their networks. So if a customer has a workflow system already, he won't use the workflow system that is built-in to FileNet, although it's available.

It's the same with the content analytics. If the client has Kibana and Elasticsearch for searching text, they won't use that feature that comes with the FileNet P8 because it's only for the P8 system and not for the whole network.

The analytics in FileNet are too complicated and they consume too much infrastructure, memory, and CPU. They're too expensive to work with.

The usability, with the addition of Content Navigator, is not good enough. We're building our own interface, doing a facelift of the product, to satisfy our customers. People here in Israel are generally more Microsoft-oriented. They're used to the SharePoint look and feel, the Outlook look and feel. When they see Content Navigator and its features, it's a bit different for them. It's hard for them to get used to it.

Most of our customers and users are asking for features with a file-system-type look and feel. For example, when they open a folder in their file system they want to see the hierarchy of the folders. If IBM built something like other products, like M-Files for example, with a file-browsing feature, into P8, it would be a very good feature. Most customers around the world would use it.

That is what we're trying to build on our own. It would be easier for the customer to work with, in the same way IBM did with the Content Navigator Office Integration. There, you can browse through Office, the folders, and find things. You can drag and drop documents from Word, from Outlook, straight into the file folder in FileNet. If they would bring these kinds of features into the file system itself, without Office, it would be a killer feature.

We have been working with it for a long time. It's one of the older versions. Both it and the new version are probably very stable.

We generally don't have any issues with the stability of the system. That could be because we are too small. In Israel we have small companies and they don't have very complicated systems, like in the United States or Europe. We have medium-size customers, compared to companies around the world. We don't have 500 users at a customer's site so these are not huge systems. And they're usually in the same geographical area. It's not like there is a site in New York and another one in Chicago or Philadelphia.

There are no issues with scaling. It's based on WebSphere Application Server so it's very easy to scale up.

I've contacted tech support many times. I don't have very much good to say about it. The people in support are changing often so most of the people there aren't familiar with the product. They are always asking for the basic information about the system, even though we've worked with finance customers for many years and we know the product. We try to provide the actual error to customer support and to get an answer about it. But until they forward it to first-level support or engineering, we lose time. We are not usually satisfied with customer support.

We used to use M-Files and we are a little familiar with Alfresco and Documentum. Generally, the biggest difference between those solutions and FileNet is the price. The others are much cheaper but most of them are less robust and less stable than FileNet. Programming and manipulating other programs to work with FileNet is easier than in Documentum, as far as I know. Each one has its own best features. It depends on the use case.

The initial setup depends. If we're talking about a Windows-based installation, it's very easy. For other operating systems, like Linux, it's a bit complex. If we're talking about the whole P8 suite, it's very complicated. Documentation on how-to, screenshots, or step-by-step instructions are missing in all of IBM's P8 finance products.

Unlike Apple or with other vendors, where you've got to book, you can install it without any understanding of the underlying system. In finance, with P8, if you are not familiar with bits and bytes you won't end up completing the installation.

In terms of how long it takes, if we're talking about only Content Navigator and FileNet P8, a basic system, just the installation could take three to five days. And that's not talking about the implementation. It depends on the customer's site, on the operating system, on the database vendor. Sometimes the version doesn't support it. It also depends on the network. It depends on a lot of things that are not straightforward.

We have a standard implementation strategy that we use for our customers. We're usually asking for Microsoft Windows operating system and either a SQL or Oracle Database, and we are not doing any other complex installation configurations like a very sophisticated single sign-on. That's because it doesn't work very smoothly.

The ROI on the automation aspect of FileNet is a big question. I don't have specific numbers. We're dealing with between 30 and 40 customers here in Israel, and every customer is different.

Within the IBM DBA (Digital Business Automation) portfolio we use Datacap and we do see a return on investment from that. The automated document scanning and email scanning show a very good return on investment.

If you are a small or medium-sized company, I would advise working with other programs before you put money into FileNet, even though I've worked with it for a long time. If we're talking about a large company, for the robustness, stability, performance, and the growth — that you can grow it within seconds — I would advise using FileNet, without any doubt.

The performance is dependent on the database. Issues with performance are usually associated with databases issues. And, as I mentioned, the GUI of IBM Content Navigator caused a lot of issues with performance, but it's working well with our GUI.

I would rate FileNet at eight out of ten. It's not a ten because of issues like the flexibility of the system, the ease of working with or manipulating or programming and enlarging it. It needs to be more flexible to work with, not hard-coded and not closed like it is now.

We're an IBM business partner. We work with customers who purchase IBM and we help them implement business solutions. Often times, we just influence their decisions. Most of the time FileNet is being used for automation projects.

An example is one of our customers, an insurance company. They didn't have process-automation before. We helped them implement an IBM product suite with FileNet content management with workflow and analytics. It helped that company reduce processing costs. It helped them unify processes in 21 countries where they have a presence, and they use it as an IT framework that helps them integrate other companies which they acquire. They're big on acquiring smaller organizations to help them grow.

Productivity gains come where workers can focus on more important tasks, higher-value tasks, and where the repetitive tasks are delegated to software.

In the end, almost every solution that we create for our customers helps reduce costs. In most instances the solution has saved time as well. Where we do get statistics from our clients, on average we see 20, 30, or 40 percent gains in terms of turnaround time. You can see that, for example, processing a complicated claim would have taken weeks and with the software solutions built on top of IBM software, sometimes it gets down to days or even hours.

It has improved business processes or case management for our customers. That's the primary purpose, that's the reason why they're investing in the software.

The most valuable features of FileNet are its comprehensive ability to store content, to get insights from the content, and to use that content for making decisions routed through workflow.

Nowadays, with the new capabilities, the unattended task processing - so-called robotics or digital employees, digital agents - is where this industry is heading.

I think it's to the point where there are probably too many features. Every software, as it matures and graduates, grows the list of features. What many of our customers express is that it's just too complicated. They're using maybe five or ten percent of the features but they're having to pay for 100 percent. There is room for improvement in terms of simplifying it. This is a case where sometimes less is more.

Making it easier to deploy, easier to use, easy to integrate are the biggest areas for improvement.

Every new software has bugs, but the FileNet software suite has been around for ages, so it's stable, it works.

The scalability is infinite if you know how to use it in your software products.

Technical support is very decent. We've never had issues with it.

The integration of this solution with other products is where we come in as consultants. IBM software works great in the silo, the silo being that you have an IBM software suite and everything is working together great. But when you have a customer that has IBM and three or four or five other repositories, a line of business systems that need to be integrated, that's where typically consultants, systems integrators like our company, come in.

But IBM provides a great API and ways to integrate the software.

ROI is hard to tell, it varies. Sometimes it's tangible where it can be measured in percentages from 10 to 15 to 20 or even 40 percent. Sometimes it's intangible, where companies can get ahead of the game, get ahead of the competition, and get their products to market faster.

I would advise a typical due-diligence process. Get hands-on with it, try it out. Do the same with competing products and decide what works the best.

Usability of the product is a complicated question. Anyway it is created, software cannot serve everybody's needs. Most of the time we'll work with very large companies and all of them have their unique needs. We oftentimes start with a base and customize it for each customer and their specific use case. You'll find a number of users that can use software out-of-the-box. But we often have to change it, tweak it, tune it, to tailor it to their specific environment.

FileNet is a nine out of ten. It's been around forever, it's stable, it's mature, it works. We know how to use it. We can confidently recommend it to customers without impacting our reputation.

As a systems integrator, for us, every customer is unique. In every environment there are very distinct challenges, so it's hard to take the knowledge from one client and apply it to another. Every time it's a journey. Sometimes there are technical issues we have to overcome. Oftentimes there are challenges, the business challenges that we help our customers overcome. The exciting part is that it's challenging. Challenges are always exciting, and that's what the software helps us with, overcoming challenges.

We use FileNet with our Cognos. We used to store all of our report history within Cognos, inside the content store. We've removed it from the content store and put it inside the FileNet system. Our users can still access their reports, but we don't have to store it in our content store.

Our main benefit is keeping our content store small, where our content store was about 5.5GB. Best practices from IBM is about 3GB, so we were way over that. By moving all the report history out of the content store, we're now down to about 1.5 to to 2GB.

Keeping our content store small. That helps our DBAs when they have to do the backups of our audit system, or of the content store. It's in SQL Server, and to back up SQL Server of something that size takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. But now that we've shrunk that down, it's a little bit more manageable to handle backups. I know if we do ever have to restore our content store - which we hope we never do - we're able to do it in a more timely fashion because it's smaller in size.

It does what we need for it to do. As long as it can continue to handle the volume that we're throwing at it, I don't think that it's going to be a problem.

We've been using it now for about four years. When we first went to it, we were having some issues, communication across the network issues, but we have had very few issues with it. 

We add stuff to it all the time, so it's scaling vertically all the time, and we haven't had any issues with it. We started out around 3GB, and we're up to about 5GB, and we expect to be somewhere at around the 10 to 12GB mark by 2020, just because that's the way our business is growing.

One of our account reps was very instrumental in getting us set up, but we really haven't had, other than network latency issues in the very beginning, a lot of issues where we needed to go to technical support for it.

We were using the out-of-the-box content store of Cognos, and we were just busting at the seams, so we had to come up with a solution. One of our account reps actually came up with the solution. We looked at a couple other things, but this was a solution we decided to go with.

The important criterion for us when selecting a vendor is mostly that it's going to handle volume. Our particular company is a distribution system, and so we have tons and tons of data, so we need to be able to handle volume. What we typically run into is, people give us a proof of concept, and it will handle it with a small use case. But when you try and explode that use case into something that we need, at the volume we're working at, many of those solutions just fall flat at that point. This particular solution, that didn't happen. 

It was pretty straightforward. Like I said, the biggest issues we had were on our company side, the network latency of moving that much data across our network at one time. Once we opened up a dedicated pipe for that data movement, we haven't seen any issues like that.

I'd give it an eight out of 10. Eight's not high, not low, necessarily, but it does everything we need. I'm not going to give anything a 10, but I'm definitely not gonna give it a one.

I would say you need to take a look at the size of your content. If you're going to use it to replace the content store of Cognos, you need to look at the size and make sure you're within best practices. Cognos is a product that's wishy-washy at times, and most of the issues that we've ever had with Cognos were because our content store was too big. Now that we've shrunk the content store, our Cognos is actually better. If you are looking at that, this would be a solution I would suggest to you, just to keep your content store small.

All of our customers are using it to ingest, process, and retrieve their documents on a daily basis.

Automation is definitely the most important thing for large enterprises because they can't process many documents without it. Our clients are definitely planning to expand the use of automation. The more automation they get, the happier they are, because they don't want to spend too much time and have large overhead for processing their documents.

There are different stages of automation. For scanning, our clients use Datacap and, once everything is configured and fits their needs, they scan and process all their documents automatically. They don't need to do a lot of extra steps to get all their documents into the system.

After that, they need to search and retrieve those documents, which is also really nice in the way it is automated. There are different options. They can use Records Manager to create records automatically and keep them for, let's say, seven years or ten years and, after that, they can delete them, but not before that.

We have a customer that was using an obsolete system from 1990-something. They switched gradually, business-unit-by-business-unit, to FileNet P8 and that changed their way of handling everything. It changed the time it takes them to do their jobs and it also completely changed their end-user experience because of all the new technology and all of the automation. It completely changed their business process.

It definitely has reduced our clients' operating costs. It also saves our clients time.

FileNet has also definitely helped them with compliance and/or governance issues. That's another thing that is specific to IBM. They're the best in the business for compliance for all kinds of regulations, laws, state law, etc. They know how all that works. Out-of-the-box, it's really easy to configure according to whatever state they live in and the specific requirements they have. Everything is already in the product. They just need to select and configure it, but doing so is really easy and, once they set it up, they just use it. There are no issues there.

There are a lot of valuable features, but the biggest advantage is that this system is stable; it's always online, it always works. In addition, there are not too many changes or updates that cause issues. It's both the system and the environment around it that are stable. For large and enterprise customers, it's the best solution because, once it's configured and running, we don't need to touch it and constantly make changes to it. It's a low-maintenance platform.

While the system is stable, at the same time, the end-user interface, the Content Navigator, gets updated frequently so that it can match the requirements from the end-users. That way it provides new features and makes sure that everybody is happy.

To summarize, the back-end of the system always works and at the front-end you have an application that gives the best user experience. It's a great combination.

I would like to see support for different databases, like MySQL. I believe it's a good thing to have options. I don't think that there will be a lot of customers doing that, but nowadays people like to have options.

There is room for improvement in the scanning solution, Datacap. It's improving all the time. But since it's more an end-user software, the end-users are constantly improving their processes, and I believe that sometimes we're not catching up with their requirements.

The stability and usability go together. The backend and the front-end are separate but they work together. Still, we can handle them separately, from a technical point of view.

The whole solution is based on IBM WebSphere, which is basically a complicated website. So all the applications are running on that IBM software and you can create a cluster, more than one server which is handling all those requests. So you can scale it up to as many servers as you need, which increases the performance significantly. Also, you have redundancy in this case. If one of the servers doesn't work, the rest of the servers automatically handle the workloads.

I use IBM's technical support all the time. They're extremely responsive and very helpful. They always ask all the questions. They give us all the information upfront. If we need them to join in a call, they always do so really fast. That's been my experience for the last seven years. Every time I need help from IBM, I get it immediately.

If a customer is using legacy software that they want to move away from, the primary reasons in the decision-making process that they decide to go with FileNet are the stability and, at the same time, a really nice end-user experience. Also, out-of-the-box, they have all the government and state requirements. The whole solution gives them everything they need.

With a lot of other solutions, you get some of the features but not all of them. So you need to compromise and probably build your own end-user experience or add something on top of it. With FileNet, you get everything you need out-of-the-box.

The initial setup is really easy. If you're going to use all the features out-of-the-box, you just install it and it starts working. You don't need to do anything.

We have customers that have their own end-user solutions or very specific needs, and then we have to spend a little bit more time with them, but that's because they have their own software on top of it that they like to use it. That's more an issue of end-user software and not the actual FileNet system.

Our customers integrate it with other solutions. A lot of the time it's their own software that they have developed in-house. They use FileNet to connect to other platforms such as FileNet Image Services, which is the older product. But there are no issues because FileNet has an API and they just connect to the API and use it. It's well-documented, easy to use, and they don't have any issues.

I'm more of a systems engineer so I work on the technical side. I don't see the numbers.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is that every solution is unique. In general, out-of-the-box, it can meet up to 80 or 90 percent of the requirements, but you still need to gear it a little bit differently for different customers. Every business has its own requirements.

My advice would be to make the right choice, which is IBM. It means less trouble for the customer and less trouble for the engineer installing it.

In terms of the usability of the solution, once we configure and set up everything according to the requirements our customers have, they are really happy with what they get. That's why we spend a lot of time working with them every time there is an upgrade or whenever we implement it for the first time within an organization, to make sure that every single business unit gets all it needs. The solution is used by everybody in the company and they find the solution usable.

I would rate FileNet at ten out of ten because it's great for the customers and it's great for all the engineers involved in the process. It's great for everybody.

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.

IBM FileNet is an enterprise content management solution. We use the solution for document management in the legal, insurance, and banking sectors.

We're implementing an on-premise solution. We're handling the installation of the product and customizing it to build a customized application addressing specific use cases. We use all kinds of documents including audio, text, images, and office documents.

The product is robust and can process a lot of documents for enterprise content management.

The user interface of IBM content management, including the ability to customize screens without the need for coding, could be improved. Customers can use it to split the screen, enhancing its suitability for office use cases.

I have been using IBM FileNet for 20 years.

The product is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

The product is one of the best products that can handle high availability. It can work with distributed content and servers around the globe on the same cluster of content engines. We cater the solution to medium-sized businesses.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

The professional services are not familiar with the product. They take too much time to handle a case. They need more knowledge.

Negative

The initial setup is very easy if it is containerized. It takes a few days to complete.

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten for containerized installation and six out of ten for standard installation, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The product is expensive. The price was 30% higher than what we needed to pay for IBM.

I rate the product’s pricing a ten out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.