IBM FileNet Reviews

Our client is using it for search and retrieval and for archiving. From the very onset, it was deployed for archiving of their legacy records. We did not implement any workflow for them. We use the FileNet Content Engine Web Services to retrieve documents. We use high-end production scanners to scan the records. After that, users can use FileNet to search for these records.

There is automation involved in the process. At the point of scanning, the scanner dispatches the records to a particular folder. In each folder, there is an application that has been designed by us, which files the records in FileNet. We are not using any FileNet application to do the filing. We have an application which renames the XML to FileNet to do that.

We mainly use it for inactive documents. These are records they don't need to edit any longer. They are still necessary for their day-to-day operations; they provide evidence about their operations so they cannot be deleted.

 Our client is using version 4.2 on-prem.

We implemented it, per our client's request, as an archival solution. FileNet has given us what we needed.

FileNet has helped our client implement a retention policy for their inactive records.

We mainly use the Metadata, we don't use content, as such, for the retrieval. It has been robust because that's how we designed it. The application, in terms of durability, has been able to withstand the usage, given that it was installed in 2003 and it's still working. The version installed back then was 3.6. In about 2009, it was upgraded to 4.2.

For us, the back-end has been good. The system is so robust that we've never had problems, in terms of system administration. We've never had any challenges.

Our client feels FileNet does not provide them with content searchability. They feel it's cumbersome. They're only using Metadata. If the Metadata is not well-populated, it becomes a problem to retrieve a document.

Aside from that, they feel the interface — when they look at modern interfaces — is not robust enough for them. However, they're on an old version and I wouldn't know what the current interface looks like.

For non-technical users, with what we currently have on the ground, which is the web services, the only challenge we have is that content searchability is not available, because it is an old installation.

I've been using FileNet since back in 2003.

From a technical point of view, FileNet is very stable.

We have never had to contact FileNet support.

I was part of the team that set up the FileNet installation we are currently using. I don't remember how long it took to implement, as that goes back to 2003.

The installation has been going on for a long time. I believe they have seen value for their money. They've been using this application for over 15 years and it's still delivering.

FileNet is quite expensive, although Documentum is expensive too. There are several other content service platforms with a very low price, and they deliver as much as FileNet and Documentum do.

Our client is trying to move away from the FileNet to Documentum and that has been difficult. The migration from FileNet to Documentum was started sometime in 2013 but, unfortunately, they have not been successful with it. I believe the vendor they used did not have enough knowledge to be able to deploy it, so they're having challenges with it.

They decided to move away from FileNet back because there was no clear direction as to where FileNet was going. They wanted to do content, and there was an option to go with FileNet P8, but they got direction from industry reviews and decided to go with Documentum because of the content functionality. Aside from that, ideally, they need to bring in workflow, as well as content searchability — full-text search. Those are some of the things they desire.

When they began with FileNet it was started as an archiving solution. That is what it was conceived for initially. But the need arose to get into content and workflow and they felt they needed a new platform.

I do believe FileNet has such capabilities. We are trying to propose to them to go for FileNet P8. Unfortunately for them, they have spent so much time trying to implement Documentum and have not made headway. They have yet to look at P8. We are the ones supporting FileNet for them. We have told them that the functionality they're looking for is available in FileNet P8. I would love to use FileNet P8 to see what it can deliver. However, whether they want to implement FileNet P8 or Documentum, the procedure is cumbersome.

I'm very familiar with Documentum. I've gone for Documentum training in Germany. But I would still go with FileNet because it delivered for me. It has been stable for many years. That is a strong point for me.

My advice would be, before you go for any DMS, don't get stuck on looking for solutions that rate highly in industry reviews. For some of my clients, that is important, but others aren't concerned about that. They say, "Does the solution address my problem? Is it cost-effective? Can I scale up? If yes, good." Those are all things my clients are looking for.

The most valuable features are the flexibility and broad capabilities. It covers anything a small company might need, all the way to what a large enterprise may require; a full feature set.

For us, it manages the transformation from a paper-based organization to a digital-based organization. What we do is, we digitize all our content, place it into the FileNet repository, which allows us to share the content across multiple teams. This is something we could not do when we had a paper-based organization. You can't share a piece of paper unless you ship it around by couriers or something.

There are no additional features that I would like to see included in the next release. I need to implement the existing features. We are not yet using the solution to its full capabilities.

It is very stable. It's mission critical. We run it 24/7, 365.

It scales very well. We just keep adding on capacity. We have about 750 million documents in it, with no problems.

Technical support is not bad. But the problem with the technical support is that it is time zone-based. So, if we have an issue that is brought across a number of time zones, this will happen: We'll start working with one technical resource; we'll finally start getting working on it when, all of a sudden that technical resource has to leave, and we have to start with the next technical resource in a different time zone. Then, we have to bring them up to speed with what we're doing, and so we lose a little bit of time. The fact that the same resource isn't on it for the entire problem sometimes is concerning.

We've always had this. When I came to this organization, we've always had this solution.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I didn’t look at other vendors, because I was already here. But I would look at FileNet and Documentum. I would look at a wide range of content management solutions, and then we just narrow it down from there.

We chose IBM because we have a longstanding relationship with them, and we're trying to buy an integrated stack. So, instead of buying just an ECM solution, we're looking at content ingestion, content management, and content generation. The stack, and not just the one off solution.

When selecting a vendor, my most important criteria are the solution, the technical support, the thought leadership, and cost.

Evaluate FileNet. Find out what capabilities you need. You may find that FileNet has way more than you'll require.

You need a lot of senior technical resources to get the best bang out of the buck for this. They're not easy to find. The solution is highly capable, but it also is highly complex.

The most valuable features of FileNet are the enterprise depth and strength, scalability, integration ability, richness, and functionality; the ability to do a lot of things across the different business units; and integrating with all kinds of solutions. At the same time, I think they did a great job in improving their web clients, such as introducing products like ICN, which is more configurable rather than customizable. The strong foundation behind FileNet in terms of the workflow; the business project management; the content engine; the ability to handle a humongous amount of data in a very high performance mode are what provide a lot of value in this system, in my opinion.

Throughout our journey using FileNet, we were able to significantly improve our business process operations’ efficiency. Think of scenarios where we provide access to the business documents to people who are dispersed across the world; people are working from home or our offshore offices. They don't have to have access to the physical documents. The authenticity of those documents allows our call centers, which are dispersed in different locations in the world, to instantly access the client documents to verify any piece of information.

Beyond document sharing, access, and high performance, the ability to integrate easily with other solutions, our line of business applications, is fantastic. You have a variety of technical options to do this integration. We have legacy systems, and we have newer, more modern solutions; finally, just being able to deal with all of that.

The platform is large, is vast. I see a little bit of ambiguity in the area of integration with Box. I hope this will be clarified in the next steps. The IBM Content Navigator is a great product. It was very much needed. It came at the right time to fill a gap in the user interface area. I think this product, because it does integrate with a variety of IBM products, as an end-user application, it's complex and a little bit more difficult to set up. I would like to see a little more simplicity and ease of use in ICN going forward.

The platform is part of our journey since two decades ago.

Stability’s been great, knock on wood. It's been very solid. It’s funny; we had an outage the same day I provided this review, but it was not caused by FileNet. It was caused by an infrastructure change over the previous weekend. FileNet has been very, very, very stable.

Scalability is fantastic. We did a major replatforming a few years ago. We moved to a newer platform of our AIX, WebSphere, etc.; all virtual. We are able to scale out, scale up. We were able to change the configurations and that has improved the performance of the system by 75%.

We subscribe to the premium support with additional charges, but it is worth every additional dollar that we spend on that, because we saw a huge jump in the quality, responsiveness, and the attention. When you have a dedicated technical account manager that looks after your technology, PMRs, support requests, etc., that is fantastic. We are able to do things far more things more quickly than before. I would say this is an A.

Look at the scale. Look at the enterprise scale. Try to set up the product to leverage it more, maximize the use of the product. FileNet as a stack has massive capabilities. To justify the cost and investment in the product, try to get as many of your business units and business processes to leverage this platform.

Try to consolidate. This is what we have done. We consolidated our content into FileNet as a mainstream platform for ECM. That has paid dividends. We are able to use it as a shared platform. We set it up as a shared service. We charge back to our clients. With that, we are able to measure the value per business unit, compared to the volume that they are using the system, the number of transactions, number of users, etc. Look at the big picture and try to expand as much as you can.

I don't think there is anything perfect, per se. We have been very successful in using the product. We have a lot of opportunities to even add more use cases and so on. The product has been very stable. We have a great relationship with the product owner. Our team is able to do a lot of stuff with the product. It's a solid platform.

Considering that the platform has been stable and scalable, how the experiences of our internal and or external customers changed since implementing FileNet is a big area of focus; number one in terms of evaluating the product. Our clients have been quite satisfied. When I mentioned we were able to improve the performance of the platform by changing the infrastructure and tuning the performance, that has resulted in great savings. Imagine 75% improvement in performance, response time of the system, that is directly linked to the productivity of the end users who number in the thousands.

In general, the most important criteria when selecting the vendor to work with really depends on the use cases. If it is a situation where critical business processes will depend on the product, the stability, the availability, and all that stuff, then I definitely would have to scrutinize each and every area of the product. In general, we take care of our own development. We rely on the vendor for only specialized skills. The ease of use of finding resources in the market who know the product is very important. When the vendor is flexible in attending to our needs, this is very important because if I compare FileNet to other systems in our area, it's like day and night between the two vendors, where, if I try to get something done through the other vendor, it's more of a challenge.

We are not considering employing IBM cloud, hybrid, or box solutions in the short-term, but we are assessing this.

As far as new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide your organization, we are implementing IBM Case Manager, including the analytics piece of it. We are very interested in exploring further content analytics. It's still on our roadmap. We're taking some steps to explore that.

There certainly are existing services that we're now able to provide better than before in some client processing areas with our business partners. We have taken some strides in improving and renewing the solution from a legacy, hard-coded solution on all their platforms; it has influenced our way of dealing with those business processes.

We certainly do have some plans to include mobile, and that is still in the process of maturing the business requirement.

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.

The most valuable feature of FileNet is its out-of-the-box functionality; not a lot of custom coding that has to happen for the solution to work.

We have access to all the documents that we need. We have all kinds of documents. We have access to all of those documents from anywhere within the organization. With Navigator, it is essentially browser-based access.

They are already working on the areas with room improvement. It's being accomplished now. There's FileNet Enterprise Manager, affectionately known as FEM, which has functionality that is not completely in ACE yet. I know they're working on getting all of the functionality from that tool into the ACE tool. There are certain functions that we still go back into FEM to accomplish. They've been working on it. Each one of the releases, they include more of the functionality. That's the roadmap: to get rid of the FEM and have all the functionality in ACE.

It is very stable. We have had no outages. We've had planned outages, as far as upgrading. That's another benefit; we've found upgrades to be quite simple, quite easy. Even now, with the latest versions, we can do that without taking the system completely down. That's partly because of WebSphere, which allows us to upgrade on the fly. That is important to us.

There are no scalability limits. The scalability is everything that we've needed.

We have used technical support. During the initial launch, there were a few issues, I guess, with the multi-value fields, but they were resolved fairly quickly.

Technical support was not excellent, but very good.

We were previously using other ECM systems in the corporation. There still are, but there's a standardization going on towards the FileNet, the P8.

Initial setup is somewhat complex, especially if you've had no exposure to it previously, but it wasn't a terrible task. It was doable.

There was Documentum, and we still have a limited Documentum installation. There really weren't many others in the running.

One of the reasons we eventually chose the IBM solution was the peer reviews, as well as from Gartner, industry reviews; peer reviews from other, not necessarily banking customers, but other customers in our area. They have FileNet P8 installations and have had good experience with that.

We encountered these reviews by word-of-mouth, associations, networking with these other companies; that proved very beneficial to us. A good recommendation from somebody that's already using the product is worth a lot.

The decision-making process lasted a number of months, not years. One of the factors that expedited that process were the good reviews or good experiences by others that proved to be helpful to us.

In general, the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are reliability and the customer service being able to respond to our requests. That's important. Then, we don't like to be on the leading edge of technology, but certainly have the capability to stay current with changes, the technology. We've seen that with the HTML5 viewer that was incorporated into Navigator. We went to that immediately, as soon as it was available.

Try it out. Test it out. Put it on the top of your list. It should be at the top of your consideration list.

The ease-of-use is important, and for us, we didn't have to customize a whole lot, or anything, really. We just had to configure, and that's always real important.
It is very intuitive. I don't find any of it hard to use. Our experience in rolling it out to our customers is that it's very intuitive. They didn't have a hard time finding what they needed to do their job, and finding it much quicker than previously, too.

Employing IBM on cloud is tough for us because of all of the security and regulatory requirements around the banking or financial industry. We're looking at it but we're not making the jump. We’re looking at it for various reasons. Part of it is not having to deal with the on-premise headaches, I'll call them.

We haven't deployed much of the analytics, but it does open the door for us to be able to provide new analytics services for my organization.

There are existing services we're able to provide better now than we were before, especially in the display of the documents. We're using the virtual viewer in Navigator, which was a big plus for us. No longer do we have to worry about which Java version is deployed here and there, and throughout the West. The HTML5 viewer has been a plus for us.

As far as how the experiences of our internal and/or external customers changed since implementing FileNet, there was somewhat of a learning curve from the old way that they displayed or got at their information, got at the documents, to the new way, but it was a short curve. It was pretty intuitive. Doing the search and then displaying the document is pretty simple.

At a recent conference, I sat through a session with mobile. We don't have the right use case yet, but there's interest in that.

There are two use cases. One is as an extended datastore for IBM Connections, but we don't have many Connections customers. We have actually lost two such customers in the recent years because IBM didn't do anything for that product. 

The more common use case is as a general filestore for documents, with interfaces to the Web, etc. It is used to store incoming invoices and documents and to classify them. It's also used to automate the process of document storage, when documents come in. We have a mechanism to automatically categorize a document based on content. Based on that, we are able to create attributes for the content management system. Then we store the document in FileNet to enable retrieving it. We have PIDs, a universal access code, for each document and via that we are able to retrieve documents, even via applications.

We have created some interfaces. We have a central solution to make it easy for customers to plug in their application systems in an easy, customizable way, without having to program it. We also work in the area of analytics where we use Cognos. We have customers who retrieve information about incoming invoices. They can click on a link and retrieve it automatically out of FileNet or Content Manager.

FileNet helps increase productivity. For example, in reporting for a construction company, when they look at the costs, they can see the incoming and outgoing invoices. By clicking, they pull that document from the content store. The productivity comes from not having to go to a folder and look for a document. It's the integration which makes it productive, day-to-day.

You can only see how much the solution saves when you did not have a content system before. We have customers, for instance, who stored their documents in PDF format in folder structures. They had structures based on year and customer number. To find and use a document would take three to four times more effort than to have access via automated interfaces. The next gain is when you plug in mobile. Then you need something like FileNet, an intelligent content store.

It also helps with compliance and governance issues because it's a datastore that is not modifiable, and you can guarantee that. You cannot guarantee that with a folder-based file structure, where multiple people have access. In that scenario, you cannot guarantee that a document hasn't been changed.

The most valuable features of FileNet are the 

• storage mechanism
• search mechanism 
• interface through Content Navigator and 
• mobile interfaces. 

The area of migrations to new versions must be made easier. It's quite good that they have now begun to improve the API area, to modernize the interfaces, but there's always a very big investment involved in migrating from one version to another. That prohibits rolling out new functionalities to customers. It's not so easy. You can't release a new version every three months to bring in new capabilities. That is the old-fashioned, the way it worked ten or 20 years ago. That is bad. In that area, they really must improve.

We have FileNet, Content Manager, and TSM in our own installation. We migrated that installation three years ago to version 5.12. Now we have to migrate to 5.25 to bring in new facilities, and it's a big task. We have to do it in addition to our other tasks where we support customers. We need a parallel machine and to set it up there and to migrate step-by-step, then test it and roll it out. It's not so easy. That is a big area where there is much to be done to satisfy the needs of customers.

I've been using it a long time. We have been an IBM Business Partner for more than 20 years. We have been using FileNet since IBM bought it, I believe about eight years ago. We have been in the content management area since 2002. We started in the area of content systems with IBM Content Manager and then we added our support for File Net.

I have never really heard of problems with the stability because the database. IBM Db2 is never a problem. I cannot say anything about Oracle or other databases. We have avoided implementing with a non-IBM database where we can. When we do, there is no problem with stability.

In the larger installations, we use primarily TSM as the object store, and therefore we do not have problems with overrunning file space and those kinds of issues. The only thing we have seen is that when a customer's system administrator installs a new Java version on the server where FileNet is running, sometimes it can cause a big mess. FileNet doesn't come up.

We have customers with a very small user base, 50 users or so, and we have some who have a really big user base. But the scalability is primarily dependent on how long you are storing documents. The time over which documents are stored now has been extended far beyond seven years. In the past, often this was a financial necessity. But now, even though we do not have insurance companies as clients, we have customers where the stored documents are more than ten or 15 years old. The scalability is also more dependent on the count of documents than on the user-base interaction.

From my point of view, it's scalable enough. Today there are machines which are scalable, where you can put in additional processors and memory. In today's scenarios, scalability is not really an issue. FileNet can take advantage of today's technology for scaling. There are other products which cannot because the database prohibits it. When they use MS SQL Server Express, for example, there are limitations. And when you have windream and such solutions in the German market, which are also in the Austrian customer area, they show wonderful functionality and a wonderful GUI, but when it comes to the extensibility and scalability, they reach their limits relatively early.

We have not had to use technical support very often. We get technical support from Germany. There is a good support center where the response time is quite good.

When you use IBM Content Foundation as the entry point for installation, it's quite well-documented. If you have know-how in the IBM area, including the area of WebSphere Application Server, then it's not too hard to install. It's up to your partner to download the right versions which fit together, the right way, and then it's not really a big deal. In those circumstances, you can install FileNet within two or three days and have a running version.

Process automation is the main reason we created our own server: To make the interfaces easy and to automate the process of storing and adding the right attributes, and to make sure you're able to search and find the document again.

It's very hard to say what the ROI is on that automation. The goal was to make a solution for the customer where he can solve his problems. For us, the greatest part is the services part. We set it up as a vehicle through which customers are able to implement automation, and to make it easy for them to apply it to their applications.

For FileNet in general, the return in investment happens over two to three years when you take into account the license costs, the maintenance costs, and the implementation. I think that is a reasonable ROI. I have heard of products that have much longer ROI.

The licensing cost of FileNet is comparable. It costs more if you use Case Foundation or the like — if you extended it. But that is not the scale of our customers. They are too small for that.

We do the scanning part, at the moment, with other products, not the IBM scanning engine, because it's a price-sensitive area.

The problem is that the competitors' products have, in most areas, a contract with an ERP system. We now have three customers who are migrating to new ERP systems and they all have contracts with a document management solution. They bring it in with a fixed price and give them a whole document integration path.

We have one customer who, for many years, used IBM Content Manager, and now he's migrating to a new ERP system and he's throwing out the old solution because, with the new ERP system, he has document management out-of-the-box with the licensing cost. This customer has no experience with the new document management system. Nothing. The ERP seller sold him the D3 DMS system and now we have lost that content management installation.

In terms of decision-making, the problem is that most customers have IT people making the decision about which product to use and they do not have really the experience. When customers come to us, they often come in with a prepared offer from someone else with a vested interest.

This is happening more or more and it is not good. In the past, it was up to the market to have a good but independent product with interfaces to all application areas. With this new scenario, it's the IT managers, who do not have much experience — they come from university from which they only have technical knowledge — and they say: "Okay, I have one supplier who is providing me one solution. I have an all-in service contract and I don't need to take care of the solution on a technical level." That is bad for independent solutions like FileNet.

It's a stable solution. It's proven. It provides guaranteed compliance; neither the attributes nor the content itself can be modified. You can guarantee and report that. The implementation time is no more than for other products. And the product is scalable.

In creating our tools we have integrated a lot with FileNet. It's very easy to integrate because the only thing you need is a mechanism to store, a way to add and change attributes, and to retrieve. You also have to be sure that you have a good search engine when you do not have direct attributes, a full content search.

In the first years, we were not happy with the usability of the content management products. Content Manager had no value for end-user interfaces. We passed on the strong demand for that. In the last few years, with the new versions of Content Navigator, it has been much better. We have a good interface also in Notes, in the right sidebar. It's a solution from IBM, Germany, where you can drag and drop documents. The Content Navigator now also has mobile support with a good interface. It's much more useful than it was before.

The internal features haven't changed and are enough to fulfill the requirements of customers. But customers always want a beautiful GUI. It's much more necessary to sell it with a beautiful GUI than with the functionality they really need. When we sell it, the end-user interface carries a much greater weight in customer decision-making than the technical part. On the technical side, there is nothing that FileNet is missing. There are three ways things can be stored: in the database, in the filestore, or in TSM. Our larger customers have TSM as object storage for FileNet and that is a very good solution.

We have not implemented the IBM Automation Platform for Digital Business. We have looked at it. We thought that in the last two or three years it was too big, too heavy, and too expensive for our customers. We are rethinking that at the moment, looking again to see if it can help and if it makes sense. We are not sure in the moment if this automation package is really a helpful and an effective investment.

Overall I would rate FileNet at nine out of ten. What it's missing to make it to a ten is the possibility of implementing new versions and new functions easily, in smaller time intervals, without a big investment on the customer's side. That is a barrier to new functionalities. In addition, IBM doesn't market well. You do not hear anything about FileNet in the market — nothing. Nobody has promoted it over the last three years. You hear much more about all other DMS systems compared to FileNet. You hear about new facilities, about mobility, and the integration of scanning and scanning-automation processes. You don't hear anything about FileNet. And that doesn't make it easy.

The primary use case for IBM FileNet involves document automation.

Using IBM FileNet allows for easy and fast access to documentation, which supports compliance and regulatory requirements.

The integration feature of IBM FileNet is most effective for document management.

The setup process is very complex, and I would prefer if it were easier. A modern interface would also be an enhancement.

I have been working with IBM FileNet for about ten years.

I would rate the stability of IBM FileNet as ten out of ten.

IBM FileNet is very scalable, deserving a ten out of ten rating.

The customer service and support from IBM are rated as six out of ten. They often lack the necessary knowledge to provide adequate support.

Neutral

Before using IBM FileNet, I used other IBM products. It seems some Robotic Process Automation products were used prior.

The initial setup of IBM FileNet is very hard. It took around five days to complete.

The deployment typically requires two people: one for installation and another for setup, particularly covering configuration.

IBM FileNet provides financial benefits through easy and fast access to documentation. However, the speaker did not mention a specific return on investment.

I recommend IBM FileNet due to its excellent integration capabilities.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

On-premises

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.