IBM FileNet Reviews

We have implemented it in a real estate environment. They receive many applications on the front-end and, before our implementation, they were processing them manually. When we implemented it, they moved to a completely paperless system.

For example, a customer walks in at the front desk, the reception, and they ask that the company process a transfer or a no-demand certificate, which is a form used in real estate to clear charges against your property. The person at the front desk creates a case in Case Manager. It's processed by the Case Manager in two different departments, and it's completely paperless.

The customer can view the status from their homes. We have created a very scalable application using FileNet and Case Manager.

Our clients use it for office automation systems to have a paperless environment. Most customers are using it for paperless because Case Manager has more capability than any other product within case management and process flows.

Before the implementation of the software, there were about 30 people who were processing things. One person would take anywhere from one to four days to process something. Now, it takes them two hours. They are processing things within multiple departments within two hours. 

The solution has increased their productivity, saving them time and cost. When it takes a person longer to get something done, there are more operational costs. If we shave the time from days to hours, there is definitely an opportunity for them to save on operational costs.

In government departments and the public sector, they have to follow regulations regarding land issues. The products are already certified by the regulatory parties, such as OSHA and ISO. During implementation we take care of these rules.

• Scalability
• Ease of use

These features are important because the customer where we have deployed it has millions of documents, millions of block files, and inside one block file there are hundreds of documents. And over the last five years, the volume of the documents has been increasing. It's handling all of them and without any errors.

Also, we see business users using IBM automation and they think that the interface is very easy to use. They can find the options and links they need. It's not difficult to find what they want or to do what they need to do. In the scope of projects where we use it, we have been able to provide them with the user interface they require. After that, they are very comfortable with it. It is already a very simple interface.

We have been working with it from version 4.0 and now it is at 5.3. They have improved a lot already.

However, there is room for improvement in the file management. It's very complex. 

In addition, they should have a built-in application for directly capturing documents from the scanners. Currently, they have that, but it is a separate product. They should have a built-in solution for that functionality.

These solutions are very good in terms of stability.

Most of our customers want to expand their automation processes. They initially implement it in four to five departments and then they expand it to the rest of the departments.

Technical support from IBM is very good. There is level-one, level-two, level-three, and lab services. We have dealt with all these support levels during our implementation. When we have asked for support with technical issues, they have resolved them.

In the private sector our customers involve us in the decision-making process, but in the public sector they don't.

Some of our customers were using the Microsoft document management system, the SharePoint portal. They were not happy with that and some of them moved from SharePoint to FileNet. They switched because FileNet has more features and it's easy for the users. They find it a complete enterprise content-management system. They have told us that a SharePoint portal is only a document management system. They cannot use it in the broader context of enterprise content management.

The setup is very straightforward.

When it comes to automation processes, so far it has not added up to the mark versus what our customers were expecting, but there is definitely some return on investment due to having an automated system and through savings on the printing costs.

There are multiple vendors like OpenText, M-Files, and SharePoint. Our clients have found that FileNet is, overall, a better solution.

I would definitely advise going with FileNet. It is better when it comes to scalability.

We have integrated it with multiple systems. We have integrated it with customized customer applications built in-house and with Oracle ERP. It's also integrated with a customer's website. The solution provides a built-in API and by using the APIs we are integrating it easily with other systems.

Very easily, the most valuable feature of FileNet is its reliability. We've been using FileNet Image Services since 1989. I average under one hour of unscheduled downtime per year. I have 800 million documents of patient records and patient financial information that reside on my box. It is sub-second response time and it just plain works.

It has done a significant number of changes. One, it has gotten us off of paper and it has also allowed us to streamline some of our work processes, so that we are electronically controlling those as opposed to doing them in the paper-pushing world.

The key to me is the ability for Watson and other analytic opportunities to be able to reach into the dark, unstructured narratives that are a key component of our medical record and read them, ingest them, and apply their analytic skills to them.

We will not have that until we complete the migration onto the FileNet P8 platform. Then, even then, we expect that there are going to be some significant challenges. I'm confident that IBM, which has very smart people, is going to be able to figure it out. That's absolutely something that I’m looking forward to them adding onto the solution; 100%.

The stability is second to none. We have consistently, year after year after year, been able to maintain an uptime of, I don't know how many nines it goes down to, but you can do the math; I have under one hour of unscheduled downtime per year.

The scalability is phenomenal. It just keeps growing. I've often likened FileNet to a teenager at an all-you-can-eat buffet, where you can just keep on feeding it and it'll keep eating and eating and eating. You'll run out of food long before the teenager stops eating.

We do use technical support. I'm a member of what IBM calls the AVP, Accelerated Value Program. They're phenomenal. These guys know their stuff. They are responsive. I have a wonderful and long term relationship with Peter Fagan, who is my AVP tech. I absolutely love the guys.

The initial setup was 1989. That perhaps predates many of us. I joined the firm in 1995, so I was not there for the initial set up. I've been there for, I believe, a representative period of time.

I’m involved in the decision process to continue making upgrades, absolutely. In fact, it's a very small team of very dedicated and focused folks who have all been with the firm for approximately 20 years like me. We don't have turnover and we don't want turnover in our product line.

From time to time, we do explore options. We looked at EMC's Documentum product, for example. We found that the migration to it was going to be as painful if not more painful as the migration onto FileNet P8, and was going to have the added detrimental aspect of bringing in an entirely new relationship. We were not confident, honestly, that the product line was going to survive for the long term.

When I’m selecting a vendor to work with, I need one with vision that is going to be able to stay with the course over the period as long as a decade. Things do not move necessarily at the speed of light. We need to know that a product line that we spend a year or two or three migrating onto, is going to be consistently available and enhanced over the next decade.

I'm not convinced that migrations can ever be made easy. I think migrations are a pill; you swallow it, it works its way through your plumbing and it comes out the other end. There are various times in the process when it hurts.

As far as building a solution in-house, I'm not sure that an enterprise content management solution is the kind of thing that is buildable in-house, though there are some who are perhaps arrogant enough to think that they can pull that off.

The key is to get involved in the user community, whether that means coming out and dedicating a week at a place like World of Watson or whether it means reaching out to a local user board if one exists local to you. The customers and the other users of the product line are sometimes more honest than one would expect a Salesforce representative to be. Get as much information as you can from people who are actually using the product.

We are not employing IBM on cloud, hybrid, or box solutions in the immediate short run.

We absolutely have plans to include mobile. We are hoping to allow our clinicians access to importing of documents or importing of photographs that are taken during the course of patient care and including them in the historical medical record.
As far as new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for our organization, we are in the process of migrating off of the Legacy Image Services product onto the new P8 product line. Once that is complete, we hope to be able to take advantage of some of the content search services and other bigger analytics that might become available at that point. Until we're there, I can't speak to that.

We've been on Image Services so long that I have to say no, there aren’t any existing services that we're now able to provide better than we were previously. Image Services is at the tail end of its life expectancy and all of our focus now is on moving onto the newer platform called FileNet P8.

Regarding how FileNet has changed the experience for our customers internal and external, there's no question that it has enhanced our ability to manage access to the medical record and to make it available both to our researchers and to the clinicians at the same time. Back when it was paper, it would be signed out of the library just like a book. With only one copy of it, if it was being used by a researcher, and Mrs. McGillicutty came in unexpectedly for an appointment, we had to track down where that record was and sometimes it led to delays. Now that it's all electronic, that's no longer a factor.

As far its usability, I have been using FileNet exclusively in my work environment since 1990. I'm very comfortable in it. I have found that it is a reliable, fairly simple, but somewhat niche product. We are confident that the P8 platform, while it is more open, is going to be as reliable, is ultimately going to be as usable when we move forward, and perhaps much more modern and able to take advantage of a lot of the newer tools, such as mobile, that really have not existed.

The older product line is phenomenal, but limited in what it can do. The newer product line is not sufficiently well known to us yet, but over the course of the migration, we will certainly learn a lot more about it.

The primary use case is for collaboration of data files through CCM with IBM Connections. It provides an information sharing space and ability to create folders, thus managing the data. We are a worldwide company with offices all over, and there is a community room setup leveraging CCM with FileNet as the back-end. Therefore, all these users upload their files and collaborate on them in this space.

Now, it is performing pretty well, since I have upgraded to the 5.5 version. Historically, we have had a lot of problems with it. 

IBM FileNet has improved our organization with its single collaboration space.

• The ability to manage the content well. 
• To create folders (unknown: how much is on the FileNet back-end versus CCM front-end).
• The ability to tag data, as it seems to be indexed well. It is a good space to manage data, keep track of it, and organize it.

• A little better control into the ACLs of FileNet and databases. 
• A better administration tool. At the moment, we are using the ACE tool, which is a web-based administration tool whenever we have to deal with the FileNet back-end directly. It is kludgy and slow. They used to have a rich client tool that performed much better, but they discontinued it. I would love to see that tool come back in order be able to do more effective, efficient administration of FileNet on the back-end.  
• It needs better collaboration between the IBM teams on the FileNet and CCM sides.

Now, they are pretty good.

In previous versions of Connections 3.0, 4.5, and 5.0, I had a lot of stability issues. It gets a little muddy, because when I would open PMRs, sometimes they would be on the connections interface on front and sometimes they would be on the back. One of my challenges seemed to be that there seemed to be a lot of disconnect between the two teams. It is empirical evidence, but it seems to me  that the Connections developers leveraged the FileNet capabilities and the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing. There seemed to be a lot of disconnect between the two teams. I would bounce back and forth between the two teams for weeks or months just trying to get support on performance and stability issues. With the most recent upgrade that we did a year ago, these issues pretty much stopped. 

Scalability is so far good. We have great adoption with the tool. For the users that we are supporting to date, it seems to be handling the load and performing well. 

My experience with the technical support is mediocre. Often times, I would open a ticket and the technical support would label it as a FileNet issue, then send it to the FileNet team. The FileNet team would receive it and declare it a Connections issues, thus creating a back-and-forth between teams until I insist on getting both teams on the phone and fight it out. I am the customer in this situation. I just want the issues fixed and resolved.

It has gotten better. However, I do not have many issues with the system now.

I do not know about previous solutions, but the business decided that it wanted CCM, which leverages FileNet. Therefore, I installed, configured, and built the infrastructure.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The Connections teams, as far as the FileNet tool, were able to integrate it with CCM. They made it easy to set up. At the time you install Connections, you point to the FileNet installers and it does all the work for you. There are a few manual steps, but all of that is pretty well documented. It is a lengthy process and straightforward, but it will take a lot longer than five minutes. 

None that I am aware of.

Do your homework. Test it thoroughly (all the standard stuff). Do load testing to make sure it is a stable platform. Look at the life-cycle of the product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support. Not just technical support when you have a problem, but how long before you are discontinuing a product. Right now, I am dealing with Connections over an issue with Java going out of date and they are not supporting it very well. Their solution is to force us to upgrade. 

Look at the support aspects of the product from life-cycle of the product to technical support. Obviously, stability of the product as a whole is important. I do not want to be opening a lot of tickets.

FileNet P8 Content Manager is the primary platform we use. We use it essentially just as a document repository. We don't currently do any business process with it. We use it purely for storing and retrieving documents. The most important features would be the flexibility in which it can store the metadata, the flexibility in which you can search on the metadata and the scalability.

We have millions and millions and millions of documents and we have to put them somewhere. That is where they get put. A user can go to the FileNet system and pull up a document within a matter of seconds. Rather than, if you had no ECM system, you would send a request somewhere, someone would walk through old paper files somewhere and you would get your file in a day. That was thirty years ago. I don't think anyone does that now.

The particular aspect that I would like for us to improve on is the ingestion of new documents to data capture. We're looking at ways to more automate our document capture, more automated categorization of documents.

We were looking at the Datacap product. We're currently using Kofax. We're looking at Datacap to see if that might do it better. We don't know the answer to that yet.

It does what it's supposed to do well: you start a document on it; it pulls the document back; it displays the document. For what we use it for, I can't think of features that it's lacking. Now, there are other aspects of it that we don't use. There's a whole BPM system that's tied into it that we've never used.

Going back to data capture, that is not part of the FileNet P8 system. You have to have something to pull the documents in. IBM’s solution is called Datacap. Cofax is another company who we've been using. I went to a recent IBM conference hoping that they had the Datacap products smarter; all the talk there was about Watson and how smart it is. They have a new version of Datacap called Datacap Insight Edition. I was hoping that it was actually really smart; you could give it a bunch of documents, it could understand what the documents are, sort them out for us and extract relevant information. It's not there yet. The hype exceeds the reality.

At first, the customer experience was pretty rocky. A lot of that is just because when you give them something new, they liked the old thing. You give them something new and there's some good features and some bad features, but they're only going to complain about the bad stuff.

From an internal point of view, we had some big improvements in maintenance. The access management – the customer account management – moved from being entirely separate management on the old system to something that was integrated with our Active Directory system. Requests for passive resets and so on went from 100 per day down to zero.

We've standardized on an HTML 5-based viewer. We’ve gotten over some of the problems with being reliant on Java installed in all the various browsers. Functionally, the end customer experience is about the same. It looks a little bit different but there have been a lot of improvements in reduced maintenance costs and trouble.

It's been rock solid. Once you get it going and you get over the initial hump of the initial installation, it's solid.

Scalability is good.

FileNet tech support is wonderful. Sometimes, they prioritize according to whether the issue is a casual question or an emergency? If it's an emergency, they're right there; they'll have somebody there. They will get it fixed. If you ask them a low-priority question, it might take a while, but it's a low-priority question.

Also, once you find a document on their website, it's generally very good. The problem I've always had is that their website is sometimes horrible to find things on.

Our FileNet P8 system is an upgrade from an older FileNet Image Services system, which we've had for 14 years, I think. We're trying to obsolete that. Everything we're doing on the P8 system is really a mirror of the old Image Services system. We really haven't got around to trying implementing anything new yet.

I was involved in the decision to upgrade to the FileNet P8 system; I've been pushing for ten years.

FileNet P8 system installation is complex. I don't know how complex it is to similar products but it is definitely complex. It's not something you want to do unless you're an expert in it. You want to make sure you have somebody that knows how to do it.

I was not involved in any comparison to any other system. I don't know exactly what was done. I'm a lowly developer. I can't really compare the FileNet P8 system against any of its competitors.

When I’m selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for me are: that they're going to exist in the future; their product is good; and their documentation is good. I like to be able to go out, find the documentation, and have it be nicely organized; I can find what I want; I can read about what I need to read about and do a deep dive into the nitty gritty details.

It is not my position to consider employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or Box solutions. There's been some conversation about what would be the economic benefit of having stuff moved to the cloud versus hosting it internally. The conversation has only been, “I wonder what the numbers are.” We don't know.

There are no plans of doing mobile in relation to the FileNet P8 system. The FileNet P8 system we use is entirely internal. There are no external, customer-facing applications. There are other departments that do mobile applications. We're a bank, so they have the bank mobile application. They do some FileNet documents but they call an ESB service, which then calls FileNet. We don't do anything directly with it.

I have no complaints regarding the usability of FileNet. I've seen other similar systems and it's comparable. It's kind of boring stuff: you pull up a screen; you put in some query conditions; you find some documents and you look at your documents. It's nothing exciting.

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.

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.

One of the primary use cases is for documentation processing, including image processing and all the content. It is also used for archiving and document management.

For example, in the mobile telecom or financial industries, there are requirements to retain a customer's documents, depending on regulations, for five and sometimes ten years. In this instance, FileNet is used for archiving all of the documentation.

We are using it for documentation automation projects, especially for content management such as customer contract management and some vendor contract management.

It has reduced operating costs, especially postage and courier costs and the cost of printing hard copies.

It has also helped with compliance issues. Instead of archiving hard copies, where there are regulations regarding the conditions in which they are stored, which means there are energy costs for climate control, FileNet saves on those energy costs. There are also savings on the cost of renting warehouses for the hard copies. Keeping everything digital means there are a lot of savings.

One of the most valuable features is FileNet's ability to capture things from the stack, from e-mail, to scanning of Excel and Word. FileNet can also convert many types of files to PDFs very easily.

Also, when the Content Engine processes files, it can reduce the size by up to ten times by compressing them. It has a very low storage profile. This is very important because storage is something that adds to the cost. In this way, it can reduce costs.

It is also possible to search any customer's documentation. If you want to find historical documents, you can find them very easily.

With the application layer you can install it with Windows Application Server to create web logic. 

You can also use clusters.

When requests come from users, you can extend it horizontally or vertically. You can put a lot of application servers in a vertical arrangement, so it's very flexible.

It's very simple to integrate it with other solutions. The business process management layer makes it very easy.

It's really user-friendly. Everything can be managed via a web application, a web console. And for non-technical users, it's mostly web-based now, so it's not so hard for them to use. Especially in the mobile industry, most workers are not technical. They are sales-based and are not familiar with a lot of technical features. But they find it very easy to use.

Finally, behind FileNet is IBM, which is a big company.

It is very stable because FileNet is mostly compatible with Unix, Solaris, and also IBM Unix (AIX). It's also compatible with Windows but the Unix system is really robust. When I was working with FileNet for a telecom company, it never went down. The uptime was five-nines.

Scaling is easy. You can scale vertically because in front of the application server there is load balancing. You can put a lot of application servers behind the load balancing. It's very easy. We were using Oracle Database and we could scale the database very easily as well. You can upgrade and scale up without any downtime. That is very important.

The initial setup is very easy. You first implement the database and after that the application. You can even install it on a remote site. It's that easy.

However, the configuration does take a long time. Every company needs its own configuration design. It depends on how many applications are connecting to FileNet. It can take a long time, depending on the application count.

The installation itself only takes one or two days, but the configuration can take a long time. The first time we configured it, it took over 20 days.

First of all, the automation means there is no more dependency on hard copies. Storing those documents was dependent on the environmental conditions, and if they weren't right, the documents could break down. And they had to be sent via post or courier.

By using FileNet, especially with bigger contracts, it doesn't take ten days or two weeks to receive and store the documents. Instead, when the documents are emailed it takes under one second and it arrives to customer service. Once they open the email, they can activate the customer's product immediately. The customer doesn't have to wait two weeks and it means the company can earn money for the product sooner. It helps with time to market.

Overall, ROI depends on the particular project. Every project is different.

Licensing costs depend on the size of the storage.

I also know SharePoint and Documentum. When I looked into them, Documentum was harder to use than FileNet and more expensive. Implementing and integrating Documentum was much harder than with FileNet. I'm not sure how it stacks up now. SharePoint was not robust or sustainable, in my opinion. FileNet is much better than SharePoint in those areas. 

In terms of the biggest lessons I've learned from using the product, when we installed the first time, I didn't know anything about document management. But with time, I learned that the most important thing is choosing the best infrastructure.

My advice would be to use a specialist in documentation management to implement the solution. That's not just true for FileNet, it's true for other solutions as well.

I would rate FileNet at eight out of ten. No product is perfect. You will always find some bugs.

We used it to develop document-management solutions for various public sectors, in India. We also use IBM BPM on top of it, which is primarily used for Workflow, with FileNet as the repository in the backend for document storage. Our solutions manage the entire lifecycle of content, right from creation to disposal.

For example, when organizations receive invoices or proposals, using FileNet we have a solution which allows users to create the content, upload the content, manage the content, and it moves through the workflow.

Our solution is called E-Office is, which handles the entire file movement, correspondence, file creation, committee meetings, etc. Wherever content is involved, the solution is involved. All day-to-day, paper-based activities have been automated using the help of BPM and FileNet.

It's deployed as a hybrid. It's mostly on-premise but some of our customers have part of it on cloud.

It's not only about productivity but utilizing resources effectively. Because of the automation, they use a lot less paper for printing. And on top of the resource benefits, there are also a lot of cost-savings as a result.

In addition, because offices are located in different locations, they now work together virtually. It is very difficult to transfer this kind of data through emails. Our solution has really helped with that. Productivity is a primary focus for every automation we implement. And our client companies have seen that as a result.

Our clients are saving a minimum of two hours a day in work time. They no longer depend on couriers or whatever they were using to dispatch and move files. Everything happens in the solution.

The most valuable feature is the suite of IBM products. It's a packaged solution. We have IBM Datacap which is used for the OCR capabilities. FileNet is the repository for document management. BPM is primarily used for workflow. Then we have Red Hat Linux or AIX, which is an OS from IBM. There is also Db2 which is a database, again from IBM. We get all these products straight from IBM. We don't have to rely on different vendors or products when there is an integration issue.

The FileNet Navigator, which came out four or five years ago, was really a major upgrade from IBM in terms of the UI. Users are happy with that.

FileNet has the capabilities to meet compliance and regulatory requirements. It is very secure. That is also one of the key requirements of any automation that we do.

There is some confusion with FileNet workflow. It's not really going into the next level. They are probably replacing it with BPM's workflow. So there's an issue of clarity, the vision for going forward. There are a lot of tools and a lot of features, but which one is really going to stay and which one is going away. When they make that vision public it will be good.

FileNet is stable. A lot of our customers are actually on older versions, so we've been upgrading their systems recently. The current version is really stable because it has been rewritten. Since IBM acquired this product — FileNet is not an original IBM product — they have rewritten certain engines in it. The more they release new versions, the more the product is stable, especially in the "five-dot" series. They are really stable. We are encouraging customers to upgrade to the latest version. That is what is happening now.

I don't remember any stability issues recently. Maybe a long time ago, with certain limitations, there were a couple of issues. But we don't have them now. There is a resolution for everything in the current versions.

We were using products like Documentum and OpenText, and we used to rely on different vendors for the database, etc., and we had certain challenges. But the IBM products come as an entire package for us, which is really helping.

The setup is going to be complex but we put the right people on the job. In the older versions, it was much more complex. Slowly it is improving. They started releasing container stuff, recently, which we like. 

I would say it is not too complex or too easy. It's somewhere in the middle. Hopefully, the coming versions will simplify the FileNet setup to help it go more quickly. Currently, it takes at least a day to set up a basic environment.

Our clients have definitely benefitted from FileNet but they don't disclose the numbers.

Some people say it is costly, but when they negotiate with IBM it is sold for somewhat less. IBM gives discounts depending on the customer base. We don't have complaints about it from customers.

FileNet is at the top of our list of referred content management solutions. It ranks well in industry reviews. FileNet has a customer base in different domains and different business areas. If somebody wants to implement it, they should look at the case studies and see how it is being implemented and what the benefits are.

In terms of its usability, we mostly use the out-of-the-box capabilities of FileNet, such as the Content Navigator. BPM has built-in capabilities to communicate with FileNet and we also develop certain Java-based GUIs.

With the new version, the UI has been improved as has the performance. There is also a distributed enrollment that FileNet allows. There is something Cache Service Manager so you can have this service set up and distributed so that people can access it locally.

I would rate FileNet at nine out of ten. IBM needs to clarify the vision, the roadmap of what is expected for it. How they want to take this product to the next level, that is what is missing.