IBM FileNet Reviews

We've been in the FileNet business for 25 years and we have found that 80 percent of our customers use FileNet for Accounts Payable processing. That's the single biggest pain point that larger customers are trying to resolve, uniformly, across industries: ingesting invoices, matching them up with purchase orders, doing the three-way match with receivers - if they're a manufacturing or distribution outfit - and then, potentially, if possible, automating the approval and payment of those invoices so nobody has to touch them. Then, they can focus on approvals and touchpoints only when they have to, and escalate when they need to based on grants of authority and delegate if somebody's not there. They can also make sure they get their prompt-payment discounts and the like.

The other big use-case area is always compliance: Records retention, how do they prove that they're complying with policies and procedures and with regulatory issues - HIPAA, PII, etc.

In terms of how this product improves the functionality of an organization we work with, the Accounts Payable scenario is one. Let's say you're a high-volume purchaser, a retail operation, and imagine that you are getting paper invoices for every case of pineapple and every case of Planters Peanuts that you are getting, and every one of those invoices has to be filed in a filing cabinet. Now instead, we'll scan those in, they get filed automatically, and you trash the paper. And you can find them when you need to find them.

Probably the best example of efficiencies that we've seen was, we worked with a port authority. They get in several large container ships a day that they have to get unloaded. Their customers are either the consignees or they're the trucking companies that move the containers on and off the dock. Every ship that comes in gets a voyage file. When they billed their customers, if a customer called in with a question, they had to go find that voyage file. If somebody else had that file, the person looking for it couldn't answer the question. They were running a first-call resolution rate of 15 percent or less. When we took all the voyage files and started scanning them, putting them online, they raised their first-call resolution rate to over 80 percent. If you resolve their question faster, they pay you faster, and that's money in the bank.

The way that FileNet sets itself apart is along a couple of different dimensions. The first is there aren't very many ECM solutions that scale properly, both up and out. We have customers who hold billions of documents. There aren't very many that can scale that far, and that can also scale out so that they can handle lots of users, lots of documents, and that understand how to handle external users.

Then there are security issues. Everybody ties into Active Directory and things like that, but on top of that are the extra layers of security for encryption, so they can meet standards required by PCI and by HIPAA: encryption at rest, encryption in flight, encryption in the database, all together. There are really only three products on the market that know how to do that, and FileNet is one of them.

First of all, let's be clear, it's a relatively mature product. It's been around, it's been finely-tuned to handle the vast majority of what customers want it to handle. Most customers probably only utilize 20 to 30 percent of the feature functionality.

In terms of functionality, what customers might be looking for is a little more in terms of native-records retention. Records Management is an add-on product. If there were just a little more of that built into the core functionality, that would be helpful. Just like when you set up the document type or the document class, it would be good to be able to indicate the retention for this data. By being able to turn that on, customers might more often default to doing record purges rather than keeping everything forever. But that's just a small item.

We're fully certified to provide first-call technical support to our customers, which we do for the majority of our customers. Our customers like doing that with us because instead of logging into IBM's site and opening a PMR and all that, they call me and say, "Fred, remember that thing we saw two weeks ago, well it happened again. What do we do about it?" And because I have to live with the problem, I don't first have to ask them what version they're running, etc. We can solve it much more quickly.

On the other hand, IBM's technical support itself is very professional, very capable. You have to learn how to work with them. We know what they want. Before we even open a PMR, we go collect what we know they will want and we send it to them. When they say, "Okay, where's all this information?" we tell them to look at the attachment. They go off and we get a resolution more quickly that way.

It's a pretty complex product to set up because it has so many touchpoints. You have to integrate with your Directory Services, you've got a large database component, you've got a large web services component, you've got a large storage component, and you've got a big security component. At the same time, you've got an application server that you have to set up. By nature, it's a fairly complicated setup, it's not for the faint of heart.

We've been committed to this product for a long time. We like the product a lot. It's top of the line, it's robust, it's reliable, as long as you implement it the right way, which takes some training and some time. You have to know where the bodies are buried. A lot of people make mistakes when they first do it. We did, we learned, but we did it years ago. It's an industrial-strength, enterprise-class product and they don't come much better.

In our organization, we have a lot of documents, such as policies. It is very critical for our organization to have safely and securely stored content in our system.

FileNet is the best tool in the business for our organization to store all our content, policy documents, and claims.

We have been using FileNet since 2000. Since then, we have been upgrading our file systems with a lot of tools and the latest file systems.

It has improved my organization by how we release documents, claims, and policies. It is very important to quickly review documents to make the customer satisfied. This is solved when we use the product.

It is a faster, robust solution. The platform compatibility is very good.

To start with there are too many add-ons, which makes it hard for us. If they simplified the add-ons and plugins to be added to our existing systems, it would definitely help us in the future.

Stability is really good. Earlier, we used to have a lot of issues with the stability, especially with the updates for the new products. The new additions made now are so stable. It is a very good for operating systems. They have simplified it using products in different situations.

Scalability is really good. Earlier, it used to be a cluster-based solution. Now, with the latest versions over the last five or six years, we have a form architecture, which we produced. We find that it helps for scaling all of our systems to our service.

We use IBM support quite a lot. We have a license with this product, then whenever there are any issues, we always contact IBM to get them resolved.

The beauty is the response time. It is very good nowadays within the platform.

Earlier they used to have a very basic version of FileNet, the content services. That was back in the mid 90s. We also had the product that were being used on the FileNet site and also having too many issues. They came up with the new products like FileNet, which made it easier to store the documents. They added more security on top of the documents. So there's a lot implements that happened over time.

The main product we use is IBM based products, FileNet, the case manager and that stuff. On top of it we build a lot of APIs and other services and that includes supplemental customer applications. So for that, we mostly work with our participating companies who are rather preferable for our company.

It was complex. There were a lot of dependencies depending on the product. It had to be compatible with the Windows matching. All the time it had to be compatible with X and OS, so we did not have dependencies with all the operating system rights. 

For the medium scale or large scale, I would recommend FileNet. FileNet is free of licensing expenses, thus good for the money. It is not expensive, but worth for the money, especially for medium scale and large scale industries.

For small scale industries, they allow different options. They can do open source. It is the complexity of the data security that they should think about before they choose.

There were a lot of other vendors trying to overtake it, like Hyland, for more than 15 to 20 years. FileNet has had the same platform which is stable, but it is very compatible with our requirements. It supports OS, Linux, Oracle and digital, making it more flexible than most products on the market.

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.

We use FileNet as an enterprise content management storage for our underwriting policies and our claims documents. The major products of FileNet that we use are Content Manager and ICC for SAP.

It's very robust. It's very good at document retrieval and storage, as well. The solution that we deployed is really good and it works fine.

FileNet provides secured facilities, which helps a lot.

A few products that we use in FileNet that really help our organization a lot. For example, Capture Pro and ICC are the important products that we use. They save us a lot of time.

We also use Image Services, which is another strong product from IBM. That also has a lot of features. It helps a lot to do annotations and then print services. The other features on that are excellent.

My thought process is that, we use a lot of FileNet products, and with the new versions that come from IBM, we were expecting IBM to provide some extended support for the products that we use at the customer's level. To make sure when we go to upgrade, we should have enough time to do any kind of upgrades or migrations.

I attended an IBM World of Watson conference to find out what new products they have. For example, we need more data analytics than we have now.

Some days, stability’s really good, especially with the product running with AIX and DB2. We have never had any bad experiences; it runs very well along with that operating system and that database.

For scalability, we have a load balancer and the AIX systems, which really help us to handle the volume and the user input also.

Technical support is 10/10.

It has been there for many years; they've been using it in our organization for more than 12-13 years.

They have been using a few products, but definitely the features and because it is an IBM product. We are basically an IBM shop, so we just prefer to use IBM products. That's why we are moving towards going to the ECM solutions from IBM.

Over time, initial setup has become more simple. Initially, with previous versions, it was harder. Now, it's getting very simple, because IBM has come up with a new hardware architecture, which helps a lot to simplify upgrades and installations.

They do have SharePoint for a few applications, but that doesn't really solve what the business needs. IBM FileNet is the right solution and we are currently using it. We'll be adding more features and more products into it to make it better for our customers.
We also have custom developments on top of FileNet.

The decision-making process takes about 6 months. We have a process to be followed. It takes a minimum of about 6 months to go through all the approvals; the business as well as our directors have to approve it.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is most likely the complexity. When there's any kind of situation with any architecture being introduced, that's when we need to have IBM or anyone to be involved directly to help us out.

Depending on the business needs, I would suggest FileNet and the architecture, as well as the features that it has. I would definitely recommend it.

According to my experience, over time, it has become perfect. The early versions had a lot of issues. It was running on different platforms, which had some issues. We had terrible outages in a back in 2008-2009. Over time, the new version upgrades really helped out a lot. With the current versions that we use, it's really great.

We are considering using IBM cloud, hybrid and box solutions. Those are leading features that IBM is coming up with. We definitely look forward to utilizing those products in the future.

We have a few analytical products, Hadoop and a few other products. They be working with a different group of teams, so they are definitely looking forward into it.
There aren’t really any existing services that we're able to provide better than we were before.

We do not have any plans to include mobile at this moment.

Most of our customers are in Dunwoody and external customers only use very few applications. We provide external login access to them, which helps a lot. We mainly now use FileNet to store the policy documents and the underwriting and claims documents. From a retrieval point of view, it's very fast. The security is very good.

We have about 6,000-8,000 users and there are no complaints from the usability perspective. With some other products, such as Case Manager, when the new thing comes out, we need to make sure that the users are comfortable using it. Then, we look forward to switching to that.

We are a ratings company. We store all of our ratings documents in a FileNet Content Manager. We also use the Datacap scanning solution to extract the data, then index it into FileNet. That is our main usage of the FileNet platform.

We store documents on-premise. As a ratings company, we are not storing anything on the cloud at this time.

The usability is very good. Our customers are happy. The stakeholders allow the interface and platform, which comes with a CMIS. This allows our external applications to talk to FileNet using the CMIS platform. It is a win-win for everybody.

• Stability 
• Scalability
• IBM support

The most valuable for us is the ease of operations in Datacap, especially to extract data, along with the robust platform of FileNet, as a content management system. 

It is very user-friendly for business users. They can create their own searches. They are not dependent on administrators to create searches for them. It is self-service for them.

I would like to have an offline DR deployment. If that is doable, then it would be a big win.

The installation needs improvement.

A lot of the solution is GUI-based. If that could be automated, that would make the solution better.

It is very stable. We hardly have any downtime or any major issues.

The scalability is very nice. It is very scalable. We are in a high availability mode.

The technical support is very good. We are very well partnered with IBM support. We have AVP Support, which is very valuable.

We did not have a different solution prior to FileNet.

The documentation was very well done. The initial setup was straightforward with our experience and in-house knowledge. We also had the IBM engineers available, as needed.

We deployed it in-house.

It has reduced operating costs by reducing the amount of manual work needed.

Datacap has helped to increase our productivity.

We use extraction. Therefore, we can see 80 to 85 percent accuracy on data extraction. This reduces the manual indexing part, which is definitely a gain on performance efficiency.

If we can achieve 80 percent automation with it, then it will save us 80 percent time.

I have used other products as well. However, stability-wise, I am more comfortable using this product.

I would definitely recommend the FileNet solution.

The integration process is very smooth because we use CMIS. The other application uses CMIS to talk to FileNet, and this is very smooth.

We are not using the solution for case management nor automation.

The most valuable features of FileNet are business process automation, and providing our business users access to all of the documents they need and when they need it, and having that ready access to all of the documents that they need to reference to complete their job functions.

There are a lot of processes that our business users were handling either manually or in less-than-efficient ways. We were able to optimize those processes for them through FileNet P8 workflows. That's probably the best way IBM ECM platforms help them.

Our legacy platform wasn't necessarily sustainable. It wasn't designed to handle the volume of documents, hundreds of millions of documents, that need to be managed through our enterprise content management platform. One of the main services or benefits that we're providing is a stable enterprise tool that they can rely on to handle that sheer volume of documents.

The front ends and the intelligence that we can build into them are leaps and bounds better than the service that they were being provided previously.

It's a very good tool. The one feature or direction I would like to see IBM move the tools, is to make them more tolerant for or lend itself more to continuous integration, continuous delivery; the DevOps model that most organizations are adopting.

We're on a lower version and we need to upgrade our platform, but there is still a lot of configuration that somebody such as a system engineer has to do by hand that isn't easily scriptable. It's done through configuration consoles such as FEM. That might make it difficult to deploy, for example, once an hour, like Amazon does, or every five minutes, or whatever their continuous delivery model is. We're still only deploying the production once every 10 weeks. We could deliver a lot more features to the business if we had the capability to deliver new features to them on a daily basis. That's kind of the holy grail of continuous delivery and DevOps. As of today, I don't know that we could really accomplish that with P8.

Stability’s been pretty good. We're maturing in terms of our monitoring and automation of FileNet services. When there are crashes, we're still responding to those pretty manually. That’s on our end and on IBM's end, a little bit of both.

The one area where we've had stability issues is when we're doing large-volume document ingestion. Part of this is related to the fact that we have regulatory requirements that require us to store documents on a WORM device, which stands for Write Once Read Many. There's just more overhead in doing that. There are times where we have flooded the system with documents, which has affected end-user experience. Those are the most high-impact stability issues that we've experienced, when a flood of documents comes into the system and Content Engine threads get buried.

There is definitely the potential for some improvements there. Although, we're at a point now, in our life cycle, that we're beyond a lot of those large-scale document migrations. For any newer customers that have that WORM requirement, it's definitely something that they need to take into consideration and have some defensive guards against flooding the system in that way.

You could consider it a scalability issue, I suppose. It might be a limitation of the way Content Engine is designed. There could be some more automated guards that are just built into the tool to turn off that ingestion if the system is starting to get flooded. We've instrumented some monitors to do exactly that on our side with custom coding. If IBM had a feature to protect against that, that's something that should definitely be looked at.

My overall impression of scalability is great. The way IBM allows you to design object stores, and have cross-object store searches, and the quantity of documents that are supported per object store or within FileNet P8, far exceeds what we had with our previous vendor, with the legacy system.

The scalability is great, it's just there are a couple of places, and some of it is specific to features that aren't used by every customer, but there are certain features that, if it's not a scalability issue, it might be a monitoring issue, and taking action against a potential negative impact to the system.

We've been pretty successful with the PMR process. I don't have any real negative or positive feedback exactly; it serves its purpose.

I came in towards the end of our first phase. The initial install of the software I wasn't there for, but I was there for the initial migration of documents from the legacy system. It was fairly straightforward. We definitely leaned on consulting from some IBM partners such as Perficient, and from IBM themselves for a few different things. We set up Datacap five years ago, and there were some issues with performance across a wide geography; my organization has 500 branches across the country. There were some issues there that IBM was able to give us a patch to correct those problems. Overall, it's been pretty good.

If you have a very large-scale ECM system, then I think it's the best tool available, based on my limited exposure. I've been working in a P8 shop for the last four years. It’s my first ECM shop, so I don't necessarily have a lot of experience directly with some of the other tools. For a large-scale solution, like what we needed at my employer, it was great. To my knowledge, for a large-scale ECM system, it's one of the best tools available.

Employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions is definitely a consideration, although my company is only just starting to get into moving our on-prem solutions to cloud. We have to understand a little bit better what the broad-view cloud strategy is from the entire IT organization standpoint before we get to that point.

The experiences for our customers, both internal and external, have changed by implementing FileNet. They're using a different tool set, so that's changed. With our scanning solutions and indexing, and especially from a data perspective, we can better cater to their needs, because of those features that are available through P8.
I don't have a great use case for mobile at this time. Most of the end users that we are providing services to are either physically located inside of a branch or located in our home office, performing more operations functions. They are not necessarily out in the field capturing documents in real-time from customers. It's just not the business case that we're servicing.

The usability is pretty good. There are a lot of great features in the upgraded platform, 5.2 and above, that we're not yet taking advantage of; we're still in 5.1. The Content Navigator, front ends and consolidation of the administration to Content Navigator consoles definitely are benefits. End users definitely benefit from that tool. It's been pretty good for us, even in 5.1.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for me is having somebody that can really demonstrate the tool, has the technical knowledge and can speak to the capabilities; preparedness for the presentation. With the RFPI, I wasn't there, but when we were first looking at vendors for ECM, IBM was certainly the most prepared and had a demo-able platform, as opposed to just something like a PowerPoint presentation. Being able to really demonstrate in real-time what your tools can do is the number one thing that any vendor can do to win over a customer.

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.

I have been working remotely for an insurance client and I use IBM File Manager.

The most valuable features of IBM File Manager are workflow, content, and process capabilities.

IBM File Manager should improve the UI. There should be more customization based on the user.

I have been using IBM File Manager for eight years.

I have found IBM File Manager to be stable.

IBM File Manager is scalable and it is easy to do.

We have approximately 100 users using this solution.

I rate the technical support of IBM File Manager a three out of five. They could improve by being more responsive.

The rate of initial setup complexity of IBM File Manager a two out of five. Whereas five is complex.

We have two people for the maintenance and support of the solution.

I rate the technical support from IBM File Manager a three out of five.

I rate IBM File Manager a seven out of ten.