IBM FileNet Reviews

We use it as a business documents repository for documents such as invoices, packing lists, POs, etc.

One way the solution has helped our organization is that HR uses FileNet to keep personnel documents instead of keeping photocopies.

The most valuable feature is access control.

We do not know how to use the FileNet API. It seems like it is very difficult and not transparent. They could also improve on the solution's resource consumption and cost.

The stability of the solution is good.

My impression of the scalability of the solution is that it is not really good since FileNet is a high resource-consuming solution.

The knowledge of their tech support staff is perfect but, even with that kind of support, we still need internal staff who have a notable level of knowledge of the solution.

We switched from an AS/400-based, on-demand solution because the company decided to abolish the IBM AS/400.

The initial setup was complex. Access control setup took a long time and it was difficult to upload documents from other systems.

We worked with Starting Point and RSTN.

The cost is about $40,000, plus yearly maintenance.

We looked at Ricoh and ParaDM. We chose IBM FileNet because of the brand name.

The biggest lesson I have used from using this solution is that, if it were up to me, I would choose a solution with a very easy upload method and an easy-to-use API.

My advice would be to understand the company deeply before making a decision.

We're not using much automation related to FileNet. We will introduce BAW soon, with a goal of introducing time savings. In terms of expanding our use of automation in our organization, we may convert some of our approval processes from paper to digitalized documents.

It runs our document management and workflow systems.

We have been able to grow the product and its use through a large number of business areas.

Overall, it has worked well for our business partners and various user groups. We have done some customization from a customer interface standpoint. Usability-wise, it has worked out well for us.

It is utilized by business users in our organization. We have done a lot of customization. We use the product more probably as a back-end delivery mechanism, but that has worked out well for our business people.

We have made our service routes more efficient, as far as moving work through the system and being able to react to customer situations and needs better by improving things, such as, address and beneficiary changes. I know that we have definitely made improvements in the process.

There are regulations on the amount of time that you have to process certain transactions. We have been able to knock that SLA down significantly with some of the products that we have implemented.

We have stuck with the product and sort of expanded on it. It's firmly entrenched in what we do (with legacy and new work).

• Reliability
• Speed
• Extensibility

Some of the user interface stuff might be a little more complicated than it needs to be: the native user interface. However, we traditionally develop our own UI.

From a business resiliency standpoint, it has worked out well for us.

We have seen an improvement from some older products to the P8 version now, from a stability standpoint

It has scaled well based off the user community that we have.

If I had a concern, it would be that we are sometimes not getting to the root cause of the issues from a technical standpoint as quickly as we should. For the most part, it's good. However, when things get a bit dicey with more involved issues, we have had some delays in getting feedback. If I had a concern, it's around the technical support and their responses in regards to things like root cause analysis.

Prior to implementing the first version of FileNet P8, our customer service organization was totally paper-based. They were dropping stacks of service requests on people's desks, and people working directly off of paper. Since implementing FileNet, we have been able to use it as a type of a distribution mechanism. This cuts out the paper process, and we now have the ability to distribute and move work through multiple steps in a business process.

The old process was going around distributing paper, then moving that stack from desk to desk. The advantage of running FileNet is that we've been able to capture the documents at the point of entry. We have been able to distribute work, then based on rules that we have set up in the workflow, route that work to the appropriate people at the appropriate time.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. As we have grown the environment and done certain things, it has gotten more complex. However, my experience has been okay. With the newer versions, because of our environments have grown, it has become a bit more complex.

We have done some homegrown development. We have used a couple partners to help with some development. We have used IBM resources to help install the original base product. Therefore, we have soft of had a mixed bag in all the deployment experiences. For the most part, they have been pretty good.

We have probably cut out at least 40 percent of what the work process was by easing out that whole distribution of paper.

It serves our needs, and it is performing as expected. It does what we expect out of it. Overall, it is a very good product for what we need in the company.

We do some basic integration with Salesforce and maybe some integration with some of our homegrown applications, but nothing that is overly involved. It has worked out, but it was hard work.

We are not right now using this solution for automation projects.

Lessons learned and advice for others:

• Don't bite off more than you can chew. 
• Do things in smaller pieces. 
• Do your homework upfront with prep tests. 
• Take it slow (implement slowly). 
• Get your requirements upfront. 
• Understand the process your users are looking for. 
  

We had several use cases. We used it for all of our loan processing and we took a 21-day manual process down to three. We also used it for all of our credit applications, and that took a 45-day process down to two. It housed about 4TB of data.

Performance was great. It was our system of record.

No one was wondering where a document was. They could all go and find out exactly what they needed, when they needed. It wasn't, "Who's got this and who's got that?"

The most valuable features are the interconnectivity and the collaboration. No longer do I have to wonder what system I need to go to for the data I need. I know it's in FileNet.

We wrote several custom applications for the users to dive in and be able to find the data they need. 

If there was more AI capability, into Watson, that would be a benefit.

Also, where are the users going to find the documents? Because that's a path we don't see. We know that they're looking at documents, but we don't know what documents they're actually going and finding the most, or where the bottlenecks might be. It would be nice if there was some interconnectivity back into Bluemix to say, "Ok, you've got a workflow problem here." That would be a neat feature moving forward because we've got a lot of users that would just say, "The system is not working." We had a few threads would get hung up because they were just constantly banging on these few documents. If that were the case, if we knew that ahead of time, then we could fix that, change the search sequences to make it more efficient. But we were blind to that until the users said it's not working.

It's extremely stable. The only time it ever had a problem was if we lost power to the servers. It never really went down.

It was very scalable. If we needed to add more processing power we could just add another server, turn it on, and then we had more power. We didn't have any scalability problems.

We did use technical support for a while. enChoice was one of the partners we used with IBM. They're a great partner. Eventually, I was able to hire enough of our own staff that we did much of our own support.

My experience with technical support was good. Any time we needed them they were right there for us.

We were all manual before and we knew we needed something.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• commitment
• partnership - we're in this together.

IBM doesn't succeed if I don't succeed, and I can't succeed if the product doesn't work well. If there isn't that mutual give and take, then no one succeeds. It's more about: Any solution can be thought of and fixed and made to work, but you have to be able to work together. If I just sign up and give you a check and then you walk away, that doesn't help me. I need to sign up and then you be there with me, through the process.

I was not involved in the initial setup. From what I understand, when they first set it up it was rather complex. They had some hurdles to jump through. It took about two years to really iron out all the kinks. We had a vendor prior to enChoice that we weren't successful with. When we found enChoice, things started to turn around. So it's important to pick the right partner.

They evaluated Documentum, they evaluated FileNet, they evaluated a few other tools. The company actually bought FileNet before IBM bought FileNet, so we had a contract with FileNet and then IBM came in and bought it. That was a good thing because of the innovation that IBM did bring to the platform. We were also a heavy C|MAN user and the content management on-demand system integrates well with FileNet too. With the new Content Navigator, it allowed for one pane of glass. So what IBM is doing in that area is just going to keep getting better.

I would give the solution a nine out of 10. If it were free I would give it a 10.

Go find an industry that is the same as yours, that is using the tools you want to buy, and find out if they're successful. If they're not, don't go with those tools. For example, I'm in energy now and I'm looking for people who are using Maximo, who are using the other tools from IBM, and I want to talk to them: Are you successful using these tools?

Don't do it in a vacuum, you've got to talk to people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FileNet gives a lot of flexibility to the different problems we run into within our environment. It gives us flexibilities for ingest in multiple different ways of different products in order to store the content in FileNet P8, as well as flexibility of where we want to store it; the flexibility of creating metadata associated with your documents. It helps in the metadata, as well the security aspects as well. The flexibility is really the biggest advantage, I feel.

It helps put structure around unstructured content. Having the structure there makes it easier for people to find their content, in many different ways, whether it's in a mortgage space or some sort of other space. It gives us the ability to unify all the content and makes it easier to find.

Over the years, it's actually improved quite a bit. I do like what they are putting into the product itself. Previously, your process engines and all these different components were outside of the actual FileNet Content Manager product and now more of that is coming internal to it; that makes it easier to deploy. I like the fact that it's easier to deploy; upgrades are much easier.

From an improvement perspective, one of the things we often have challenges with is, within the FileNet product, changing properties or just general configurations within the product to support a business. That's been one of our biggest challenges, to automate that and make that an automated deployment, rather than somebody having to go in all of the time and click on the button to make that configuration. More automation in that area would probably be one area I would like to see.

I've worked with the FileNet product for over eight years.

I feel it's very stable. I've never had any real challenges with it.

It gives us flexibility to expand it and grow it and scale it really simply.

I've always had a great experience with technical support. I've used them enough that I know most of the tech support people by name. The good feeling is, yes, they recognize you as well and they understand your experience and where you are coming from. They are easy to work with, to get on the phone. Having that phone conversation usually speeds up the resolution time quite a bit.

We were previously using an earlier version of FileNet.

We were looking for the next generation, where we were. We had used FileNet Image Services, and we still use FileNet Image Services, but we were trying to move on, grow and get into newer technologies. That's part of the decision to do that as our strategy to move forward.

The product itself, I wouldn't say it was complex to set up. It was to integrate it within our environment’s current systems. Not every environment was ready to go or integrate into a FileNet product like that when we first implemented it. Eventually, we worked with IBM, we found the right solutions, had to make some product changes at the time and it worked out just fine.

We reviewed different vendors that we had worked with. Our organization is quite large, so we had multiple, different types of products where we are. Everything was analyzed, and we came to the decision to move on with FileNet. I think it has to do with the supportability. With our organization being large and IBM being large, they are able to support the types of volumes and types of challenges that we have. That played a lot into it, along with the fact that we do have some other IBM products already. That worked out well.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is having that ability to contact them easily and communicate our challenges because you always have to have that open dialogue and collaborate and understand our challenges so they can suggest improvements for us. There might be something we have to change as a client of IBM but we have to have that collaboration in there so that we can get that done.

It was probably a year-long decision-making process, to fully go through it, because of the size of our environment. One of the key factors to actually move forward was the fact that IBM was able to change some of their connectors that work with our environment. If that wouldn't have happened, it might have been a different decision. Knowing that they were able to make some adjustments to the product; that helped.

In the content management space, we probably did not think too much about building a solution in house. That’s not something that we would typically do in our environment. If there is a product that does it, we tend to lean towards the product.

You have to look at the requirements you have for your business. Then, based on those requirements, look at your options. Look at the different vendors and different products and make sure you are making the right decision for your requirements in your organization, because the skillset of your organization is key, too. You have to have the support within your organization to have support for the product, whether it's the FileNet solution or some other solution.

My rating reflects the fact that there is always room for improvement. The product is very good; its stable; its served us very well for 8+ years, but there is always room for improvement. The technologies and the industry changes; having that flexibility. As long as the product keeps improving, it will continue to be a great product. I’m not sure I would give anything a perfect rating because there is always room for improvement. As far as what might earn it a perfect rating, I would almost have to use Watson to think into the future to tell me what I don't already know.

We've been looking at ways to analyze content that’s at rest or been sitting on file shares, SharePoint sites and different areas within the bank that people might not be aware of or don't really know how to classify it, and using different IBM tools in order to do that.

As far as existing services that we are now able to provide better than before, in general, it’s the find-ability for our content; exposing more of our web services to different applications that we support with our environment; give them that flexibility so they can actually find the content.

Regarding usability, I hesitate to describe it as simplistic, but it is simplistic, yet it can be complex if you need it to be. You can keep it simple if you need to keep it simple but yet, if you need a little bit more complexity in your business requirements, it's there and it's available.

For internal customers, I think the experience has changed a lot. FileNet has made it much simpler for our clients to get to their content. They understand that it's one place, now they know how to find it and it's more repetitive, rather than trying to search this way here and another way somewhere else. It's improved from a time perspective for clients, with our basically internal associates, to find content. It’s a great time saver.

We are not considering using or employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions at this time.

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

FileNet integrates other solutions with my business applications; the APIs, the web services, all of the frameworks that we have developed around the FileNet solution.

We have used FileNet for legal proposals, digital governance and storage; digital documents that we would otherwise have to store physically. We have reduced costs for storage, by using digital and electronic documents instead of physical. That also makes us faster. For example, with our storage policy built into the application for electronic documents, we can now easily print the document.

I would like to see analytics from the unstructured data. Our documents are not always prepared in a way that Datacap and other tools can recognize or extract text from them. I don't know; maybe analytics from two rows or from handwriting.

It is very, very stable, like 99.9%.

Scalability is great. We have increased our size in FileNet. We have doubled its size in the last year and it is working well.

We have not used technical support.

We were looking for a BPM solution, and we found the FileNet BPM solution. It was integrated with ECM. We decided that it was a great integration, the way FileNet was showing the way to solve the problem.

Initial setup was a little complex but that was before the FileNet was part of IBM. It was many years ago. It was complex, but we made it. We had to change our document process, and define the governance policy for the documents. It was kind of difficult to figure out the right way that FileNet could do that at the time. That was difficult, but we found the way to do it right.

We considered solutions other than FileNet, but I don't remember which ones. We had three proposals at the time. We chose FileNet because of the integration, the brand name and the way that the brand would support us in the future. Then, IBM made it better.

The decision-making process took 10 months. The price was higher than we thought they would be. We did not consider building a solution on our own.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is the brand support; the way that they can improve the product in the future and work with you with those solutions.

FileNet is a better way to solve the ECM problems and needs that you have in your company. I have seen different solutions, and I found FileNet to be the more complete solution.

As far as how the experiences of our internal or external customers have changed since implementing FileNet, projects are easy. They need to find some information, some data, and they have it right at the moment that they need it. That changes the way that they use the information.

We are considering employing IBM for a hybrid solution. Right now, we have FileNet in a private network. We want to see if we can transform that into a hybrid cloud.

We also have plans to include mobile. We are now researching the possibility to implement the Datacap mobile solution.

Usability is very good; very, very good. We have different kinds of people working in administration; using FileNet is easy for everybody. We have no problems; we don’t have to keep explaining the way to use it. It is easy.

I have found in FileNet almost everything that we wanted to find; we can search quickly. For example, if you need a text translated from electronic to text, to then go to analytics, you can do it, and IBM is looking at it the same way.

Our primary use case was to have our complete documentation digitized and provide secure access to it for all employees in our organization. Along with that, we were to develop a workflow for check-in and check-out of the documents.

We are currently using FileNet but for a limited purpose. We have just one workflow configured in it. It's only used for document scanning and retrieval.

FileNet has not improved any of our organization's processes or functions. Our aim in 2013/14 was the same. We wanted to have complete automation, a paperless-office scenario. But that aim has not been fulfilled. 

The basic and fundamental point about FileNet is that the interface is very bad. It's just not appealing so people are reluctant to use it. Nowadays, when you go to any web application or mobile application, the interface is very appealing and very intuitive. These aspects are not available in FileNet. People are very reluctant to use that kind of application, one which has a very plain UI.

It should also provide different APIs to interface with multiple applications. There are some connection services for SAP but we have found the extent of such connections is not usable for our needs. We want a side-by-side type of a scenario where we can open an SAP transaction on one half of a screen and on the other half we should get a document from FileNet. That functionality is not in the version we have right now.

In addition, it needs a very smooth storage and retrieval process. 

Along with that, the workflow should be very simple to configure. Currently, we are capturing most of the information in Excel and then interface Excel with FileNet. That should not be how IBM FileNet works. They should improve on how the workflows can be automated with minimum effort on the programming side.

The product is very stable. We don't have much of a problem as far as the stability of the technology and the product go.

We awarded the contract to another party and they outsourced it to somebody else. So it wasn't that easy for us to implement FileNet. It took a lot of time for us to implement and install. 

The plan was that once everything would be digitized and we had a paperless-office scenario implemented, we would have high-availability, to have complete redundancy of the applications. Whenever one application would fail, another would take care of it automatically without the end-users knowing about it. But that wasn't set up properly. We then managed with Microsoft Cluster between the two nodes. That also wasn't that successful. So there were issues.

We are now looking at another DMS which will have a better look and feel and be easier to operate.

We are an Indian company and the skillset available in India for FileNet is very small. We wanted to to resolve some technical issues and we faced a lot of problems from Indian tech people in supporting us. IBM needs to increase the expertise of FileNet in India wherever possible. They should open training centers or schools in India where people can get exposure to FileNet.

We have SAP ERP for our business applications. We have mail and messaging from Microsoft. We have different productivity applications developed for our own environment, for our own business and business cases. Specifically regarding RPA, we have not developed anything as of yet.

We store policies, documents, and customer data in the FileNet repository.

The solution has increased productivity. We're a life insurance company. We get claims. It becomes much easier to view documents on the screen and process the work immediately so that the next person can review it and the next business user can view it. It makes the process very easy.

It has also reduced operating costs and saved us time, on the order of days. It used to be that processing applications would take weeks. Because we have different departments, physically moving documents would take a lot of time. Now where everything is online, they can just read the document and pass it to the next person. Things get done within days now, not weeks.

The solution has helped us with compliance. The documents are highly sensitive, they contain PI, so we had to make sure that only authorized people can access them. We have defined the security structure within FileNet. Only the people who have access can read the documents. That's how we ensure compliance and security on them.

In addition, decision-making goes faster. We don't have to wait for physical documents. Users can log in to the application, look up the information, and take the decisions quickly now.

The document storage is the most valuable feature. And then, searching those documents by users is helpful.

The usability is very good. We like the Content Navigator. It's very easy to use the search and retrieve for documents and has a lot of options for the user to download documents or send an email.

In Content Navigator we want to see the ability to view different types of video. They have come up with video support. We are using HTML 5 but it's very limited. They don't have a lot support for a lot of video formats. We definitely want to see support for most types of video formats in the market. That's the main feature we are looking for.

There is room for improvement when we need a fix to a bug in the application. That has to be a little bit quicker as compared to other solutions. It takes time for them to release any interim fixes. That impacts business on our side. We have had to wait for the solution, and sometimes it takes three weeks, sometimes it takes more than a month.

It's very stable. We haven't had any issues as far as stability is concerned. It's highly-available, so it's definitely stable as compared to other products.

It's easily scalable. We have multiple environments for FileNet, millions of documents. It's easy to scale and we don't have to worry about downtime.

Technical support is good. When we have any issues, we open a PMR with IBM and we do get the response on time. The only thing is that if there are any bugs, it takes time for them to come up with the fixes. But other than that, the technical support is good from IBM.

We did work with Documentum and Alfresco, but we went with FileNet because we had been using it for a long time and we are happy with it. It's more reliable. And support is also very good when compared to others.

If you ask a "fresher," the setup would be a little bit complex for him. But if you ask an experienced person who knows FileNet, it's easy for him. He knows exactly what to do.

In terms of integrating it with other solutions, we use Content Navigator within our in-house applications, and for the document viewing and searching. So we have created plugins and they use those plugins to access those features within Content Navigator.

Everything was done in-house.

The biggest lesson we have learned in using this solution is that nowadays everything is digitized so people want to take decisions faster. If you want to make your business processes faster, you have to think about a product like FileNet, which helps you take the steps.

Go for FileNet. It's good as a document repository. It has a lot of features and supports a lot of document formats. Content Navigator is a very good application. You don't have to write any custom code; you can just install it and start using it. Everything is out-of-the-box. You don't have to worry about writing custom code.

We don't use IBM Case Manager, but we have an in-house case management tool where we hooked up Content Navigator to view documents, so that really helped us.

I would rate the product at eight out of ten. It's very good. It does have a few limitations in the media formats and all but, overall, it's fine.