IBM FileNet Reviews

The most valuable feature of FileNet is the storageand records management capability. It allows us to records manage our content properly.

It's allowed us to consolidate content all in one spot, to make it easier to pull out all of the customer-related content for a single customer. We provide better service to the customers. It can be more efficient, if they're not looking in various places.

We've talked a bit about Content Navigator on top of it; some improvements there right now. We use a customized viewer, because ICN doesn't have a couple of features we need around security, restricting content; who can see what content within the repository. We want to roll that out.

We’re also looking at other solutions that work with FileNet. It's a pretty bulletproof back-end solution, but we want to look at what else can we use, the cognitive and so on.

It’s lacking from our standpoint. We haven't done it. There have been different priorities. With things like box and so on, they're rising to the top because we need those types of solutions to go with the mobile or with the customer interactions.

It's been great; very stable; very few issues.

No scalability problems at all.

We have not used technical support, because we have an IBM service team that we use directly. They're not the actual tech support guys, but we do have an IBM team that does a great job.

I do not find it particularly expensive. We're having some discussions around licensing for external customers, and some of the licensing seems pretty expensive; the records management piece of it that's layered on top. You can get enterprise agreements on that sometimes. For smaller companies, it might be a pretty big ticket, though. If you're smaller, cost-wise, maybe it's not something you need.

If a colleague asked me for advice, from my standpoint, I'd certainly recommend FileNet as an option. I'd want to understand what else they're running, because it depends on what else is integrating with it; do they have workflow, do they have capture, what is it, how well does it play in the sandbox with FileNet? From what I understand, almost every vendor I talk to has out-of-the-box connectors for FileNet, which tells you it's a pretty big solution.

Relationship is the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with. How do they react to problems? You don't expect no problems; you know you're going to have problems. It's about the reaction to them; how fast are they, how quickly can they get it done, what do they do to address the root cause, and so on; being more of a partner than a vendor.

Also, with working on new solutions, helping me identify what's out there in the market, not just their solutions. I have a big Kofax deployment, and IBM supports us having that. They are not trying to sell us DataCap, because they know we have Kofax. It makes sense, so they support that decision. They integrate well. We have an internal layer that's in between; it's not a native integration. We built something in between, unfortunately; that just complicates integrations. It's another layer, something else that can break. It's customized for us. We're not quite sure why it does that. I think it's because, if we ever went away from FileNet, we wouldn't necessarily have to change the front-end applications, but we have no plans to do that.

We are considering employing IBM box solutions. Right now, IBM hosts our FileNet for us, but we're looking at box as a potential option, so that we can interact with external customers, without having them get into our firewalls, mainly.

Right now, there aren’t any new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for your organization. At a recent World of Watson conference, we were looking at some of the solutions. We have Cognos running, but we're now starting to look at the more advanced solutions.

It’s hard to say whether there are any existing services that we're able to provide better now than before because of the implementation of FileNet. I’m not sure.

As far as how the experiences of your internal or external customers changed since we implemented FileNet, we implemented it a long time ago, so that’s hard to answer. Nonetheless, as we've gone along, customers will see slower but steady progress in terms of knowing more about them and being able to retrieve the documents. We used to have a big problem with not finding a customer's document, often. FileNet makes it easier to find, so it gives the customer more confidence.

We've launched mobile applications. Most of the launches so far have not used FileNet, because the deployment of the app was the most important thing. They didn't do a proper back end solution, and now they're following up for the proper back end. They’re catching up, but we'd like to get to a point where we're deploying with them upfront.

I'm not that close to FileNet, but I haven't heard anything negative about its usability.
It's been a really solid product. I've only had this area for about a year, but it's been a really good product; very few problems. We’ve had some technical production issues, that might have to do less with the product, and more about how it's deployed, but nothing major; enough that I haven’t given it a perfect rating. I'm not sure I'd give anything a perfect rating.

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.

There are many aspects that can be improved in this product. We're doing a lot of projects with customers. It would help if there was a summary of the products. They should be able to do more upgrades of the product or offer new versions. They could also improve the user experience.

They have to think about how to make the environment over. Make it in some containers, for example. The complexity of installation can also be improved. They should re-imagine the way that they install products. 

The solution is very stable.

The solution is very scalable.

We use various solutions that aren't really similar, but are in the same field. There are lots of products that pretend to do enterprise content management. I have sample projects with SharePoint, and Microsoft Checkpoint among others.

In terms of the initial setup, you have to have some requirements. I am technical specialist in finance, so I can do installation as well, but it's not easy for everyone to handle. 

You have to know it takes time, you have to be very careful and know exactly what you are going to do. You need a good knowledge of the production system, middleware, application services, servers databases, etc. It's not as easy as other products.

How long it takes to deploy the solution depends of the requirements. It can take from six months to two years. It depends on a lot of factors including the modules, because you want a summary, and which remodels are the customer needs. The solution is modular, so you may have lots of modules. 

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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 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.

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.

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.

We use the platform for the automation of business digitalizing documents. We can turn the digital content into workflows for automation and monitoring processes.

It is a superior product based on Gartner's classification. It provides good stability and scalability for huge enterprises as well. One of the valuable features is the ability to digitalize documents, including enterprise content. We can store the information in video and audio formats. It provides efficient security. Only authorized users can view and edit the stored documents in a role-based user group. Another form of security is redacting documents, where one can view only selected parts of the document. It allows us to share crucial documents like contracts by ensuring that confidential information is redacted.

The platform's price could be better than other products in the market. It could be simpler to use, considering multiple use cases. We could deploy it easily with some training as well.

IBM offers distinct features through different products, such as IBM Enterprise Records for record management, IBM Datacap for document scanning, and IBM Business Automation Workflow for complex workflows. They could include all the features into one application, similar to other vendors.

We have been using IBM FileNet for eight years.

IBM FileNet can add and manage processes for a minimum of five and 1000 users.

The initial setup and maintenance are complicated. It requires authentication to be able to deploy and maintain the certificate. We need to configure different protocols for different user groups. We require an administrator to conduct the deployment as large enterprises involve several roles and lengthy processes. We first deploy it in a test environment. Once approved, we implement it in a production environment. It requires a month to complete.

The product generates a return on investment.

We evaluated Alfresco. It offers a community edition free of charge.

I rate IBM FileNet an eight out of ten. I recommend the product. I advise others to go for it if they have the budget. It is a mature product with enough resources and support partners in various regions.