IBM FileNet Reviews

We are using this product in Beijing. It is a good product to use.

Our team programmed an automation workflow to use with it.

Our upper management encourages us to use this solution with automation.

It has increased our productivity.

It is easy to use. You can put everything in it, such as, documents. It is really easy to access and pretty easy to set up.

My colleague and I have a lot questions about the Datacap related stuff.

While the stability is pretty good, there sometimes can be issues with the database connections. FileNet has too many outages because things are broken in the database.

There are some issues when contacting technical support. It is not a very satisfying experience.

The company had a training session and decided based on that to implement the solution.

It has saved time for us.

I attended the tech track at the IBM conference.

We have not integrated this solution with other solutions.

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.

Digital business automation is the primary use case.

This solution is not used by business users in our organization.

One of our clients, a customer of IBM, rolled out and replaced their existing ECM system with FileNet. Their productivity has increased pretty dramatically. 

The Enterprise Records plugin helps with compliance and issues around that. Thus, we have clients who are using it specifically for that reason.

• Extensibility
• Customizability
• The API
• It has a very broad market share and a lot of people know about it.

The usability is fair. It could be a bit better. It could be better designed. They could put more effort into the user experience and do a better job of integrating other components, like Datacap, to be a bit more seamless.

I would like to see more integrated support for records management functions. I would like to see ICN be more integrated from a desktop standpoint with records management. Especially since, compliance and issues like privacy, which IER is uniquely capable and designed to handle, are becoming more important for users, things like advanced search and the ability to find data with privacy issues. Some work on that type of interface would serve everybody well.

It is very stable. The maintenance process has been greatly improved over the past few years. It seems like there is maturity now to the product which didn't exist even four or five years ago.

It is very scalable. You can deploy multiple WebSphere nodes and use clusters to do all sorts of things. It is enhanced now with the support for containerization, like Kubernetes and Docker. It is highly scalable, which is great.

The technical support is pretty strong. However, I still have cases of APARs which have been left open from many years. Therefore, the technical support is not excellent, but it's good.

The initial setup is complex. There are many different components to it. There are a lot of decisions which have to be made: architectural decisions, platform decisions, and team personnel decisions. These have to be made before you go ahead and implement something like this. It is a huge undertaking.

It takes a lot of time to roll out.

I am the consultant for deployments.

My customers have seen ROI. There have been productivity gains, time savings gains, and things that they have been doing much more efficiently in a more modern way than they were before.

The solution has reduced operating costs for our clients.

The product is worth considering. It has a lot of support with a lot of pedigree. Make sure your ducks are in a row, as far as understanding what your user requirements are and what your processes are around your content management needs. Then, once you have that done, definitely consider this as a very viable option.

Take your time and be careful with your planning phases.

We have integrated the solution with Enterprise Records. We have written our own custom interface that sits on top of Content Navigator. We have also written integrations to databases for lookups.

We are not using the solution for automation projects yet.

I would rate it a seven out of ten for its stability and maturity as a product. However, because it is so big, it is sort of slow to catch up to trends and things like privacy by design.

It is our unstructured record archive solution.

It is mainly for internal users. We don't have end users for it, since it is only used internally. It has captures a maximum part of our organization to help with the efficiency in our records.

It has a process interface for a lot of different aspects of our business, which makes record archiving very efficient.

With our organization being in the financial sector, it has a lot of records: millions to billions. These were very tough to manage overall. A solution like FileNet has definitely improved our business. It keeps legal focused on what is required, and what is not. It has also helped the overall organization to focus on what is really needed, and what is not.

The product has helped with compliance and governance issues. There are some archiving policies which a financial organization has to keep. Our organization can keep up with them because of the IBM product.

It does help the legal team with their decision-making. They can hold and sweep the records based on legal actions required on any particular record. Therefore, it does help on the compliance.

It is very user-friendly.

In the next release, I would like to see automation and simplicity in the installation.

I feel that there is not enough ease on the initial front part. The ease and flexibility could be improved.

The technical support is good and efficient. I would rate it an eight out of ten.

In the past, we did have some other custom solutions. We have also tried some other vendors and they did not covering the platform 360 degrees. When we opted for this particular product from IBM, we saw that it has the overall coverage which is not being provided by any other vendor. This has improved our productivity.

The initial setup was pretty complex. There are too many options, and it can get a bit confusing.

We implemented it in-house.

It has not done much for operations costs because there are still operations involved in it. However, I still see a percent or two difference.

We did a PoC. We tried multiple vendors and compared them on different aspects. Based on the simplicity, ease, convenience, and many aspects of this solution, we made the decision in the past to work with it. We plan on continuing doing so in future.

Do a study and learn about the solution instead of jumping in and finding out about stuff later on. Attend conferences before making decisions and doing things. Then, you can make a smart call.

We haven't used any automation so far. I would like to explore the business partners on automation and find out much more about it.

While it does have business and case management in the tool, we are not really using it.

We use FileNet to store all the medical records and information for a patient. 

We have business users utilizing it in the whole organization for medical records.

I work in information systems now. However, regarding the emergency medical records, research, and other parts of the organization, FileNet lets us have all these records maintained smartly and securely. Mostly, we can use this information in the future for research, if we ever want into AI solution or if we wanted to look for new ways to look at cancer, then it is all there.

The solution provides ease of access. It has affected the decision-making in our organization.

FileNet lets us store everything there for compliance. There is something legally about us not being able to delete stuff. 

The taxonomy is its most valuable feature. Everything is hierarchical and has properties.

I am doing practical coding. Therefore, I am very happy that they have extensive Redbooks and demos with the FileNet API.

It is really usable. There is a lot of support for it. You have the online components to trawl through the storage. I have a lot of fun with it.

I did hear that maybe there are some errors in relationship to another product that they offer, like SmartLock. There is something going on there which is not good.

It is stable.

It is scalale.

There are a lot of Redbooks, and there is the IBM knowledge that is sent there. There are some more obscure errors that get thrown when I'm coding, because I'm bad. 

All in all, the tech support is really good. They have a lot of support.

We were using image services. Now, we are migrating to FileNet. Therefore, we are storing patient records, so they can be used in research.

I know it took them seven months to convert, so the initial setup was, probably to some degree, complex.

We used enChoice for the deployment. Our experience with them was good.

It has reduced operating costs. We went from paper to image services to FileNet. We did that because it was cheaper and better.

The solution has saved us time.

I would recommend choosing IBM. Go for it. It is not like there is a better alternative.

The automation that we are doing right now is to check that all our systems are up and working. I wrote a program in C# which touches a whole bunch of boxes and services. It does a whole bunch of actions against FileNet that checks everything is going correctly. It saves us time and effort, and it works.

I know that they're releasing FileNet 5.5.3 at the end of the month, but I don't know what is in it.

We're an IBM business partner. We work with customers who purchase IBM and we help them implement business solutions. Often times, we just influence their decisions. Most of the time FileNet is being used for automation projects.

An example is one of our customers, an insurance company. They didn't have process-automation before. We helped them implement an IBM product suite with FileNet content management with workflow and analytics. It helped that company reduce processing costs. It helped them unify processes in 21 countries where they have a presence, and they use it as an IT framework that helps them integrate other companies which they acquire. They're big on acquiring smaller organizations to help them grow.

Productivity gains come where workers can focus on more important tasks, higher-value tasks, and where the repetitive tasks are delegated to software.

In the end, almost every solution that we create for our customers helps reduce costs. In most instances the solution has saved time as well. Where we do get statistics from our clients, on average we see 20, 30, or 40 percent gains in terms of turnaround time. You can see that, for example, processing a complicated claim would have taken weeks and with the software solutions built on top of IBM software, sometimes it gets down to days or even hours.

It has improved business processes or case management for our customers. That's the primary purpose, that's the reason why they're investing in the software.

The most valuable features of FileNet are its comprehensive ability to store content, to get insights from the content, and to use that content for making decisions routed through workflow.

Nowadays, with the new capabilities, the unattended task processing - so-called robotics or digital employees, digital agents - is where this industry is heading.

I think it's to the point where there are probably too many features. Every software, as it matures and graduates, grows the list of features. What many of our customers express is that it's just too complicated. They're using maybe five or ten percent of the features but they're having to pay for 100 percent. There is room for improvement in terms of simplifying it. This is a case where sometimes less is more.

Making it easier to deploy, easier to use, easy to integrate are the biggest areas for improvement.

Every new software has bugs, but the FileNet software suite has been around for ages, so it's stable, it works.

The scalability is infinite if you know how to use it in your software products.

Technical support is very decent. We've never had issues with it.

The integration of this solution with other products is where we come in as consultants. IBM software works great in the silo, the silo being that you have an IBM software suite and everything is working together great. But when you have a customer that has IBM and three or four or five other repositories, a line of business systems that need to be integrated, that's where typically consultants, systems integrators like our company, come in.

But IBM provides a great API and ways to integrate the software.

ROI is hard to tell, it varies. Sometimes it's tangible where it can be measured in percentages from 10 to 15 to 20 or even 40 percent. Sometimes it's intangible, where companies can get ahead of the game, get ahead of the competition, and get their products to market faster.

I would advise a typical due-diligence process. Get hands-on with it, try it out. Do the same with competing products and decide what works the best.

Usability of the product is a complicated question. Anyway it is created, software cannot serve everybody's needs. Most of the time we'll work with very large companies and all of them have their unique needs. We oftentimes start with a base and customize it for each customer and their specific use case. You'll find a number of users that can use software out-of-the-box. But we often have to change it, tweak it, tune it, to tailor it to their specific environment.

FileNet is a nine out of ten. It's been around forever, it's stable, it's mature, it works. We know how to use it. We can confidently recommend it to customers without impacting our reputation.

As a systems integrator, for us, every customer is unique. In every environment there are very distinct challenges, so it's hard to take the knowledge from one client and apply it to another. Every time it's a journey. Sometimes there are technical issues we have to overcome. Oftentimes there are challenges, the business challenges that we help our customers overcome. The exciting part is that it's challenging. Challenges are always exciting, and that's what the software helps us with, overcoming challenges.

It's used for content management. It's not for business process automation but for digital, electronic archives: documents, folders, and access to the client's native IBM content. It's an IBM content manager, especially for IBM BPM.

FileNet has many features which support our clients' compliance and governance requirements.

The most useful feature is its persistent storage. Also, the full-text search and attribute searching are valuable. It shows a preview of documents, and makes possible small, event-driven automation: creating documents, editing documents, deleting documents, and others.

For end-users there is a lack of administrative features. The interface of basic FileNet is not very good.

IBM is doing a lot of work to combine the abilities of its major products, BPM and FileNet, into one product, either IBM Business Automation Workflow, or Digital Business Automation. These are two major offerings from IBM. These products are very tightly integrated. I'm waiting for the moment when, in one or two years, it will be only one product which will combine the major strengths of these products. This is the right way forward, from my point of view. IBM is moving quickly in this direction.

I haven't seen any problems. FileNet is stable software as long as it is installed correctly.

The installation of FileNet is not very easy. It requires a very experienced administrator. But if the program installs correctly, it works. It's stable. It takes two to three days to install FileNet in high-availability mode.

Talking about the cost is difficult because IBM has offers that combine different products, and each of these offers has different types of licensing. IBM also has a policy that the actual price for a given customer may be very different from the stated book price. It's hard to say whether it's expensive or not.

I didn't do a deep comparison. Previously, I compared FileNet with some open-source enterprise content systems, especially Alfresco, but I realized that this product is for a different type of customer. FileNet is for enterprise customers, but Alfresco and other open-source BPM products are for small or medium-sized customers.

In terms of a comparison of the features, the open-source solutions are really are missing a lot.

Create a solution combining the strengths of all of IBM's products: IBM BPM, FileNet, or IBM Case Manager, a product which sits on top of IBM FileNet technology.

We have banks as clients with 3,000 to 4,000 employees but the FileNet users number between 100 and 200.

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.