IBM FileNet Reviews

The primary use for this solution is customer and client demos, in order to share it with them, if they have a requirement for this particular type of capability.

We position a product or solution like this to a client where there is a great fit, and it does have a return on investment in terms of efficiencies, cost savings, or job role function acceleration.

We position the solution for client-facing opportunities. The internal use of it would be in terms of testing and prevalidation. Therefore, the internal use is what would be considered our informal R&D lab situation in partnership with IBM.

It improves out client and customer functions, which is paramount to our business model. It enables customers and clients to quickly and readily access the content that they need in real-time, without any delays.

Indirectly, it does have the potential to provide a high level of audit capabilities, in terms of being able to track the success of a person's job role in a workspace.

The most valuable feature is the way in which it enables clients and customers to quickly access the content and information that they use for everyday functions.

There is a high degree of usability with this solution. It is highly compatible with our clients' and customers' work environments, making it easy to deploy and implement.

It would be nice to have additional integration features, which could be integration with IoOT-based products and solutions that also have automation requirements on the IOT side. Anything can be integrated from a Gateway or API perspective would be a plus.

It is highly stable.

It is highly scalable.

The technical support is very robust.

That is our role as an adviser. As a trusted adviser to our clients and customers, we would have discussions with them that would identify this particular type of requirement, then identify it in the client/customer review.

We are the partner who works with either the customer or client for deployment.

My advice would be to have that upfront requirements discussion with your clients and customers early on to ensure that this solution is indeed a fit for them. If so, explore other automation products and solutions which might run sidecar to this one from a more deep dive automation perspective, since clients and customers seem to have an increasing propensity for absorbing automated solutions at this time.

Even a simple, straightforward approach to one-stop solution implementations, like this, one can provide significant gains in terms of accelerated job role functions and efficiencies that clients and customers really like.

The solution increase productivity. The working example is that of a client who has been using a different type of product or solution which had roadblocks, issues, or challenges that frustrated them, making it more difficult for them to access the necessary content. Whereas, this solution is able to streamline the process for them, making it easy and still resilient for their business model.

It definitely saves time in terms of enabling the customer and client to access more content, if they want to. The prior content that they were accessing is now accessed in an accelerated fashion, allowing them to get onto other business tasks of greater value.

We have not integrated the solution with other solutions yet.

It has the potential to improve business process or case management.

It can be used in conjunction with automation, but it is not positioned as an independent, standalone automation solution.

I rated it as a nine (out of ten), because of the robust nature of the solution, its stability, and the ease of being able to position it from a requirement's perspective with clients and customers.

We use the Case Manager component of FileNet, itself. It helps with the business process, mainly; incoming documents; and then collaboration of the underwriters or adjusters. Besides that, we consolidate all documents within FileNet, so nothing is going to be left on a file share or somewhere that is not going to be found down the road. It's very important for the company to have something like that in place, to control every asset of the documents within the enterprise.

Documents used to be everywhere; anybody's desktop or shared file systems. Now, everything is in one location and people can share or view the same document at the same time, without waiting for each other to finish a folder, paper or document, to go ahead and work on them again. Basically, that's it. You can have many people using the same document at the same time, sharing it without any problem; annotating on them, if need be; having it all in one place; and being easily accessible.

I would rate it higher if they improved the usability, because as a product, it went through iterations and things like that. If it was supposed to be a perfect product, Content Navigator would have been developed earlier, so that people would have been using the system much, much better. We still have lots of customers that are used to using XT; migrating them from one environment to another always causes issues. Training them again on the new product for the same backend, for the same solution, that always creates some issues. It's the response from the customers, mainly; the end users. When there's a change, there is always resentment. You have to deal with all of those things.

It would have been better if things were what they are today five years ago or seven years ago. The product could have matured quicker.

Because it's a content management solution, they could start providing an analytics component on it. They already have the content, so they could start adding components. Usually, they rely on third-party or external products to do those things. If they start doing the analytics, that would make it easier for me, instead of implementing other products, but I guess that's the trend now. You have to go with that. It's something that we don't currently have that I would like.

The way I see it, IBM is going more towards cloud-based solutions; more towards Box being a content management solution for the cloud. Even with the delay, how that's going to fit with the Case Manager, I don't know. I don't know what the future is going to be for content management.

They could have done things differently or better. No product is perfect 100% of the time.

It is stable. We have no major issues.

It's an enterprise solution. Everybody, from coast to coast, is using it. It's not only departmental or one geographical area. It's enterprise, coast to coast, and it’s being used.

My advice wouldn’t be positive because, as I see it, everything is going cloud-based. Everything is going in a direction where content management is becoming like the database products used to be 10 years ago; they are in the back room and nobody knows about them anymore. They do their job, day in and day out, but they are in the dark now. That's the trend I'm seeing with the content management. They're going to go in the back room and nobody's going to be dealing with them. They will just sit there and do their job; collect the content and then do nothing else. That's where it's going.

Just because it's not sexy doesn't mean it's not good. Everything runs on the databases but they just sit there; nobody cares about them anymore. The same thing goes for content management. That's my impression. That's my gut feeling about what's going to happen.

We're looking into the IBM Box solution, for cloud collaboration with external vendors, external users and external suppliers. That would make it easier for them to come in, send documents or upload documents, without having to go through emails, which is currently the case. It makes the work process easier, document management easier.

As far as new analytics or content management services that we are now able to provide our organization, we are doing some proof of concepts but nothing in production yet; mainly content analytics, not streams or anything that's coming in from other sources. We're doing analytics on the content that we already have. We're looking into the sentiment part of the documents that are coming in, to see if it’s something people are going to be using, or to escalate it to be looked into right away, or it's something that anyone can view anytime they want; there's no urgency on it.

Regarding existing services that we're able to provide better than before, it's easier to respond to documents that are coming in or are requested; coming in from brokers, for example. It's easier to work on them. It's faster to work on them. Turnaround time used to be two or three days; now, it's minutes or less than an hour.

Mobile is probably going to be part of the Box solution coming in but nothing has been decided yet.

As far as usability, it's user-friendly. Now that we're using Content Navigator, it's easier to use and easier to present it to the users. Training-wise, it's much easier because you teach them on one application so everybody knows how to use the next application that's going to come on as a solution. That's a plus.

The most important criteria for me in selecting a vendor to work with is how accessible they are; how support is available, especially IT or technical support; and if we're doing development, how fast they're going to respond for problems that we encounter. Those are the things that are important.

Since we implemented FileNet, the users are happy with the experience. The users are using it on a daily basis, especially when they don't deal with paper. Whenever they need, it’s there and they don't have to worry about paper. It helps them in their daily work and job.

Predominantly, we use Case Manager in order to automate technical design review processes. We also use it in collaboration with multitenant. 

We are using FileNet to increase the efficiency of our collaboration and in our organization overall. It has improved the decision-making efficiency, as managers can have access and do approvals while traveling.

We use the of the lifecycle management of the document's automation features in conjunction with Content Navigator.

The solution has reduced our operating costs.

It does a 360 view of IBM and views the taxonomy on any documents. It flattens documents so you can see all the attributes of a document on one screen. The taxonomy feature helps with compliance and ISO.

The document collaboration is very good. There is something called Pink Note where departments can collaborate within the document. It has a built-in viewer to see any type of document.

The FileNet user interface is not cumbersome and pretty easy to use. It is easy to search for a document and get to the right place.

The Case Manager doesn't have a difficult process to follow.

I would like to have easier steps for setting up the application. They should have an easy one step process for the whole installation. Right now, you have to know the application well to set it up and have IT expertise. 

I would like them to have a document distribution feature, even if it is developed by a third-party, just as long as it has a seamless integration.

The performance is good.

We have one administrator for maintenance. It is relatively low maintenance.

The scalability is pretty good. We can scale horizontally at any one point of time, so we are able to scale pretty easily.

We have about 150 users on it. 

We have around six working machines. It has good capacity, so far.

Our design and technical departments use it for automation projects. The solution is being integrated and scaled into other departments. 

Business users are utilizing it day-to-day usage in the organization.

Our organization has administrators who are well trained, so we have experienced people on our team to manage the solution. However, if we have any production issues, we do contact their IT support.

We previously used OpenText ECM.

Previously, there was a lot of exchange of documents via email with outside parties and within the organization. This became cumbersome. We looked for a solution that to increase the efficiency of our collaboration, which is why we are using FileNet.

We also liked Case Manager and the overall architecture of FileNet. 

It took a while to get it up and running, but it is not very complicated. It took us about a week to have all the components setup.

There needs to be a coordination between the hardware and software teams.

Our leads completion process used to take two to three days. It now takes half a day.

Yearly, we pay for the maintenance, which is $20,000.

The overall package is a good product. It has good usability and scalability.

Using it has to be planned properly. It will take baby steps to roll this product out throughout your organization. Assess your users level of ability with training.

We have integrated the solution with BRP.

At the moment, we are also looking into IBM Business Automation Workflow.

The most valuable features of FileNet are the document management, records management, and integration with other solutions. We want a system of record and that's what it supplies us with, a system of record that's well supported.

It's given us the ability to organize and apply an actual system of record to it, so that we're tracking and making sure that things are disposed of when they need to be. We know where things are. We're applying a real taxonomy to our environment. We're taking many disparate systems and merging them all into one system, and it's now our system of record.

I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as SharePoint; that would be a key one. IBM knows that we want that. Integrations with that and other solutions, in general – other records management solutions, other document management solutions, including those from competitors; that is key for us. While we're trying to coalesce everybody into one system, for the most part, there are other systems that we still have. We still need the connectors to go out to them and connect up everything.

Also, their integration between their own products, such as Watson; things like the Content Collectors and so forth. It would be much better if they made all that work seamlessly together. We've had some troubles with FileNet working with Content Collector, working with Watson and working with Classification. You would think that these things would work seamlessly together but the bridges aren't there. All of the connections aren't in place. It's taking time for that to happen.

One of the key reasons why we went with FileNet is how stable it was. We're very happy with the stability of it.

Scalability-wise, we're really happy with that, as well. It's a system that we built with scalability in mind. We went highly available with it and we know exactly how to branch out for every single node that we want, every component that we've got.

We have used technical support quite a bit. We're heavily engaged with the Lab Services on a regular basis. We have a lot of enhancement requests that are going out and so forth, and IBM has been very responsive to us.

We had a lot of different systems. We wanted an industry leader. At that point in time, they were one of the top ones in the Magic Quadrant from Gartner or Forrester. We did look into this with Gartner and Forrester. We tried to stay as neutral as possible in this decision, and we were looking at several different companies. They just worked their way up to the top, eventually.

We were a very siloed organization. We had different systems in different regions and so forth. It was very difficult to find information, so we knew we needed one. We also knew that there were new government regulations on how we handled our records, and we needed to have something that we could really leverage to facilitate all of that.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with has to do with the size of the organization; what they're able to bring to the table, as far as the number of people and so on. We've dealt with small groups, where there's 1-2 people working for a company. That can make it difficult for us. It's the personnel, the power of the people that they can bring. That's really critical for us.

Also, experience, obviously; that they know what they're doing. I've also dealt with vendors where they come in and they learn with us. When we started with our implementation, ICM was brand new. When we were sitting down with our vendor, we realized quickly the vendor was learning it as we went. So, having some experience with the product is obviously key.

We're a pseudo-governmental organization and that means that we're a slow ship to turn. The decision-making progress takes a long time. There are a lot of different policies and procedures that are in place to gate us as we go through that process. It just naturally takes us a long time to get through it. From strategy, through an RFP, to getting to the point where we made a purchase, it probably took two years.

We did not really think about building an in-house solution. There are components of this that you could probably do on your own. We looked at things like platforms such as SharePoint and so on, and realized that there were limitations. That's why we wanted an enterprise leader; something that's already pre-built that we didn't have to build from the ground up and support. That's not to say that we won't build certain things going out. We've looked at connectors and what we want out of those connector products and we've toiled with the idea of actually building it from the ground up ourselves.

In addition to myself, we also brought in others who have consultant experience, so we knew how to do this from the ground up. If you threw someone new into it, it's very complex, very difficult to do, but since we had lots of experience, we knew what we were doing. It was still complex; not an easy thing to do. You have to have some people with some pretty decent experience to build it up; not only that, but also understand how your customers are actually going to use it. It's one thing to build up a foundation that they can use, it's another thing to make sure it actually does what their business needs.

Really listen to your customer, your users, and what they need. Understand what they need from a records management perspective and what they're going to be migrating from and coming into this with. With these solutions, there are a lot of dials to play with and some of them handle that better than others.

It's a very stable platform. It's obviously a leader. When used properly and the customers understand what it's to be used for, it's an excellent product. Whether or not it's as customizable and user friendly, that's where it starts to drop a little bit as far as I'm concerned. When you compare it to the flexibility and what users can do with SharePoint or some of the competing products like OpenText and so on, it seems like there's a little bit more flexibility on the user side for them to do more with those than what you can with FileNet when it comes out of the box. Now, I do understand, IBM is changing that. That's the reason behind my rating.

We are considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions; a little bit of everything. The box solution is a nice way for us to work with outside agencies such as banks and so on, when we do reviews of them and so forth. We would look at the cloud for development systems and things of that nature. I don't see us moving any of our production-level data out to the cloud at this point in time. An in-house cloud, that's different, perhaps.

We’re now able to provide analytics and content management services for my organization that we weren’t able to provide before, because we didn't really have a complete system before we had this system. We're now a records management system for a central bank.

Document management is probably the key existing service that we're now able to provide better than before. As I’ve mentioned, we had disparate systems, many different search engines to find all that data and now we're all kind of coalescing into one.

We have plans to include mobile. It's a little bit further out and, being a central bank, we have some restrictions as far as what we can do on mobile devices and what they can do to access their network. That makes mobile difficult.

The experiences of our internal customers have changed quite a bit since implementing FileNet. As I’ve mentioned, they've got one area to go to find all their data. For the customers that are using it, they like that quite a bit. Being able to leverage new workflows to improve their business processes is fantastic. As far as external customers, we haven't allowed anybody external. We have no external access to it. That's where we might use something like box down the road.

There's an ebb and flow to usability, as far as what you're willing to customize on the user front end. Coming out of the box, it's difficult to say that it's very usable for customers until you get in and really start customizing it for their needs and understanding how they're going to use it in their day-to-day practice. ICM out of the box is OK from a document management perspective, but it's very generic and it needs to be ironed out and customized. I'm not referring to custom coding, but really going in and tweaking the settings to facilitate what the customers want.

We store our medical records.

The solution is used by business users in our organization. However, in our organization, the business users are connecting into the FileNet system via a set of middle tiers. Their user experience is based on their middle tier application, not my back-end. This middle tier is an integration that we have done on the product.

All ECM systems save time, especially on systems that are well-designed, because the users can retrieve their content in a much quicker and more consistent fashion.

• The uptime
• Stability
• The speed of retrieval

We found that it is incredibly usable and rock solid. FileNet P8 is probably the most usable, extendable option out there in the ECM space.

I understand that video is becoming more prevalent on some of the content which they are storing. We are very happy with that.

It is ability to display legacy content needs improvement.

I've never come across anything better for stability.

The key way that this product has improved the way that that our business functions is by its stability. Its ability to remain up despite other pressures, its consistency, and lack of downtime are really the greatest things that it brings.

There is difficulty in the upgrade path when new versions come due every other quarter.

Absolutely best in market for scalability. You can scale it, and it just keeps on going.

I evaluate technical support every time that I make a technical support request, and they do very well. I am very happy with them.

My previous system, Image Services, was being sunsetted.

The initial setup is very complex, but we expected that. This should be expected with this product. The setup process was complex because it was a migration from the previous system, which was also a FileNet system, and image services. This was a multiyear effort which involved enormous challenges due to the volume and complexity of the data.

We used a business partner for the deployment, who was 100 percent top-notch.

I would recommend finding a business partner who is skilled, then staying with them.

There were no other vendors on my shortlist.

Our primary use case is a medical record, and there isn't an enormous amount of business process management that occurs around that. However, we have seen limited improvement in business process management. 

We expect to be using the solution for automation projects by the end of the year.

Content never dies is the biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution.

I would rate it a nine (out of ten) because of its scalability, uptime, and support.

It's an image repository for our medical documents, our claims, etc. They do all kinds of stuff. They put checks there. It's an indexing software.

It has added more indexing capability on images and enabled us to search them. 

Stores a lot of documents. It's a good repository for that.

What I would want to see is heavier analytical ability within it, but we've purchased the cognitive piece of it. I haven't seen that implemented yet, but that would be the future; I think it may already be there but I just haven't seen it yet. Something like indexing for unstructured text.

At this time, it has improved, but it wasn't that stable not that long ago. 

It seems fine, it's dynamic. It works with all the different business needs that we have for it.

I have not used tech support for this solution.

When selecting a vendor the important criteria are 

• cost
• ease in getting something accomplished
• not over-promising 
• trustworthy.

I would rate it a seven out of 10. That rating is because of stability problems when I first had it - and then, I'm not entirely sure our company has set it up right. Sometimes things are only as good as the people who run it. It's like going to a restaurant. It's only as good as the chef. So you can go to Burger King and have a pretty good burger or you can go down the road, it just depends on how good the chef is. So I think there's some of that dynamic. I don't know that much because I didn't mess with it like at that level. But it's a fine product. We've used it for a very long time.

The advice I would to a colleague at another company who's researching this or another similar solution would be to check how data index with one another, and the communication back and forth in being able to find your files, if you have a large data set like we do. 

We use it to manage all the documents, for all the working groups we have, for management meetings, and for all the projects we run. The advantage is to have a unique place where you can store everything and then we connected it with the another IBM product, IBM Connections. So it's a new way to work, to collaborate, and to exchange documents; even on mobile, especially for people traveling a lot, like me.

It's performing quite well, there is a high level of acceptance by the end-users. Obviously it's all part of the change management that we are running in parallel, and that's so the people can get used to it and discover new features every day. We're quite satisfied, it has performed quite well. 

We have reduced paper, because people, especially at the management level, but not only, use tablets and electronic documents more and more, because they know where things are stored.

And they can access the documents in different ways, like from IBM Connection, from Lotus notes, and all the documents are in FileNet. That's a big advantage because you can save time and you can easily distribute documents to all the people, for example in a project or after a meeting.

For me it's the possibility to share and to collaborate, the possibility to connect FileNet with many other IBM products as well. It helps avoid the possibility of creating "island applications." We have an ecosystem where everything can be interconnected. The people are getting used to it.

In any product, what I would like to see is integration. Because for me, what is important is to be able to give stability in what we provide to the final users. So integration is the keyword for future releases and maybe even new products.

I think it's quite stable, it's a very robust product and we haven't found any major problems or issues, so far.

It seems to be very scalable. We don't have millions and millions of documents, but it seems to be quite scalable and the performance is also quite good.

We are working with a business partner in Switzerland. We work with them for every new release and for configuration. Our experience with them is quite good. We have been partners for quite a while on many different projects with many IBM products, and we are quite satisfied.

Previously we were using, as in many other companies, Windows Network Drive. Then, some years ago, before I came to the company, they decided to invest in IBM FileNet because, in our company, we have used IBM for many years and many purposes, and we were quite satisfied. The consultant proposed this solution and we started with FileNet. Later on, we installed IBM Connections and many other products. We are satisfied, as a long-time IBM user.

For me, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor include that they have to be close to the customer and they need to understand not only the technical point of view, but the business point of view. That is very important. The risk in many projects is well-known, you build a perfect technical solution but maybe it's not covering the requirements, or it's not close enough to business needs, so people don't use it. So the returns are only on paper.

I rate FileNet a nine out of 10. It would be a 10 with closer integration.

In terms of advice, I would say look for something that covers your requirements. From my point of view, FileNet can for sure cover the requirements of a medium and  a big company, because of the scalability and the possibility to connect with many other IBM products.

We use IBM FileNet to store state government-related documents, and conduct workflow processes to channel information between the knowledge workers.

We are very happy with the efficiencies that it has gained, and the customer service that we are able to provide back to the citizens.

It provides us with a solid place to store our records in a structure where we will be able to find those records efficiently. It improves the time when providing customer service to our constituents.

• It is a stable environment.
• It is feature rich.
• It' has a good user interface.

We would like to see, in FileNet, the ability to manage video and audio.

For the most part, the solution is very stable. Once it is a fully-baked application, it is stable.

It scales very well. We are housing 89 million records and 16 terabytes, and the performance is fine.

We have not had to use their technical support. We have done a lot of the support ourselves internally. We have not had to use professional services for a very long time.

We were not using anything in the document management/document capture industry until we purchased FileNet.

We were running out of physical space to maintain records, and the cost of processing documents manually had gotten to be too high. In an effort to reduce our physical storage space and our costs, we decided that a solution was needed.

The biggest benefit to purchasing it was prior knowledge. The prior knowledge of the product: It did what it was supposed to do. It provided a stable environment, a good way to put your documents in, and get your documents out.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I was not part of the evaluation process.

We have been running FileNet for 18 years. It has been a very good relationship.

This product requires that you take a long look at it, because it provides a good solution. It is used across many industries, and it has a solid reputation.

Most important criteria during the evaluation process: Familiarity with the product. The people who were doing the selection had a prior knowledge of the product from a prior company, and it had a very good reputation at that point, even 20 years ago, and the product has maintained that reputation.