IBM FileNet Reviews

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It's very robust. We have been using it for the last 15 years and we've never had any opinion to change it or not use it. So far, we have been very happy with it.

Slowly, we are streamlining all our document management systems. We are including all other departments into FileNet who were not using FileNet as a document management system.

The user interface for FileNet can be improved. It was not very professional, you could say, in the beginning, so we developed a custom user interface. With the new ICN, they have come a long way, but they still need to work on the ease of use for the user/customer. So, the user interface is one thing where they're lacking.

It's very expensive, so they could make it a little cheaper but still, it's good.

We never had any stability issues.

Scalability-wise and robustness-wise, it's awesome.

The technical support is very professional and efficient. So far, we have been very happy with it.

Before we started using FileNet on our own, we were subcontracting with other departments using their FileNet. So, around 2007, we decided to move to our own installation and our own system, rather than using the county's system.

I was involved in the initial setup. It's very straightforward, as long as you know what you're doing.

It's on the expensive side.

If someone is comparing FileNet against other solutions like SharePoint or open-source solutions, I think they should be looking into the scalability, robustness and the whole document lifecycle features.

When I look to work with a vendor, the most important criteria is their in-house expertise, how competent they are, the resources they have in their organization; and then, price. We always have to look at which vendor is good and cheap.

For our custom projects, we outsource to a couple of vendors, such as Imagine Solutions. We work with them. They are vendors for FileNet solutions. They don't compete against FileNet. They help us in upgrading FileNet. Those type of projects.

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.

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.

We use IBM Case Manager as our platform for deploying our telemedicine solution. The use case is delivering connectivity between patient and doctor without any third parties. The cognitive capabilities of Case Manager and how we're able to create a case, which is a patient, are very valuable for us. Everything that goes into an object is about the patient, versus it being event driven.

The most critical benefit has been ease of use. It speeds along our development, helping us go to market a lot sooner.

It's cognitive capabilities and scalability. 

I'd like to see more cognitive. That's obviously where all of our world is going. I think if we can have more of those types of features and functions as a core, out of the box, that would be very helpful for us and our space.

Excellent. It's probably one of the most mature pieces of technology that IBM offers. 

I believe we built it on that platform because of its ability to scale to whatever size we need to go to.

We're consistently using technical support and they're doing a great job to this point.

We started with IBM Case Manager after doing our research on some of the other ones, just sampling them. We saw that the other ones didn't have the scalability and were very easily breakable.

For me, the most important criterion when selecting a vendor is trust.

There's a level of complexity, but our exposure, for starters, has been with the IBM Concierge, where the solution is fully loaded already, Case Manager on all of its platforms. But when we try to do it ourselves, that's not as smooth. 

We started with considering doing a peer, mobile-first type application. Obviously, from a mobility perspective that's great, but you need a lot more heft from data storage and otherwise. 

I will rate it at eight out of 10, because I think some of the technical pieces, when implementing it ourselves, were something of a roadblock until we discovered the Concierge. Those are some things they have to work on. We'd like to be a lot more independent for something like that. But outside of that, from what it delivers in terms of functionality, it's great.

My advice would be, respect the maturity of the solution if you're trying to go to a huge scale. Most new stuff breaks.

It really has improved our organization, because it's the repository of all our documents, PDF, etc. That's where we are archiving and storing all those documents, so it's critical.

The natural interoperability with IBM Datacap, that is a key component of our solution, as well as with BPM, and WebSphere Portal. That's why we prefer FileNet instead of some other, less world-class solution.

Support is good. When they have to escalate internally, in order to get some more expert advice internally, they do so and it's okay.

No problem. We've were helped by IBM. That is, you always have problems on a project, but what I ask is whether the solutions have been solid. Yes, they have.