OpenText Content Manager Reviews

All features are important for a complete solution since any solution will need to cater to drive the transformation from the reliance on paper-based processes to digitized solutions, as per the following:

• Inbound processing – capturing incoming traffic through inbound scanning, conversion to long-term preservation PDF format, document classification, metadata extraction, capturing emails.
• Repository/storage of content – ingesting all inbound traffic to a reliable ECM system with governance capabilities relating to records and information management with the capacity to identify records, storing, retrieving, collaborating, tracking, security, lifecycle management – disposal and retention, etc.
• Outbound processing – documenting composition and dispatch and database storage.

Many organizations are facing the same problems with their operating environment and scope of responsibilities. Due to the fact that collaboration with external stakeholders has grown in scale and complexity, keeping track of important business decisions and ensuring that all relevant internal and external stakeholders have timely access to this information, is now a major corporate challenge, as in the exponential growth of paper, shared drives and emails.

Government agencies and private organisations alike expect to do more with the same or fewer resources. Giving staff the tools to enhance productivity is essential to help meet the increasing demands and expectations of the Government and public in a constrained fiscal environment. Changes to Government policy concerning digital records management, security and amendments to legislation such as the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts are also expanding compliance requirements for employees and corporate IT systems. Digital Continuity is an approach to creating and managing information that can be trusted and used for as long as needed despite technological change.

This is how the solution has helped transform business organisations. Businesses are facing the same problems. Network drives, accumulation of paper records, and email used to manage documents and other digital format records of business value do not adequately support the information management compliance requirements. This lack of an enterprise approach to information access and management is limiting organisational efficiency, responsiveness and capacity to maximize business opportunities.

Investment in a modern EDRMS solution has been identified as a key component for addressing efficiency and compliance business needs. Electronic business will mean the necessity to become more diligent and smarter in terms of the information management of the department. Usually a staged approach is taken to select and implement a commercial-off-the-shelf EDRMS. Hence the above vendors cater for these goals and objectives to some degree with integration to Record Management software capabilities, as well as OCR, conversion capabilities and content management.

In line with any digital continuity policy an EDRMS solution is about making sure that information is complete, available and therefore usable for business needs. Information is usable if people can:

• Find it when they need it.
• Open it as they need it.
• Work with it in the way they need it.
• Understand what it is and what it is about.
• Trust that it is what it says it is.

So any product vendor solution must be able to meet the above minimum requirements closely aligned to an out of the box solution such as MS SharePoint has perfected.

Perhaps:

• Cloud computing could be added.
• The ability to substantiate adherence to Australian security standards.
• Better ways in managing extraction of metadata.

In the case of SharePoint you rely on user selection but vendors should try to alleviate human intervention where possible.

I have used the above products for the last 20 years.

Many projects I've worked on encounter issues in production relating to load balancing and throttling where systems cannot cope with the volumes and capacity of transactional processing.

In the case of conversion of Adlib software polling MS Exchange and writing to an HNAS drive, it managed to bring down both servers. It's paramount to adequately plan capacity and preventive maintenance.

They need to support the processing by adding CAS servers, etc to manage extra loads. Also there is the importance of creating an active/active redundancy topology.

The technical support is OK as long as you pay for ongoing technical support structure to get appropriate support during critical breakdown when time is money and have the vendor understand your backup and recovery needs for transparent BAU continuity.

We have used many that do not deliver what they say so we chose the above because they deliver the goods. However, licensing is always an issue.

Initial setup is always complex to get all integrated processes/technology/software working together. For example, Adlib software will poll exchange mailboxes to ingest and process emails and create conversion and content metadata XML output as well as PDFA documents including native formats. OpenText OCC will poll the HNAS drive to ingest the output files that Adlib produced and to OCR all documents and create full text index to extract all metadata and them apply customization code that ingests the Adlib conversion metadata and merge the OCR content metadata then output the transformed XML with the PDF files ready for the next step.

Any content management software will then poll the output directory and ingest all files into the ECM system to store in a database record management system. Paper documents digitized by an external provider were transferred via secure FTP to a shared drive which the ECM system utilities would also poll to ingest and create the records in the EDRMS.

Some implementations were in-house and others were through vendor engagement.

Initial ROI is not appreciated but if you look at the time it takes to process for example, claims, then you are providing an optimized business model where you are competitive because you are more responsive to customer requests and processing.

Claims don't take a week or a month, instead they are processed daily and get into a downstream workflow system that sends notifications and gets assigned to the relevant teams to action. This creates a more sustainable, competitive, government compliant, and secure solution in the long term which pays off on the investment.

Be very clear with functional and non-functional requirements. Set forth minimum mandatory baseline business requirements in order to meet overall EDRMS objectives, aligned with the Principles and Functional Requirements for Records in Digital Office Environments and compliance. Also identify non-mandatory features deemed desirable but not mandatory.

In addition:

• Provide the organisation functional requirements specific to the use and operation of the EDRMS.
• Detail the relevant standards and specifications applicable to the efficient management of public/private records – NAA or PROV.
• Provide the mapping and traceability between the Business Requirement and NAA standard/business and specification with the functional use case as context.
• Provide guidance to vendors in the implementation of the EDRMS system, testing and user acceptance testing.

All requirements should be uniquely identified for tracking purposes and have a business priority assigned to provide an understanding of business importance.

The priorities should be derived from an EDRMS strategy to ensure consistency across business units. A code should be provided to indicate EDRMS’s (Vendors) ability to meet the business, compliance and functional requirements. There should be clear traceability in their ability to meet expectations. What is their ability to meet functional and non-functional requirement statements? Can they fully meet, partially meet, conditionally meet, solution not concluded, cannot deliver, etc.

Stipulate your complexity model to identify what requires complex customization, requires complex configuration, requires minor configuration or is an out of the box requirement. Identifying these components will make it easy to manage the vendor's deliverables and gives the business a better grasp on the monetary bottom line expectation and where the money is being allocated to. Create transparency where you can.

Records management tracking and workflows.

• Eliminated the need for paper records.
• Increased compliance with our internal approval processes.
• Helped us with grant, contract approval, and retention.
• The workflow routes the contract/grant through our legal group and then on to the department and/or finance department and/or city manager for approval.
• Can use the workflow to see where in the process their contract/grant is and where it may have gotten stalled.
• The contract/grant route is dependent on what kind of document it is, what agency it is with, and the cost.
• Helps with the filing of the records and to track and close contract tasks.
• Our agency doesn’t want too many different workflows: It gets confusing for users to decide which one to use.
• Too many options on the workflow for users to select

• Having a workflow tool that is a little bit smarter. This means being able to leverage the metadata entered about a record in order to make workflow decisions.
• Having a workflow template designer that didn’t require adding in a whole lot of steps in order to make the circuit work.
• The retention tool is probably fine. It just needs a lot of trial and error to get more comfortable. That is probably a user issue on my end with me.
• The reporting tool is very clunky and it is hard to make it do what I want it to do.
• There is very little information in the online help. Just this week I was trying to build a report that would have a simple signature line at the report end with some standard text. I was limited to how much text each box could have. I couldn’t find a simple way to set a margin for the report that wouldn’t have the signature line drop off the page.
• Trying to figure out which versions of which fields to add to the report.
• Tying everything to the “bands” isn’t that intuitive either.

I have used HPE Content Manager since 2006.

The product is very stable.

We have not had scalability issues.

Technical support is very frustrating. It is difficult to get a good response from HPE and even more difficult to find anyone that can really help us with the product.

It doesn’t fail often. When it does, it is usually something unusual and out of scope for our regular group that handles common errors.

The initial setup was complex.

Make sure this is really a product you are going to use fully. Otherwise, you are paying for a lot for a product that won’t get utilized.

We evaluated EMC and OpenText.

You can’t pre-plan enough on how you want to organize the records. The more planning you put into the implementation, the more you will get from the product. Don’t discount the amount of hand-holding and change management your organization might need.

HPE Content Manager 9, and its predecessors, is an excellent EDRMS with a strong emphasis on record lifecycle and compliance with government standards. It provides unparalleled storage and search capabilities, and is an invaluable tool to information management units across all sectors.

HPE Content Manager has built-in workflow components allowing users to manage business processes with ease.

Currently in development is a web client version of the software, doing away with the need to deploy full software clients to staff PCs. This web client requires more refinement to be viable as a desktop client replacement.

I’ve been using and supporting HPE Content Manager in its various versions and names for around six years.

Deployment comes in two parts:

• Server-side deployment, which, depending on the scale of deployment, can be fairly straightforward.
• Client-side deployment, on the other hand, can be complex.

In order to maintain stability, some monitoring from ICT staff is required to catch any anomalies before they become issues.

The system is very scalable with the ability to add infrastructure as required.

HPE has a self-help web page and a very active forum for HPE Content Manager. When lodging support tickets, the response time is very quick and the personnel are very professional. It helps to include as much information in the support tickets, as often you will be asked the same questions up front.

I have trialed other EDRMS solutions, though Content Manager is the software leader.

Initial software setup is straightforward, though quite a lot of preparation is required for the information management processes. As the software is very customizable, the actual configuration for business use requires a lot of input from information management staff.

My primary role is actually to implement this solution and, as consultants, I would suggest using vendor/partners.

Content Manager is a software seat license agreement. I would suggest ordering bulk licenses as running out of licenses can be disruptive to business.

Look for vendors or partners in your area to offer advice.

• Audit events on documents, folders
• Ability to manage retention, disposition
• Sharing documents, setting security on documents and folders
• User labels (we wish they were ‘shareable’)

• Sharing of documents
• Reduction of duplication
• Ability to manage retention, disposition and overall records management

• Easier to set security/access at all levels.
• Make the job of the administrator managing the system easier (client setup, position setup, org changes).
• The system options > Permissions tab for each user type: There are too many permissions with our recent upgrade that were ‘clumped together’ that make it difficult to manage what people in the system can do (e.g., Records Coordinators’ vs Records Managers’ ability for document deletion and removal).
• Copying datasets is difficult and time-consuming
• Enhancement requests that have been submitted are either not implemented or take a very long time to be implemented (we’ve stopped submitting them because of this).
• Emails used to be stored in VMBX format (now it is MSG format): This is problematic when trying to pull the emails out of HPE RM.
• Compound/linked files (e.g., InDesign, Dreamweaver, AutoCAD, linked Excel): When filed in HPE RM, the links are broken. This means that several departments at my organization cannot use HPE RM for their documents.
• Help file is not very helpful and has room for improvement.

I have used it since Sept. 2008.

It is hard to get technical support when you try to integrate HPE RM with other products. For example, when implementing a third-party load balancer, the response time was impacted significantly. It is a gray area between technical support and/or consulting, HPE did not provide much support.

Generally speaking, HPE’s support for the product has been weak since the acquisition from TOWER Software. There is a large gap between 1st-level support and the often-required 3rd-tier support. Escalation is often onerous and HPE seems to be focused on closing tickets rather than solving issues. More technical issues that need to go beyond support to the development group are extremely difficult to move forward.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The first level of technical support is not very helpful. All support calls have to go through the first level of support unless you purchase premium support. The application has a complex architecture with lots of arcane configuration settings. Complex issues often fall into the “try this” trap, which can cause serious impacts.

There was no document management system for the entire organization. However, one department (legal) was using Worldox, due the integration with their case management system.

• Issues with setting up and getting the retention schedule triggers to work: The help menu was not helpful and this was not a part of the basic configuration that was initially set up with the consultants.
• Management of multiple offices of primary responsibility (OPR): In our system, we have multiple OPRs, and HPE RM clients were using the owner to manage only one OPR.

The licensing model changed from the original model when we purchased the product. Initially, there was one license type (expensive) and you controlled what the user could do through the user security configuration. The new model breaks the licenses into multiple types, from Admin (full access) down to Read Only. Each successive level has functional areas they are prescribed from using. You will need to map those functions against your internal planned security wants to ensure you are buying the correct license type. For us, other than a handful of Read Only licenses, all new purchases tend to be at least the Records Manager level, as (for us) the lower license type are missing key capabilities.

Hummingbird document management was the only other shortlisted vendor. Others may have been in the initial RFP process. Keep in mind that we initiated it in 2008.

Fully understand the impact of how you set up the system; for example, the internal locations directory, security groups, security/access on different levels (classification, folder).

The most valuable features are retention and additional field options. Retention is important because we need to know when records are due for destruction for compliance. The ability to add our own user-defined fields allows us to modify this product to suite our needs.

It allows us to be in compliance and we know where every single record is located. This allows us to be efficient.

I would like to see an improvement in the licensing process. It is very complicated and it seems to involve many different people throughout the entire process.

We have used this solution for over 15 years. It was a product originally developed by TOWER Software and purchased by HP.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We used different in-house solutions over 15 years ago. They didn’t have many options and someone in-house had to create and manage them.

This is a wonderful product with many options. We have never been disappointed by it.

We use the solution for records management.

The solution allows us to do digital management, everything being digital nowadays, without the need to resort to paper use. The entire process has been digitized. 

We like how the solution allows us to have retention of records and workflows, as well as its fire plan. 

The ease of use should be addressed. If one is skillful then this will not present a problem, but a person who is not will be forced to struggle. 

Mobility, as it relates to the ability to have access, should also be addressed. 

We have been using Micro Focus Content Manager for five years. 

The solution is stable and is being used by bigger companies the world over. 

The solution is scalable. The technology allows for the scaling of different modules. Unlike SharePoint, the scalability is fine. There are different modules that can be scaled within the technology. 

We have plans to increase the usage. 

Premium support is available and it is good. 

Prior to the use of Micro Focus Content Manager we made use of SharePoint. We switched to the current solution since it provides a more mature process of records management. 

The deployment took six months and our implementation strategy was that of a cloud-based service package.

The implementation is handled by the partners.

We did everything on our own.

There are around five people responsible for deployment and maintenance. 

I would prefer not to address the frequency of our licensing requirements. 

The fees incurred are for the licensing and maintenance.

We also evaluated OpenText, but decided to go with Micro Focus Content Manager in the end. 

The entire organization makes use of the solution and this is primarily done by those in charge of records management. 

The organization comprises 500 people. 

My advice to others is that they cannot go wrong with the solution. It is the stable and secure Content Manager product available. 

I rate Micro Focus Content Manager as a seven out of ten. 

The product is valuable generally due to its wide use and acceptance in the public sector in my region. The skills and knowledge are transferable.

Many associated products offer OTS integrations.

Some of the tools are useful for sharing information; however, organizational culture inhibits records management compliance and TRIM acceptance, in general, is low.

It has extensive configuration restrictions for administrators and file extension limitations.

Clunky in look and feel.

I have been using it for approximately seven years over different versions.

We had regular and different experiences related to user profiles and control over client product.

We have not had any scalability issues.

Support is good from a preferred vendor.

Our previous solution was outdated and non-compliant.

It was an easy installation.

Pricing is competitive.

We did not evaluate alternatives.

There are serious considerations of compliance for the product role. HPE TRIM has limitations beyond a document repository.