What needs improvement with IBM FileNet?

The setup process is very complex, and I would prefer if it were easier. A modern interface would also be an enhancement.

The solution’s pricing could be improved.

IBM does not do very good marketing for FileNet. Initially, after IBM acquired the product, there was good marketing support, but this has dwindled as IBM has lost personnel. More could be done to highlight the benefits to customers. Additionally, there are no visually appealing interfaces or apps for the product, which can influence customer buying decisions.

Currently, our primary ERP system is SAP S/4HANA. Despite this, we have encountered difficulties integrating the solution with it, which remains an unresolved challenge for our team. The renewal cost has significantly increased since we adopted the solution, posing a considerable challenge. Previously, we paid an annual maintenance fee of 22 percent, but now the renewals have become expensive. This cost escalation may prompt us to consider replacing the solution in the future due to pricing concerns. We need training programs for the solution by IBM here. My team could benefit from getting certified and improving their skills. It's something we haven't seen much of in our country. So, if IBM could provide training, it would be helpful.

The application's processing engineer needs to be more advanced.

The user interface of IBM content management, including the ability to customize screens without the need for coding, could be improved. Customers can use it to split the screen, enhancing its suitability for office use cases.

The platform's price could be better than other products in the market. It could be simpler to use, considering multiple use cases. We could deploy it easily with some training as well. IBM offers distinct features through different products, such as IBM Enterprise Records for record management, IBM Datacap for document scanning, and IBM Business Automation Workflow for complex workflows. They could include all the features into one application, similar to other vendors.

Developers like us have an upgraded interface. That interface does not work in the process that we have today. It hangs and is not user-friendly.

IBM File Manager should improve the UI. There should be more customization based on the user.

There are many aspects that can be improved in this product. We're doing a lot of projects with customers. It would help if there was a summary of the products. They should be able to do more upgrades of the product or offer new versions. They could also improve the user experience. They have to think about how to make the environment over. Make it in some containers, for example. The complexity of installation can also be improved. They should re-imagine the way that they install products.

Our client feels FileNet does not provide them with content searchability. They feel it's cumbersome. They're only using Metadata. If the Metadata is not well-populated, it becomes a problem to retrieve a document. Aside from that, they feel the interface — when they look at modern interfaces — is not robust enough for them. However, they're on an old version and I wouldn't know what the current interface looks like. For non-technical users, with what we currently have on the ground, which is the web services, the only challenge we have is that content searchability is not available, because it is an old installation.

Technically, the product is pretty good. In the area of AI and whatever new technologies are coming, I would like to see it able to capture NLP in an advanced search. It would also be good if it could capture images and segregate them in categories within a span of seconds.

There is some confusion with FileNet workflow. It's not really going into the next level. They are probably replacing it with BPM's workflow. So there's an issue of clarity, the vision for going forward. There are a lot of tools and a lot of features, but which one is really going to stay and which one is going away. When they make that vision public it will be good.

We do not know how to use the FileNet API. It seems like it is very difficult and not transparent. They could also improve on the solution's resource consumption and cost.

The analytics in FileNet are too complicated and they consume too much infrastructure, memory, and CPU. They're too expensive to work with. The usability, with the addition of Content Navigator, is not good enough. We're building our own interface, doing a facelift of the product, to satisfy our customers. People here in Israel are generally more Microsoft-oriented. They're used to the SharePoint look and feel, the Outlook look and feel. When they see Content Navigator and its features, it's a bit different for them. It's hard for them to get used to it. Most of our customers and users are asking for features with a file-system-type look and feel. For example, when they open a folder in their file system they want to see the hierarchy of the folders. If IBM built something like other products, like M-Files for example, with a file-browsing feature, into P8, it would be a very good feature. Most customers around the world would use it. That is what we're trying to build on our own. It would be easier for the customer to work with, in the same way IBM did with the Content Navigator Office Integration. There, you can browse through Office, the folders, and find things. You can drag and drop documents from Word, from Outlook, straight into the file folder in FileNet. If they would bring these kinds of features into the file system itself, without Office, it would be a killer feature.

The area of migrations to new versions must be made easier. It's quite good that they have now begun to improve the API area, to modernize the interfaces, but there's always a very big investment involved in migrating from one version to another. That prohibits rolling out new functionalities to customers. It's not so easy. You can't release a new version every three months to bring in new capabilities. That is the old-fashioned, the way it worked ten or 20 years ago. That is bad. In that area, they really must improve. We have FileNet, Content Manager, and TSM in our own installation. We migrated that installation three years ago to version 5.12. Now we have to migrate to 5.25 to bring in new facilities, and it's a big task. We have to do it in addition to our other tasks where we support customers. We need a parallel machine and to set it up there and to migrate step-by-step, then test it and roll it out. It's not so easy. That is a big area where there is much to be done to satisfy the needs of customers.

We have been working with it from version 4.0 and now it is at 5.3. They have improved a lot already. However, there is room for improvement in the file management. It's very complex. In addition, they should have a built-in application for directly capturing documents from the scanners. Currently, they have that, but it is a separate product. They should have a built-in solution for that functionality.

IBM has a lot of documentation but the kind of information in a lot of the documents can be confusing to our clients. It would be easier if they used video tutorials. Right now, the information is too hard to understand, and there is a lot of it. If they used videos I think FinalNet would be easy to use for an end-user. The technical information is hard to understand at times, especially on the installation of the product. And that's particularly true when you have to install FileNet with high-availability. In addition, there are a lot of use cases for FileNet as a platform. There are other tools on the market with demos or models, ready-to-use use cases that can be configured. With FileNet, all projects we have to be developed step-by-step. IBM should develop some use cases or pre-configured models, across use cases. That would help us speed up implementation a lot.

I would like to see support for different databases, like MySQL. I believe it's a good thing to have options. I don't think that there will be a lot of customers doing that, but nowadays people like to have options. There is room for improvement in the scanning solution, Datacap. It's improving all the time. But since it's more an end-user software, the end-users are constantly improving their processes, and I believe that sometimes we're not catching up with their requirements.

The basic and fundamental point about FileNet is that the interface is very bad. It's just not appealing so people are reluctant to use it. Nowadays, when you go to any web application or mobile application, the interface is very appealing and very intuitive. These aspects are not available in FileNet. People are very reluctant to use that kind of application, one which has a very plain UI. It should also provide different APIs to interface with multiple applications. There are some connection services for SAP but we have found the extent of such connections is not usable for our needs. We want a side-by-side type of a scenario where we can open an SAP transaction on one half of a screen and on the other half we should get a document from FileNet. That functionality is not in the version we have right now. In addition, it needs a very smooth storage and retrieval process. Along with that, the workflow should be very simple to configure. Currently, we are capturing most of the information in Excel and then interface Excel with FileNet. That should not be how IBM FileNet works. They should improve on how the workflows can be automated with minimum effort on the programming side.

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.

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.

We have had different problems and IBM has resolved those different problems.

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

Before we ask for any documents from customers, we would like to automatically see if any of them are already in our system. Are the documents signed already? We need to know before we have them sign a document that the document has already been signed. That is done manually, it's not automated. Also, I have heard that there is already an integration with DocuSign. That was one of our needs. We brought DocuSign into our company's solution three years before. At that time there was no direct integration. We wanted to pull documents out from FileNet, push them to DocuSign and, when done, retrieve them and store them back in FileNet. We wrote our own custom solution for that. It would be nice if there was some tool we could have used to do that. It would be helpful if I could submit a question and get a bunch of documents back. I would like to be able to query the documents that are already in the system and then we wouldn't have to worry about some of them because they're only year-old documents. If there is a document that is three years old we may have to re-ask for it from the customer. Such a rules-engine is not available. Moreover, the questionnaire we use to generate documents is in XML and then it's coded in a scripting language. If there were rules it would be easy to configure them to pull out a specific document. The business cannot find what documents are in a given area right now.

The new software and trends with the cloud solution is a little slow. I would like them to move toward more cloud-based and microservices rather than a SaaS model. This is where the industry is going and what customers are asking for. The usability is a lot better than it used to be.

It is really not useful for us as a front-end tool. If somebody wants to access documents, I would not let them use the FileNet interfaces. I would like more controlled APIs, tools, exception handling, and ways to globally monitor it. Something that would make it a true back-end system. I would like to have more governance features with more supervisory layers. Access control integration would be nice. You can actually control access, but it's not that easy to integrate. It is all up to our software to make sure that we do the job, and we don't always do. We all screw up. The API needs improvement.

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.

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.

In Content Navigator we want to see the ability to view different types of video. They have come up with video support. We are using HTML 5 but it's very limited. They don't have a lot support for a lot of video formats. We definitely want to see support for most types of video formats in the market. That's the main feature we are looking for. There is room for improvement when we need a fix to a bug in the application. That has to be a little bit quicker as compared to other solutions. It takes time for them to release any interim fixes. That impacts business on our side. We have had to wait for the solution, and sometimes it takes three weeks, sometimes it takes more than a month.

It 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This solution could be improved with the ability to present the file system from FileNet.

Simplifying both training and maintenance would be an improvement.

I would like IBM to improve with each release, continue moving towards a continual, tighter integration, and build solutions that take advantage of all the different modules the platform has from one place.

I would like to see in FileNet integrated with Watson, which can read something and send it without any human contact or interaction.

We would like to have more automation of rollout solutions. We've done some of this on our own. We've created what we call a repository builder that will build out a standardized solution meeting the needs of most of our customers initially. This has saved us a tremendous amount of time. We did this using the APIs the product provides. They just don't always provide those same sorts of tools. The user interface is also extensible through programming. Although, it's not easy to set up, so some improvements along these lines would be good too.

First of all, let's be clear, it's a relatively mature product. It's been around, it's been finely-tuned to handle the vast majority of what customers want it to handle. Most customers probably only utilize 20 to 30 percent of the feature functionality. In terms of functionality, what customers might be looking for is a little more in terms of native-records retention. Records Management is an add-on product. If there were just a little more of that built into the core functionality, that would be helpful. Just like when you set up the document type or the document class, it would be good to be able to indicate the retention for this data. By being able to turn that on, customers might more often default to doing record purges rather than keeping everything forever. But that's just a small item.

Preforms could be useful for specific projects.