What advice do you have for others considering IBM FileNet?

The tool has proven robust without any notable functionality or performance issues. Currently deployed on the primary side, we plan to implement it in a high-availability environment on a DR site. This implementation will provide insights into the ease or difficulty of setup and management in such configurations. I rate it a seven out of ten.

The operations management team primarily utilizes IBM FileNet as the foundational tool for content management. It offers a range of modules with additional functionalities for tasks such as daily maintenance, yearly maintenance, and quarterly maintenance. It has broader capabilities, and the team has tailored its usage to meet specific content management needs. The platform efficiently streamlines the handling of documents and content in our organization. It is a user-friendly system and easy to manage for anyone with basic knowledge. It has been leveraged effectively in our existing workflow, particularly concerning third-party components and directory services. The security features work effectively in managing sensitive information and ensuring confidentiality. I rate it an eight out of ten.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I rate IBM FileNet an eight out of ten. I recommend the product. I advise others to go for it if they have the budget. It is a mature product with enough resources and support partners in various regions.

I rate IBM File Manager a seven out of ten.

My advice to someone considering this solution is that there are a lot of open-source tools available. Other than going for IBM FileNet you should look into other options too because even we are not using the full potential of FileNet and we are paying a huge amount of money for it. I would rate FileNet a seven out of ten.

We use the on-premises deployment model. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

My advice would be, before you go for any DMS, don't get stuck on looking for solutions that rate highly in industry reviews. For some of my clients, that is important, but others aren't concerned about that. They say, "Does the solution address my problem? Is it cost-effective? Can I scale up? If yes, good." Those are all things my clients are looking for.

If you want to integrate it with multiple other solutions you can do it quite easily. It exposes its services and it exposes APIs so you can integrate it with other applications have on the floor. These days, whatever products we have, we can do multiple things on the platform itself with some simple configuration. We are still thinking about merging IBM BPM with FileNet. In terms of automation, we have two BPM products. We capture the file transfers, outbound and inbound. We capture forms with pharmacy data from customers, the pharmacy branches. They collect it and scan it and then it is processed under BPM. We keep a version of the document in FileNet. So far, there has been a very small ROI with the project. There is ROI but if the project can be explored further, it will have better ROI. In terms of market capture, FileNet is significant in North America. It is coming along in the Middle East, but in North America, I would say it is the leader. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten. It's a flexible, very much scalable product and it's very user-friendly.

FileNet is at the top of our list of referred content management solutions. It ranks well in industry reviews. FileNet has a customer base in different domains and different business areas. If somebody wants to implement it, they should look at the case studies and see how it is being implemented and what the benefits are. In terms of its usability, we mostly use the out-of-the-box capabilities of FileNet, such as the Content Navigator. BPM has built-in capabilities to communicate with FileNet and we also develop certain Java-based GUIs. With the new version, the UI has been improved as has the performance. There is also a distributed enrollment that FileNet allows. There is something Cache Service Manager so you can have this service set up and distributed so that people can access it locally. I would rate FileNet at nine out of ten. IBM needs to clarify the vision, the roadmap of what is expected for it. How they want to take this product to the next level, that is what is missing.

The biggest lesson I have used from using this solution is that, if it were up to me, I would choose a solution with a very easy upload method and an easy-to-use API. My advice would be to understand the company deeply before making a decision. We're not using much automation related to FileNet. We will introduce BAW soon, with a goal of introducing time savings. In terms of expanding our use of automation in our organization, we may convert some of our approval processes from paper to digitalized documents.

It's a stable solution. It's proven. It provides guaranteed compliance; neither the attributes nor the content itself can be modified. You can guarantee and report that. The implementation time is no more than for other products. And the product is scalable. In creating our tools we have integrated a lot with FileNet. It's very easy to integrate because the only thing you need is a mechanism to store, a way to add and change attributes, and to retrieve. You also have to be sure that you have a good search engine when you do not have direct attributes, a full content search. In the first years, we were not happy with the usability of the content management products. Content Manager had no value for end-user interfaces. We passed on the strong demand for that. In the last few years, with the new versions of Content Navigator, it has been much better. We have a good interface also in Notes, in the right sidebar. It's a solution from IBM, Germany, where you can drag and drop documents. The Content Navigator now also has mobile support with a good interface. It's much more useful than it was before. The internal features haven't changed and are enough to fulfill the requirements of customers. But customers always want a beautiful GUI. It's much more necessary to sell it with a beautiful GUI than with the functionality they really need. When we sell it, the end-user interface carries a much greater weight in customer decision-making than the technical part. On the technical side, there is nothing that FileNet is missing. There are three ways things can be stored: in the database, in the filestore, or in TSM. Our larger customers have TSM as object storage for FileNet and that is a very good solution. We have not implemented the IBM Automation Platform for Digital Business. We have looked at it. We thought that in the last two or three years it was too big, too heavy, and too expensive for our customers. We are rethinking that at the moment, looking again to see if it can help and if it makes sense. We are not sure in the moment if this automation package is really a helpful and an effective investment. Overall I would rate FileNet at nine out of ten. What it's missing to make it to a ten is the possibility of implementing new versions and new functions easily, in smaller time intervals, without a big investment on the customer's side. That is a barrier to new functionalities. In addition, IBM doesn't market well. You do not hear anything about FileNet in the market — nothing. Nobody has promoted it over the last three years. You hear much more about all other DMS systems compared to FileNet. You hear about new facilities, about mobility, and the integration of scanning and scanning-automation processes. You don't hear anything about FileNet. And that doesn't make it easy.

If you are a small or medium-sized company, I would advise working with other programs before you put money into FileNet, even though I've worked with it for a long time. If we're talking about a large company, for the robustness, stability, performance, and the growth — that you can grow it within seconds — I would advise using FileNet, without any doubt. The performance is dependent on the database. Issues with performance are usually associated with databases issues. And, as I mentioned, the GUI of IBM Content Navigator caused a lot of issues with performance, but it's working well with our GUI. I would rate FileNet at eight out of ten. It's not a ten because of issues like the flexibility of the system, the ease of working with or manipulating or programming and enlarging it. It needs to be more flexible to work with, not hard-coded and not closed like it is now.

In terms of the biggest lessons I've learned from using the product, when we installed the first time, I didn't know anything about document management. But with time, I learned that the most important thing is choosing the best infrastructure. My advice would be to use a specialist in documentation management to implement the solution. That's not just true for FileNet, it's true for other solutions as well. I would rate FileNet at eight out of ten. No product is perfect. You will always find some bugs.

I would definitely advise going with FileNet. It is better when it comes to scalability. We have integrated it with multiple systems. We have integrated it with customized customer applications built in-house and with Oracle ERP. It's also integrated with a customer's website. The solution provides a built-in API and by using the APIs we are integrating it easily with other systems.

You need to be patient when you first use FileNet because the information is hard to understand. People often learn a lot when they go over the licensing agreement because it gives them all the possibilities of the platform. You also need technical expertise to use the platform. In addition, it's important to use support after implementation. Keep updated on the versions of the product and try to use all its capabilities. Don't try to customize the product code because that may lead you into difficulties. I would rate FileNet, overall, at seven out of ten. It's not just about the platform. It's also the skills of the people around the platform. That is the most important thing you have. The platform is good but it's the people who know the platform who can be hard to find.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is that every solution is unique. In general, out-of-the-box, it can meet up to 80 or 90 percent of the requirements, but you still need to gear it a little bit differently for different customers. Every business has its own requirements. My advice would be to make the right choice, which is IBM. It means less trouble for the customer and less trouble for the engineer installing it. In terms of the usability of the solution, once we configure and set up everything according to the requirements our customers have, they are really happy with what they get. That's why we spend a lot of time working with them every time there is an upgrade or whenever we implement it for the first time within an organization, to make sure that every single business unit gets all it needs. The solution is used by everybody in the company and they find the solution usable. I would rate FileNet at ten out of ten because it's great for the customers and it's great for all the engineers involved in the process. It's great for everybody.

We are an Indian company and the skillset available in India for FileNet is very small. We wanted to to resolve some technical issues and we faced a lot of problems from Indian tech people in supporting us. IBM needs to increase the expertise of FileNet in India wherever possible. They should open training centers or schools in India where people can get exposure to FileNet. We have SAP ERP for our business applications. We have mail and messaging from Microsoft. We have different productivity applications developed for our own environment, for our own business and business cases. Specifically regarding RPA, we have not developed anything as of yet.

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.

Create a solution combining the strengths of all of IBM's products: IBM BPM, FileNet, or IBM Case Manager, a product which sits on top of IBM FileNet technology. We have banks as clients with 3,000 to 4,000 employees but the FileNet users number between 100 and 200.

Try it because it works. There are many alternative solutions, but this one has worked well for us. It has been scalable, and there have been different automation that we have been able to surround it with that have helped us to make it even closer knit to the clients' business needs. It is very integratable, which is good. We have a lot of different integrations that goes on with it. It allows for a lot of hooks into it, so we can use code. There are also different components which are available with it, even out-of-the-box. It is advanced and further along than other products. There are always different ways to do something. Sometimes automation and technology will help resolve these more than we think.

I attended the tech track at the IBM conference. We have not integrated this solution with other solutions.

My advice is to set up rules in an outside programming tool. Put them in a separate configuration tool and make an API call to find a list of the documents which match. It would then show the list of the documents to the partner who is trying to open the account. Currently, sometimes they send a request and they get a bunch of documents and they say, "This isn't what I want, I want something else." Then they change the question and the region of the documents. To preview a list of the documents we have to generate the documents. The reason we cannot preview is because the rules are coded in our system instead of being externalized in a separate configuration. We are not doing anything around automation at this time. We are just capturing the documents but we are not analyzing them. My team is looking into expanding into automation, as is the architecture team. There have been meetings with IBM recently on that. The use of the solution within our organization is growing. A lot of business units are onboarding the solution now. We started with one and now we've got four or five business units we are supporting. We have business users using the solution. For them, the usability is not 100 percent but it gives them some flexibility. They still have a problem: they may open an account for a customer but there are five different types of accounts. They have to ask for specific documents each time but they don't want to send the same document to the customer for five different accounts. There is some intelligence we cannot apply at the moment, such as finding which documents are already in the system and that we don't want to send to the client to fill out again. It is manual work as of now. The relationship manager will look into all the documents and say, "Okay, I already have this document from the client in the past couple of months so I won't send it again." Primarily, when we generate documents we don't apply intelligence to validate which documents we have. We don't analyze the data in the system; we keep generating documents. I would rate FileNet at nine out of ten. All the capabilities I needed in setting up documents or applying security, using content and filters, met the requirements that we had for the solution.

Depending on the customer's needs (requirement) and how they have they have laid out their environment, I would recommend the product. The product has improved over time through automation. We plan to expand automation into machine learning, artificial intelligence, and analytics.

We have integrated FileNet with other solutions, and the integration process works. The biggest lesson that I learned from using this solution is to slow down. Think five years ahead and don't worry about today. 15 years ago, I would look at my problems of the day and try to solve them, or maybe at my problems of the next year and try to solve them. Today, I look at my problems five to ten years from now, then try to think of them and go towards a solution, as much as possible.

The product is worth considering. It has a lot of support with a lot of pedigree. Make sure your ducks are in a row, as far as understanding what your user requirements are and what your processes are around your content management needs. Then, once you have that done, definitely consider this as a very viable option. Take your time and be careful with your planning phases. We have integrated the solution with Enterprise Records. We have written our own custom interface that sits on top of Content Navigator. We have also written integrations to databases for lookups. We are not using the solution for automation projects yet. I would rate it a seven out of ten for its stability and maturity as a product. However, because it is so big, it is sort of slow to catch up to trends and things like privacy by design.

Do a study and learn about the solution instead of jumping in and finding out about stuff later on. Attend conferences before making decisions and doing things. Then, you can make a smart call. We haven't used any automation so far. I would like to explore the business partners on automation and find out much more about it. While it does have business and case management in the tool, we are not really using it.

The biggest lesson we have learned in using this solution is that nowadays everything is digitized so people want to take decisions faster. If you want to make your business processes faster, you have to think about a product like FileNet, which helps you take the steps. Go for FileNet. It's good as a document repository. It has a lot of features and supports a lot of document formats. Content Navigator is a very good application. You don't have to write any custom code; you can just install it and start using it. Everything is out-of-the-box. You don't have to worry about writing custom code. We don't use IBM Case Manager, but we have an in-house case management tool where we hooked up Content Navigator to view documents, so that really helped us. I would rate the product at eight out of ten. It's very good. It does have a few limitations in the media formats and all but, overall, it's fine.

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.

I would definitely recommend the FileNet solution. The integration process is very smooth because we use CMIS. The other application uses CMIS to talk to FileNet, and this is very smooth. We are not using the solution for case management nor automation.

I would recommend choosing IBM. Go for it. It is not like there is a better alternative. The automation that we are doing right now is to check that all our systems are up and working. I wrote a program in C# which touches a whole bunch of boxes and services. It does a whole bunch of actions against FileNet that checks everything is going correctly. It saves us time and effort, and it works. I know that they're releasing FileNet 5.5.3 at the end of the month, but I don't know what is in it.

It serves our needs, and it is performing as expected. It does what we expect out of it. Overall, it is a very good product for what we need in the company. We do some basic integration with Salesforce and maybe some integration with some of our homegrown applications, but nothing that is overly involved. It has worked out, but it was hard work. We are not right now using this solution for automation projects. Lessons learned and advice for others: * Don't bite off more than you can chew. * Do things in smaller pieces. * Do your homework upfront with prep tests. * Take it slow (implement slowly). * Get your requirements upfront. * Understand the process your users are looking for.

I would advise a typical due-diligence process. Get hands-on with it, try it out. Do the same with competing products and decide what works the best. Usability of the product is a complicated question. Anyway it is created, software cannot serve everybody's needs. Most of the time we'll work with very large companies and all of them have their unique needs. We oftentimes start with a base and customize it for each customer and their specific use case. You'll find a number of users that can use software out-of-the-box. But we often have to change it, tweak it, tune it, to tailor it to their specific environment. FileNet is a nine out of ten. It's been around forever, it's stable, it's mature, it works. We know how to use it. We can confidently recommend it to customers without impacting our reputation. As a systems integrator, for us, every customer is unique. In every environment there are very distinct challenges, so it's hard to take the knowledge from one client and apply it to another. Every time it's a journey. Sometimes there are technical issues we have to overcome. Oftentimes there are challenges, the business challenges that we help our customers overcome. The exciting part is that it's challenging. Challenges are always exciting, and that's what the software helps us with, overcoming challenges.

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.

Do not underestimate the staffing component or you will fail. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best I would give IBM FileNet an 8 out of 10.

Overall, IBM has a great end-to-end solution. I would highly recommend it. Most important criteria for our customers when selecting a vendor: stable and scalable. Performance is a very big deal for most of our customers, and knowing it's a secure platform as well.

If you are looking for a stable, highly secure solution which will work with a capture solution or will work with an automated workflow solution that you are implementing, then you should look at FileNet, especially if you have a very large repository or database. Going forward, I am interested in knowing: * Where is AI going to play a part in FileNet? * Does IBM plan on advancing the technology and integrating it with the newer technologies that they are focusing on now? * Will FileNet and Datacap one day be replaced by something better?

I would recommend the product with the its core and standard interfaces. We purchased our product directly through IBM. Our company continues to reassess what it's doing with content management. We're involved enough in the sort of richness of the feature set that it would be difficult to replace.

We've been committed to this product for a long time. We like the product a lot. It's top of the line, it's robust, it's reliable, as long as you implement it the right way, which takes some training and some time. You have to know where the bodies are buried. A lot of people make mistakes when they first do it. We did, we learned, but we did it years ago. It's an industrial-strength, enterprise-class product and they don't come much better.

The reporting is good, and customers value that about the product.

My experience with FileNet leads me to rate it as a six out of 10. It needs a lot of development effort. Programmers have to translate user needs into IBM FileNet, which causes misinterpretations.