Its weaknesses are primarily tied to the lack of available resources and expertise in the market to effectively support and provide solutions and services to each customer for seamless implementation. Expertise in this specific product is rare throughout the market. One key reason is the product's limited downloads. Additionally, archiving solutions are often perceived as complex and challenging, dissuading many companies from venturing into this domain. Consequently, partners who specialize in archiving solutions are always seeking straightforward, uncomplicated options that are easy to manage and meet customer expectations.

The IBM Datacap site actually is on the newer inside. They will give it as a plugin only. They'll be giving it as a package completely, however, the plugin for the ICN, we can deploy on the ICN desktop. The ICN desktop is a UA. One is an admin and one is a normal user. There's a user interface when we log into that admin desktop. We can see and deploy all these kinds of plugins for data as well. We can deploy new features and all for the backend installations. Right now, we can just keep the backup, and the existing data, and we can reuse the newer version and we can reinstall it.

Datacap has performance issues when processing large volumes of documents. We're doing 18,000 pages daily. Scanning takes almost 20-30 minutes, but it normally takes one or two minutes. We informed IBM and opened a ticket for that. They forwarded the issue to developers but didn't give a specific timeline for it to be resolved. Version 8.1 is already at the end of support. 

We would like to see Datacap transition to a cloud-based solution with cloud storage. There is a web interface, but it isn't easy to use. 

I've faced some bugs or issues. They should do deeper testing of the product before releasing it because some of the bugs that I found were a bit simple. I understand that it is a massive product, and some of the functionalities can get overlooked.

Their platform for reporting bugs and issues works. Sometimes, it takes them too long to solve the issue, but eventually, they do. So far, every issue that I've found in reporting has been resolved, but their support can be improved in terms of resolving the issues faster.

In terms of additional features, I've been following the roadmap they have, and so far, it has been good.

One of the things that we wished for was to have an easier way to carry out the customizations. Currently, if you want to customize data, you need to have a developer with C# knowledge. If IBM could implement a no-code or low-code platform for Datacap, it would be easier to adjust it without needing a developer, which was always the most difficult part.

The first line of support from IBM can also be improved. When we reached out to IBM to explain the problem that we had, we always had to go through a lot of hurdles. It was really not easy to get to the specialists that we needed. Dealing with the first-line support from IBM was always a very difficult thing. We had more experience, and we knew a lot more about the product than their first-line support did, and that's a really bad sign. 

So, the support and being able to extend it only by code are the main areas of improvement.

Our main language in Egypt is Arabic, and IBM DataCap does not support it perfectly. All our documentation is in Arabic. It's not English or any other language. However, we have overcome this problem by using QR codes in the document to extract the data from it. So i think that they should have better support for Arabic.

It is important to have the solution support Arabic, not only supporting Arabic in the QR code but reading it by scanning it from the QR code, and scanned documents that are computerized. The Arabic needs to be enhanced because not all systems support QR code generations. We can use IBM DataCap to read, scan, and extract data from it, but it will be difficult. For example, if you have some documents without a QR code and you need something to oversee all these documents, locate certain parts of the document, and extract the data to use in indexing and retrieval, it will be hard. It's not accurate at all. We will be obligated to use IBM DataCap in a certain manner. This manner means I have a QR code printed on the document, otherwise, it will be hard for me to use IBM DataCap.

What could be improved in IBM Datacap from a technical perspective is having all configuration interfaces together in one place, rather than having several different configuration interfaces. For example: there is an interface for configuring background tasks, then a different interface for configuring how the application actually works, then there's a third interface for configuring user access. It would be nice to have everything in one place instead of needing to use different interfaces.

In the next release of IBM Datacap, I'd like the ability to leverage cloud-based OCR technologies or cloud-based OCR engines, such as Google Vision. There's the ability to be able to build things yourself, so as a partner, we could build those integrations, but it is possible that we would build something only to find later that it has been built by someone else. 

IBM Datacap cannot fetch unstructured data properly; it always gives you wrong information, so no one uses this solution for unstructured data. Even for structured data, sometimes the administrators need to change the members under the characters. The reading efficiency of the solution needs to be improved. This solution is meant to focus on both structured and unstructured data to achieve the vision of the solution. 

Its weaknesses are primarily tied to the lack of available resources and expertise in the market to effectively support and provide solutions and services to each customer for seamless implementation. Expertise in this specific product is rare throughout the market. One key reason is the product's limited downloads. Additionally, archiving solutions are often perceived as complex and challenging, dissuading many companies from venturing into this domain. Consequently, partners who specialize in archiving solutions are always seeking straightforward, uncomplicated options that are easy to manage and meet customer expectations.

Recognition between certain numbers and letters could be improved. Sometimes this solution misreads five with an "S" for Singapore.

When I scan a document in Datacap that has a watermark or the document is a little distorted, the image output is poor. It either becomes completely black, or there is so much distortion that we cannot read the numbers or the addresses mentioned in the POD. When we scan a document, we expect the output to be at least 95 percent accurate. If IBM could work on that particular thing, I think it would be fantastic.

Reporting and analytics seem to often be something of an afterthought. With Datacap, they've started building out some dashboards, but one thing we hear from our clients a lot is, "Well, gee, we really love reports. What Datacap has is not really helpful. We'd like something better. We'd like more dashboards." That's one area where we've seen some feedback that the product could do better.

There should be an increase in the capacity of the workflows. Datacap is a little limited in this aspect. So, you cannot really implement all the possibilities. 

The interface can be more intuitive. What is in common with the big solutions like EMC tool, OpenStack, IBM SharePoint, et cetera is that the platform and the interfaces are not generally user-friendly. They are powerful. This is common in between all of those solutions. It's hard to customize those interfaces to be intuitive and to be user-friendly. We have to create a new interface up to par of these strong solutions to make it user friendly. I tried many solutions in my life and I never had a beautiful solution that is powerful. 

IBM could improve Datacap's navigator. The company implemented Taskmaster starting in version 8.0. We're using the Taskmaster web interface, and our main issue is the navigators, especially in the new CP4BA environment. The application is slow, so we face issues with the navigator and the new plugin. 

There are also some bugs in the features they added in 9.1.7, and the fixes they applied are still not working, so IBM still hasn't rectified some issues. The navigator plugin makes the application a little heavier. That needs to be improved.

The financial team I'm working with always compares their old application with our new one. They have been using that application for the last 15 to 20 years, and they're not happy with the UI. They think the layout isn't user-friendly. From a user perspective, I would like all the buttons to be easily labeled.

I've been working on Datacap for the last 11 years, and I haven't seen any massive changes aside from the navigator plugin and the mobile application. However, IBM needs to make many small changes to keep this scanning solution up to date.

We have page requirements where some values must be copied on each page. For example, say I need to scan a bunch of documents, and the name will be a field on every page. We don't have a default functionality in Datacap to copy the field value on the first page to all the pages. That feature would make the documents easy to prepare.

Third-party integration is slow especially through API calls because if you want to integrate between Datacap and BPM, it can only be done in that direction (and not BPM to Datacap). One of our customers needs it the other way and we had to make a development app for that to work. There also needs to be additional support for the Arabic language as the translation doesn't work well. Finally, I'd like to see an interface update in the next release.

I've always had my own gripes. Speed of OCR is one issue. It's a challenge because we have customers that have millions and millions of pages that they want this solution to crank through. In order to do that you have to have a large infrastructure in place, and that directly impacts licensing, based on the core count.

The user interfaces for exception processing can be tweaked. I commonly find that we try to tweak and customize some of those components to more of what the industry standard is. The product is still trying to play catch-up a little bit in those areas.

I would like to see the product have the ability to process more documents in parallel. Right now, it is a single queue. Therefore, if you want to really test the load and stress test it, having multiple instances and the ability to scale it up would be great.

Datacap's technology seems a little behind the industry. It's still using the old .NET framework. They should move to .NET Core and start integrating some machine learning. You can do some integration yourself, but you expect a solution to include the latest machine-learning approaches if you're paying reasonable money for it. 

I would like to see integration of Watson AI technology into Datacap. AI could play a huge, pivotal role as far as where IBM technology's heading. Not only that, but where the world's technology is heading, as well.

We have been seeing all these different competitive uses and different, softer technologies along with a lot of copycats who have popped up. IBM is fantastic and phenomenal at being a differentiator. As time has moved forward, there has been less focus on the Datacap and the FileNet side, and there has been more focus on the next generation of technology, like AI.

I would like IBM Datacap to add features similar to Captiva. Currently, when you are entering invoices, you have to enter multiple rows. In Captiva, the multiple rows will be dynamically added. This would be a beneficial feature for IBM to add.

Our users prefer TM's navigator more than  IBM's current navigator. It could just be a training issue, however, they like having more options like filter badges.  

In one case, our client needed to scan 5,000 pages in five minutes, or less, Datacap was not able to accommodate this task. 

The usability is challenging and hard for our business users.

I would like better ease of use and more support options.

Going forward, IBM needs to ensure that the output is perfect (as it can make the product) while staying true to platform's core.

They should improve the customization feature of the solution. Also, they should work on its pricing.