Something that I want to be improved is the customization abilities and the ability to turn on and turn off features, disable them. I know it's a product and it offers a lot of features. If we don't need them, there should be a way to disable them.

I had a discussion with the Datacap group at a recent conference and I gave a couple of suggestions. One thing that we would definitely want to see is including some enhancements in Datacap that would reduce our solution development, our solution delivery time. I have mentioned so many benefits of Datacap versus the other capture solutions, other capture products. However, when you talk about solution development time, Datacap's solution development time is sometimes a multiple of other solutions’ development time, even for simple capture processes, because nothing is out of the box. Nothing is ready to use. For everything, you have to build a solution and for a lot of things that are very common, you have to customize too. Even if we are not customizing anything, even if we are not building our own actions and so on, the general solution building also takes time. I talked to Tom Stewart too at a recent conference. He said there are plans to build some compiled rule sets, which would reduce the development time, but I think IBM should give a priority to that.

My rating reflects the positives and a few negatives. As far as the negatives, as I’ve mentioned, solution development time is number one. Another is developing solo solutions is very, very difficult. Datacap has Datacap Studio, TM Web, multiple configuration files and then the application configuration. There are multiple applications and you have to switch between applications. There isn’t a uniform, integrated studio, where you go and build your solutions. That's one of the reasons.

The learning curve with Datacap is very high. It is very difficult to find really good Datacap professionals in the market. It's such a complicated product with which to build solutions for developers.

I’d like to see more analytics and mobility features; I think that is where we're going towards.

There are a lot of things that can be improved. It's a big list; mostly, making FileNet compatible with a lot of the enterprise solutions we have around. I think that's the primary objective right now.

We would like to see some more basic reporting built into the core, such as content engine and so on. I know there's some stuff around reporting based on Case Analyzer, which used to be Process Analyzer; stuff with workflow. I would like to see more content reporting baked into the product.

Also, this might be coming, but it seems like five years ago, somebody did a session at a conference on security proxies. I saw the same session again at a recent conference. Somebody else found out how to do it; it's really kind of an obscure workaround. I would like to see IBM bake that into the content platform engine. It would allow dynamic security updates of millions of objects with a click of a button rather than actually hitting each individual object.

The development platform is not local. For example, you need 100 days in IBM, whereas other platforms, like ServiceNow, need only 20 days.

I would like administration to be easier and the product simplified. More importantly, it is sometimes overly complex, and requires a lot of work from the infrastructure and administration standpoint; a lot of hands-on patches. It can be time-consuming. So, simplification of patching and maintenance would be an improvement.

I would probably like simpler admin screens, a simpler way to administer the product. ACCE and some of the other UI is not very intuitive for new users. If you think of the TurboTax workflow, something simpler like that would be awesome.

Overall, the Admin screens for Case Manager (accessed via the ACCE and other interfaces) are not intuitive for a novice user. I am fairly technical and catch on quickly, however the ACCE (and other) interfaces leave me wondering where to start, and what to do next, etc.

“Case Manager” is defined as the following:

• FileNet P8
• WebSphere for Content Platform Engine (CPE), ICN, ICF, and ICM operations
• CPE V5.2x
• ICF
• ICM
• ICN
• CSS
• FileNet Integration for MS Office (FIMO)
• Emptoris-FileNet Connector

Our setup is as follows: When a contract is executed in Emptoris, the connector pushes a copy over to Case Manager. We are also using the bulk upload facility in Emptoris, which also pushes a copy over to Case Manager.

My job is to get Case Manager (those items listed above) and Emptoris setup – adding contract classes, mapping metadata (properties), setting up security, etc. I do not setup the servers, network, firewalls, or other infrastructure. That is handled by our IT staff.

We also want to setup and use the workflow capabilities.

What I would like to see with any technology is a wrapper (or wizard) that asks: “What do you want to do?” and has several button options to choose from, like:

• Setup or Modify a workflow
• Add or Modify a user
• Add or Modify a contract class
• etc.

When you make a selection, it then walks you through all the programs, and based on what you select, presents the appropriate questions you can answer yes/no, choose from dropdown, select ratio button, etc. Then, the system can provision all of the necessary stuff in the background.

This should apply to all areas – Emptoris-Filenet Connector, Case Manager, Workflows, ACCE, etc.

I haven't really found anything that I would like to see improved. They're continuing to improve it; things such as improved optical character recognition, hand writing recognition. I think as they continue to tweak those engines on the Datacap side, that'll get better. I’m looking for more improvement in that, and that’s mostly because the environment itself is very difficult. A hand-written form is extremely difficult to interpret. Sometimes, it's even difficult for humans to interpret it. I think we get about 80-90% readability for hand-written numbers, and 30-40% for hand-written letters. That's the nature of the OCR business. I’m looking for them to improve that, if they can.

It didn't implement as easy as we had hoped. We had some partner issues. Ease of implementation would be really great and make it perfect.

I would like there to be more documentation. A lot of the knowledge that we have gained has been from calling IBM support people, or Googling things on the web and then learning from experiences of other users. I would like there to be more formal IBM documentation. If you do a Google search for anything, you don't know how official the results are or if those things are even supported. If you do things this way, you might be doing things that are not recommended by IBM and you void some kind of contract with them or something. I would feel better if the searchable knowledge base is actually IBM's. I would like them to provide that.

As far as the product itself, I don't have many major complaints. So far, we've had to develop a custom program that we have for searching and viewing; basically, an interface in front of the users. I've heard a lot about Content Navigator, which is their own interface and would probably replace of our custom one. I was going to mention that I wanted something out of the box that we could immediately use for searching, viewing and indexing documents, but I guess they have it. It's just that I haven't had any experience working with it. They promise that Content Navigator is something that you can use out of the box without coding, quickly slap together and the users can just run with it.

However, I've heard from other users, other IBM customers, that's not necessarily the case. Nothing out of the box can really be used immediately. You still have to do some kind of customization. I'm thinking that's almost like what we have done already. Why move to Content Navigator and throw away our development to do other development? I am holding my verdict until I have hands-on experience with Content Navigator, because what I’ve heard is only hearsay. I don't know myself if it's really that difficult or that useless.

With Datacap, the development piece should definitely be improved; the usability. It's a little hard to use. To do a Datacap application, you have to go to several different places in the application to get it to do what you want it to do, as opposed to linking those things into one UI. There are Rulerunner server configurations. There are Taskmaster server configurations. There are application configurations. There is integration. For each of those things, you have to go to different places. It should be better integrated. For instance, there’s a generic flavor that you can just start with and then customize it. Even the generic flavor is difficult to customize off the shelf.

It's a little confusing when you start to add in different objects into the application, as to which object to use or what are the best objects to use. Sometimes there are too many options. That's what would be better. I heard it's better with version 9. I haven't played with 9 too much, but I heard it's better with 9.

With the cloud solution, probably our biggest issue would be the customization that we would need to go along with the cloud solution. I haven't really gotten into that yet because I haven't had approval for cloud, for Datacap. I recently attended a conference to look at using Datacap in the cloud. We haven't tried it yet. Right now, we are just evaluating whether or not we want to go into the cloud for Datacap.

With FileNet, I think there is room for improvement with the ability to use it. It gets complex on how to integrate some of the solutions into what we currently have. At the end of the day, it’s just IT.

With Datacap, what would earn it a perfect rating is definitely the ability to create applications. Creating applications in Datacap is kind of cludgy. If they had a better way of doing that, I think I would probably move it more towards a perfect rating.

We couldn't run the silent install scripts.

Datacap is a very complex system. There are Taskmasters, there's Rulerunner, there are all these different pieces. It seems to me that these pieces were written by different people, although I don't know the newest and latest and greatest; we're on 8.1. It would seem that they could kind of converge them into one big package. Save on one screen is not necessarily a save on another screen, right now anyway. Make it comprehensive and the same across all parts of the tool. It is very much an ease-of-use issue.

It's very powerful, but it's also very complex. Make it easier to use.

The IBM Content Navigator product (IBM's new UI and Collaboration) is much stable with fewer bugs but this should not be a surprise as IBM has been shipping poorly QAd/Tested products for many years expecting their customers to provide feedback and improve unlike their competitors and its not even funny.Better QA and product release cycles would be appreciated.

IBM really needs to provide a single ECM management dashboard or platform to manage the ECM components as currently its an sys-administration nightmare especially with one ICN UI platform strategy for all ECM products.

Product licensing can be more easy on customers as there is not a single size that fits all and business area requirements and IT landscapes change every 2 -3 years due to M&A and adoption of new technologies like hybrid cloud.We abandoned our Case manager solution as it was so complex and cost-prohibitive for us .

We’d like for it to be able to ingest reports that were created on the distributed side and get them into the same repository, where you have one repository for all reports. We run CMOD on Z and that might already be there; it's just not a feature that we have used. We don't have that right now. One part of that is, these new distributed applications often come with their own archival type system. It would be nice to be consolidated.

I think we need to see less dependence on Java, and get away from those applets. Those things need to be fixes. They have the HTML5 viewer, but there are other aspects in Content Navigator that need to be elevated and moved off that to newer technology.

The print function, email links and so on are based on little Java applets. Process Administrator is all Java, so that's no longer going to be supported on Firefox; it’s no longer supported in Chrome. It's those types of things that need to be updated. I think that is on the road map, so I'm preaching to the choir.

I think it's already getting away from Java applets. A lot of our users struggle with keeping up to date with Java versioning, so a lot of the functions they're doing, like printing, emailing, and even some of the viewing, they're struggling with.

I would like to see seamless application integration.