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. 

Overall, I rate the solution an eight 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.

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.

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.

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.

Evaluate FileNet. Find out what capabilities you need. You may find that FileNet has way more than you'll require.

You need a lot of senior technical resources to get the best bang out of the buck for this. They're not easy to find. The solution is highly capable, but it also is highly complex.

Look at the scale. Look at the enterprise scale. Try to set up the product to leverage it more, maximize the use of the product. FileNet as a stack has massive capabilities. To justify the cost and investment in the product, try to get as many of your business units and business processes to leverage this platform.

Try to consolidate. This is what we have done. We consolidated our content into FileNet as a mainstream platform for ECM. That has paid dividends. We are able to use it as a shared platform. We set it up as a shared service. We charge back to our clients. With that, we are able to measure the value per business unit, compared to the volume that they are using the system, the number of transactions, number of users, etc. Look at the big picture and try to expand as much as you can.

I don't think there is anything perfect, per se. We have been very successful in using the product. We have a lot of opportunities to even add more use cases and so on. The product has been very stable. We have a great relationship with the product owner. Our team is able to do a lot of stuff with the product. It's a solid platform.

Considering that the platform has been stable and scalable, how the experiences of our internal and or external customers changed since implementing FileNet is a big area of focus; number one in terms of evaluating the product. Our clients have been quite satisfied. When I mentioned we were able to improve the performance of the platform by changing the infrastructure and tuning the performance, that has resulted in great savings. Imagine 75% improvement in performance, response time of the system, that is directly linked to the productivity of the end users who number in the thousands.

In general, the most important criteria when selecting the vendor to work with really depends on the use cases. If it is a situation where critical business processes will depend on the product, the stability, the availability, and all that stuff, then I definitely would have to scrutinize each and every area of the product. In general, we take care of our own development. We rely on the vendor for only specialized skills. The ease of use of finding resources in the market who know the product is very important. When the vendor is flexible in attending to our needs, this is very important because if I compare FileNet to other systems in our area, it's like day and night between the two vendors, where, if I try to get something done through the other vendor, it's more of a challenge.

We are not considering employing IBM cloud, hybrid, or box solutions in the short-term, but we are assessing this.

As far as new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide your organization, we are implementing IBM Case Manager, including the analytics piece of it. We are very interested in exploring further content analytics. It's still on our roadmap. We're taking some steps to explore that.

There certainly are existing services that we're now able to provide better than before in some client processing areas with our business partners. We have taken some strides in improving and renewing the solution from a legacy, hard-coded solution on all their platforms; it has influenced our way of dealing with those business processes.

We certainly do have some plans to include mobile, and that is still in the process of maturing the business requirement.

It does most of the things that an ECM platform can do.

In the future road map, we are looking at mobile, the cloud, and those kind of things. We plan to use mobile in 2018. First, we want to try out search and retrieval with Content Navigator, possibly, and maybe through DataCap Mobile. Either one of them would be the first.

We’re also considering employing IBM cloud solutions at some point, but there are certain regulations and compliance that we have to factor in before we can do that. But we're thinking in that direction.

Cloud gives us benefits; for example, the infrastructure will be handled more efficiently. The cost can be reduced. We are also looking for a partner. It will also provide a partner who can manage our lower infrastructure rather than us having to keep upgrading ourselves and putting in those patches and stuff like that.

There aren’t yet any new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for our organization, but we were looking at those at conference, looking for cognitive solutions for Case Manager and DataCap. And we'll see an opportunity there.

We are actually at the onset of a transformation. We are looking at services we have not yet provided. We are looking at those opportunities as we do, what we are calling, our ECM transformation starting next year.

With the new Content Navigator platform, the usability has become a lot better and it has become integrated. I think it's becoming better with the new mobile integration; it's getting better and better.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for me are scalability, security, and that we also have strategic partnership with the vendor, somebody who can meet our roadmap objectives.

Try it out. Test it out. Put it on the top of your list. It should be at the top of your consideration list.

The ease-of-use is important, and for us, we didn't have to customize a whole lot, or anything, really. We just had to configure, and that's always real important.
It is very intuitive. I don't find any of it hard to use. Our experience in rolling it out to our customers is that it's very intuitive. They didn't have a hard time finding what they needed to do their job, and finding it much quicker than previously, too.

Employing IBM on cloud is tough for us because of all of the security and regulatory requirements around the banking or financial industry. We're looking at it but we're not making the jump. We’re looking at it for various reasons. Part of it is not having to deal with the on-premise headaches, I'll call them.

We haven't deployed much of the analytics, but it does open the door for us to be able to provide new analytics services for my organization.

There are existing services we're able to provide better now than we were before, especially in the display of the documents. We're using the virtual viewer in Navigator, which was a big plus for us. No longer do we have to worry about which Java version is deployed here and there, and throughout the West. The HTML5 viewer has been a plus for us.

As far as how the experiences of our internal and/or external customers changed since implementing FileNet, there was somewhat of a learning curve from the old way that they displayed or got at their information, got at the documents, to the new way, but it was a short curve. It was pretty intuitive. Doing the search and then displaying the document is pretty simple.

At a recent conference, I sat through a session with mobile. We don't have the right use case yet, but there's interest in that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Go for it!

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor are the initial support, the knowledge they have and then, being able to partner-up from the support perspective, for any future needs. That's the most important thing for us.

I have given it a high rating because we've analyzed other systems; compared everything out there. We do that because our CIO's office wanted us to. There just isn't anything better out there for what we use it for, for ECM.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is that they deliver what they promise; not just a white paper but actually implemented it and it's working. If they do what they say, I think that's most important.

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.

I would give the solution a nine out of 10. If it were free I would give it a 10.

Go find an industry that is the same as yours, that is using the tools you want to buy, and find out if they're successful. If they're not, don't go with those tools. For example, I'm in energy now and I'm looking for people who are using Maximo, who are using the other tools from IBM, and I want to talk to them: Are you successful using these tools?

Don't do it in a vacuum, you've got to talk to people.

You have to look at the requirements you have for your business. Then, based on those requirements, look at your options. Look at the different vendors and different products and make sure you are making the right decision for your requirements in your organization, because the skillset of your organization is key, too. You have to have the support within your organization to have support for the product, whether it's the FileNet solution or some other solution.

My rating reflects the fact that there is always room for improvement. The product is very good; its stable; its served us very well for 8+ years, but there is always room for improvement. The technologies and the industry changes; having that flexibility. As long as the product keeps improving, it will continue to be a great product. I’m not sure I would give anything a perfect rating because there is always room for improvement. As far as what might earn it a perfect rating, I would almost have to use Watson to think into the future to tell me what I don't already know.

We've been looking at ways to analyze content that’s at rest or been sitting on file shares, SharePoint sites and different areas within the bank that people might not be aware of or don't really know how to classify it, and using different IBM tools in order to do that.

As far as existing services that we are now able to provide better than before, in general, it’s the find-ability for our content; exposing more of our web services to different applications that we support with our environment; give them that flexibility so they can actually find the content.

Regarding usability, I hesitate to describe it as simplistic, but it is simplistic, yet it can be complex if you need it to be. You can keep it simple if you need to keep it simple but yet, if you need a little bit more complexity in your business requirements, it's there and it's available.

For internal customers, I think the experience has changed a lot. FileNet has made it much simpler for our clients to get to their content. They understand that it's one place, now they know how to find it and it's more repetitive, rather than trying to search this way here and another way somewhere else. It's improved from a time perspective for clients, with our basically internal associates, to find content. It’s a great time saver.

We are not considering using or employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions at this time.

We do not have any plans to include mobile at this time.

Really understand your use case and capabilities that you're going to need, especially because we start out thinking it's just document management or content management, but then there's always all this other stuff. Does the product or product line have the ability to expand to the other stuff that the business wants?

I think Box has potential for us because of our interaction with external consultants, but not at this time.

As far as any pre-existing services that we're now able to provide better than we did before, we’re now able to provide better centralized access by using FileNet; that's where we're at, at this point and time.

We have plans to include mobile. We have folks out in the field, so we want them to have access to electronic documentation via a tablet or other mobile device.

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.

I'd give it an eight out of 10. Eight's not high, not low, necessarily, but it does everything we need. I'm not going to give anything a 10, but I'm definitely not gonna give it a one.

I would say you need to take a look at the size of your content. If you're going to use it to replace the content store of Cognos, you need to look at the size and make sure you're within best practices. Cognos is a product that's wishy-washy at times, and most of the issues that we've ever had with Cognos were because our content store was too big. Now that we've shrunk the content store, our Cognos is actually better. If you are looking at that, this would be a solution I would suggest to you, just to keep your content store small.

Do your homework. Test it thoroughly (all the standard stuff). Do load testing to make sure it is a stable platform. Look at the life-cycle of the product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support. Not just technical support when you have a problem, but how long before you are discontinuing a product. Right now, I am dealing with Connections over an issue with Java going out of date and they are not supporting it very well. Their solution is to force us to upgrade. 

Look at the support aspects of the product from life-cycle of the product to technical support. Obviously, stability of the product as a whole is important. I do not want to be opening a lot of tickets.

It really comes down to our ability to work together so as to address the gaps that we may have, i.e., between what FileNet needs to offer and what we need.

Ensure that the product itself matches the needs in your particular vertical. There are a lot of ECM products in the market space today that actually will vertically integrate into a given space. Whether it's the insurance, banking, manufacturing or whatever vertical that you're talking about, these ECM products will customize into that space so heavily, that it may supersede the existing functionality that you may have today. It's important that you look into what is it that the vendor is trying to resolve. Is it really meeting the gaps that you have? Lastly, does it extend beyond what you need it to do? These are all important factors to consider before selecting a product.

We always look for the ability in our vendors to provide their products in an integrated manner or that it will be integrated into our product seamlessly. This really comes down to the level of the APIs that they present. 

We look at various other factors before selecting a vendor, such as, Are the products themselves scalable and have they been tested out? What's the experience of the vendor in the space that we're in, i.e., for our specific vertical? Finally, we also look at the other customer recommendations.

If a colleague asked me for advice, from my standpoint, I'd certainly recommend FileNet as an option. I'd want to understand what else they're running, because it depends on what else is integrating with it; do they have workflow, do they have capture, what is it, how well does it play in the sandbox with FileNet? From what I understand, almost every vendor I talk to has out-of-the-box connectors for FileNet, which tells you it's a pretty big solution.

Relationship is the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with. How do they react to problems? You don't expect no problems; you know you're going to have problems. It's about the reaction to them; how fast are they, how quickly can they get it done, what do they do to address the root cause, and so on; being more of a partner than a vendor.

Also, with working on new solutions, helping me identify what's out there in the market, not just their solutions. I have a big Kofax deployment, and IBM supports us having that. They are not trying to sell us DataCap, because they know we have Kofax. It makes sense, so they support that decision. They integrate well. We have an internal layer that's in between; it's not a native integration. We built something in between, unfortunately; that just complicates integrations. It's another layer, something else that can break. It's customized for us. We're not quite sure why it does that. I think it's because, if we ever went away from FileNet, we wouldn't necessarily have to change the front-end applications, but we have no plans to do that.

We are considering employing IBM box solutions. Right now, IBM hosts our FileNet for us, but we're looking at box as a potential option, so that we can interact with external customers, without having them get into our firewalls, mainly.

Right now, there aren’t any new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for your organization. At a recent World of Watson conference, we were looking at some of the solutions. We have Cognos running, but we're now starting to look at the more advanced solutions.

It’s hard to say whether there are any existing services that we're able to provide better now than before because of the implementation of FileNet. I’m not sure.

As far as how the experiences of your internal or external customers changed since we implemented FileNet, we implemented it a long time ago, so that’s hard to answer. Nonetheless, as we've gone along, customers will see slower but steady progress in terms of knowing more about them and being able to retrieve the documents. We used to have a big problem with not finding a customer's document, often. FileNet makes it easier to find, so it gives the customer more confidence.

We've launched mobile applications. Most of the launches so far have not used FileNet, because the deployment of the app was the most important thing. They didn't do a proper back end solution, and now they're following up for the proper back end. They’re catching up, but we'd like to get to a point where we're deploying with them upfront.

I'm not that close to FileNet, but I haven't heard anything negative about its usability.
It's been a really solid product. I've only had this area for about a year, but it's been a really good product; very few problems. We’ve had some technical production issues, that might have to do less with the product, and more about how it's deployed, but nothing major; enough that I haven’t given it a perfect rating. I'm not sure I'd give anything a perfect rating.

FileNet is a better way to solve the ECM problems and needs that you have in your company. I have seen different solutions, and I found FileNet to be the more complete solution.

As far as how the experiences of our internal or external customers have changed since implementing FileNet, projects are easy. They need to find some information, some data, and they have it right at the moment that they need it. That changes the way that they use the information.

We are considering employing IBM for a hybrid solution. Right now, we have FileNet in a private network. We want to see if we can transform that into a hybrid cloud.

We also have plans to include mobile. We are now researching the possibility to implement the Datacap mobile solution.

Usability is very good; very, very good. We have different kinds of people working in administration; using FileNet is easy for everybody. We have no problems; we don’t have to keep explaining the way to use it. It is easy.

I have found in FileNet almost everything that we wanted to find; we can search quickly. For example, if you need a text translated from electronic to text, to then go to analytics, you can do it, and IBM is looking at it the same way.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

The key is to get involved in the user community, whether that means coming out and dedicating a week at a place like World of Watson or whether it means reaching out to a local user board if one exists local to you. The customers and the other users of the product line are sometimes more honest than one would expect a Salesforce representative to be. Get as much information as you can from people who are actually using the product.

We are not employing IBM on cloud, hybrid, or box solutions in the immediate short run.

We absolutely have plans to include mobile. We are hoping to allow our clinicians access to importing of documents or importing of photographs that are taken during the course of patient care and including them in the historical medical record.
As far as new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for our organization, we are in the process of migrating off of the Legacy Image Services product onto the new P8 product line. Once that is complete, we hope to be able to take advantage of some of the content search services and other bigger analytics that might become available at that point. Until we're there, I can't speak to that.

We've been on Image Services so long that I have to say no, there aren’t any existing services that we're now able to provide better than we were previously. Image Services is at the tail end of its life expectancy and all of our focus now is on moving onto the newer platform called FileNet P8.

Regarding how FileNet has changed the experience for our customers internal and external, there's no question that it has enhanced our ability to manage access to the medical record and to make it available both to our researchers and to the clinicians at the same time. Back when it was paper, it would be signed out of the library just like a book. With only one copy of it, if it was being used by a researcher, and Mrs. McGillicutty came in unexpectedly for an appointment, we had to track down where that record was and sometimes it led to delays. Now that it's all electronic, that's no longer a factor.

As far its usability, I have been using FileNet exclusively in my work environment since 1990. I'm very comfortable in it. I have found that it is a reliable, fairly simple, but somewhat niche product. We are confident that the P8 platform, while it is more open, is going to be as reliable, is ultimately going to be as usable when we move forward, and perhaps much more modern and able to take advantage of a lot of the newer tools, such as mobile, that really have not existed.

The older product line is phenomenal, but limited in what it can do. The newer product line is not sufficiently well known to us yet, but over the course of the migration, we will certainly learn a lot more about it.

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.

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.

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.

It may be a little complex to implement and take some effort, but with the integration the way it is, it is worth the effort. Once it is in place, it is very stable.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Stability
• Credibility.

We are using a lot of IBM products across our company. For the most part, they have a strong track record with us already.

See the product on the road, so to speak. Set it up and do a PoC and see the architecture; see the design.

My rating for this product is because of the high availability, scalability, robustness, adaptability, being the leader in the sector. These are the major reasons. I have not given it a perfect rating because it is not suitable for smaller environments and it could offer more features for different use cases. Consider, for example, on the database side, there are non-SQL databases and SQL databases. The big one would be providing both SQL and non-SQL together in the same environment. P8 is robust and for the heavy side, that is OK, but for the light side, it is not. Maybe they can add a light environment; work in it can be better.

We are considering employing IBM in cloud, hybrid, or box solutions, but in Turkey, using cloud, especially if there is customer data in the environment, is restricted by regulations. It's not clear. If this issue is solved, we will seriously consider it, including in the document management environment; not a public cloud, but maybe a private cloud, also. We are waiting for these regulations for it, but we are considering the technology, so that we do not fall behind.

We have some mobile applications; we are also providing documents to mobile applications. Our clients can also scan and submit some types of documents. They are inserting some type of forms, for example, credit card application forms, through mobile devices, but it's our own solution, not IBM's Content Navigator or other solutions. Nonetheless, in the back end, we are using FileNet. For the front end, our architecture decision is to use our own native applications because it's easy to build and customize. For our needs now, it's the best solution. Maybe in the future, we don't know. Technology is rapidly changing. Maybe we won’t have to create everything ourselves or invent everything from scratch. Maybe a surprise will occur in technology and we can use it, but now, we are using our own solution.

There are new analytics and content management services that we are able to provide for our organization. We have our own solution on the content analysis side also. Our R&D department have developed a project. They are doing human-made documents. These are unformatted documents and free texts, sometimes handwritten; especially faxes, for example. They are fetching the data, doing ICR on faxes. With an NLP-like algorithm, they are deciding which document it is, which department should be responsible for it, and sending a task to that department. The analytic operation is done in our own environment.

Since we implemented FileNet, there are services that we're now able to provide better. Before FileNet P8, we had another document management system, FileNet Image Services. It had some pitfalls, including, for example, a number of documents limit. We have overcome this after implementing FileNet P8. Also, the response times severely decreased. There was no high availability; it was an active-passive cluster on Image Services. After FileNet P8, it is an active-active configuration. These are huge benefits in terms of high availability, and customer satisfaction, also.

The experiences of our internal and or external customers both have changed because we implemented FileNet. External customers generally use internet banking, mobile devices, etc. Before making the document management environment highly available, we couldn't provide, for example, credit card statements as a document to the clients. We were only providing data, and they could see their statements, for example, for only the previous six months, not earlier. They were only seeing the data, not the exact statement I sent them. Now, we are providing exact statements. They see everything in it. They see the benefits we provide with this statement also. Yeah, that's a huge benefit for the clients. Even if it's more than 10 years ago, they can see that statement. For example, sometimes they can need it for legal issues.
Also, for our internal clients, there is no downtime and fast response.

As far as the usability of FileNet, our customers don't have any direct interaction with FileNet. We have our own applications. They don't see FileNet; any FileNet screens. They only see the document.

The people actually using FileNet, they only feel the response time and availability. That's easy and strong for them.

Depending on the business needs, I would suggest FileNet and the architecture, as well as the features that it has. I would definitely recommend it.

According to my experience, over time, it has become perfect. The early versions had a lot of issues. It was running on different platforms, which had some issues. We had terrible outages in a back in 2008-2009. Over time, the new version upgrades really helped out a lot. With the current versions that we use, it's really great.

We are considering using IBM cloud, hybrid and box solutions. Those are leading features that IBM is coming up with. We definitely look forward to utilizing those products in the future.

We have a few analytical products, Hadoop and a few other products. They be working with a different group of teams, so they are definitely looking forward into it.
There aren’t really any existing services that we're able to provide better than we were before.

We do not have any plans to include mobile at this moment.

Most of our customers are in Dunwoody and external customers only use very few applications. We provide external login access to them, which helps a lot. We mainly now use FileNet to store the policy documents and the underwriting and claims documents. From a retrieval point of view, it's very fast. The security is very good.

We have about 6,000-8,000 users and there are no complaints from the usability perspective. With some other products, such as Case Manager, when the new thing comes out, we need to make sure that the users are comfortable using it. Then, we look forward to switching to that.

It is not my position to consider employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or Box solutions. There's been some conversation about what would be the economic benefit of having stuff moved to the cloud versus hosting it internally. The conversation has only been, “I wonder what the numbers are.” We don't know.

There are no plans of doing mobile in relation to the FileNet P8 system. The FileNet P8 system we use is entirely internal. There are no external, customer-facing applications. There are other departments that do mobile applications. We're a bank, so they have the bank mobile application. They do some FileNet documents but they call an ESB service, which then calls FileNet. We don't do anything directly with it.

I have no complaints regarding the usability of FileNet. I've seen other similar systems and it's comparable. It's kind of boring stuff: you pull up a screen; you put in some query conditions; you find some documents and you look at your documents. It's nothing exciting.

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 give it an eight out of 10. What it needs to be a 10 is easier to configure single sign-on.

I would recommend that when you are doing the initial setup that you use fewer metadata fields. The fewer you use the better off you're going to be in the long run, for performance.

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.

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?

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. 

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.

Make a very good design at the beginning, understand what you need and also prepare the different phases of the project to ensure that you finish the projects. Have a clear view. Draw the lines of the software you need.

First, know the problem that you are trying to solve. Different products have different sweet spots, different scales, for operation. Understand the business problem that you are trying to solve. Understand the ability of your organization to adapt to change, because these things require the entire organization to think a little differently about how they do what they do. And then, make sure you have the right technical strength to implement a large infrastructure solution like this.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are reliability, technical support, and, definitely, the cost.

We are able to provide a lot more content management solutions than before. We've been using it for almost 10 years now. There's really nothing dramatically different or new that we've done in the last 12 months.

It's very usable. I haven't seen it lately but I'm sure it has improved dramatically in the last 12 months, too. Compared to what I saw five, six, years ago, and what we actually upgraded to, it's come a long way.

We are not considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or Box solutions, nor for mobile, at the moment.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Company's position in the industry within that particular technology field. We want market leaders. A company who can support an 80,000 person company which is global.

When selecting a vendor the important criteria are 

• cost
• ease in getting something accomplished
• not over-promising 
• trustworthy.

I would rate it a seven out of 10. That rating is because of stability problems when I first had it - and then, I'm not entirely sure our company has set it up right. Sometimes things are only as good as the people who run it. It's like going to a restaurant. It's only as good as the chef. So you can go to Burger King and have a pretty good burger or you can go down the road, it just depends on how good the chef is. So I think there's some of that dynamic. I don't know that much because I didn't mess with it like at that level. But it's a fine product. We've used it for a very long time.

The advice I would to a colleague at another company who's researching this or another similar solution would be to check how data index with one another, and the communication back and forth in being able to find your files, if you have a large data set like we do. 

My advice wouldn’t be positive because, as I see it, everything is going cloud-based. Everything is going in a direction where content management is becoming like the database products used to be 10 years ago; they are in the back room and nobody knows about them anymore. They do their job, day in and day out, but they are in the dark now. That's the trend I'm seeing with the content management. They're going to go in the back room and nobody's going to be dealing with them. They will just sit there and do their job; collect the content and then do nothing else. That's where it's going.

Just because it's not sexy doesn't mean it's not good. Everything runs on the databases but they just sit there; nobody cares about them anymore. The same thing goes for content management. That's my impression. That's my gut feeling about what's going to happen.

We're looking into the IBM Box solution, for cloud collaboration with external vendors, external users and external suppliers. That would make it easier for them to come in, send documents or upload documents, without having to go through emails, which is currently the case. It makes the work process easier, document management easier.

As far as new analytics or content management services that we are now able to provide our organization, we are doing some proof of concepts but nothing in production yet; mainly content analytics, not streams or anything that's coming in from other sources. We're doing analytics on the content that we already have. We're looking into the sentiment part of the documents that are coming in, to see if it’s something people are going to be using, or to escalate it to be looked into right away, or it's something that anyone can view anytime they want; there's no urgency on it.

Regarding existing services that we're able to provide better than before, it's easier to respond to documents that are coming in or are requested; coming in from brokers, for example. It's easier to work on them. It's faster to work on them. Turnaround time used to be two or three days; now, it's minutes or less than an hour.

Mobile is probably going to be part of the Box solution coming in but nothing has been decided yet.

As far as usability, it's user-friendly. Now that we're using Content Navigator, it's easier to use and easier to present it to the users. Training-wise, it's much easier because you teach them on one application so everybody knows how to use the next application that's going to come on as a solution. That's a plus.

The most important criteria for me in selecting a vendor to work with is how accessible they are; how support is available, especially IT or technical support; and if we're doing development, how fast they're going to respond for problems that we encounter. Those are the things that are important.

Since we implemented FileNet, the users are happy with the experience. The users are using it on a daily basis, especially when they don't deal with paper. Whenever they need, it’s there and they don't have to worry about paper. It helps them in their daily work and job.

I rate IBM File Manager a seven out of ten.

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.

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.

Do your research. Don't listen to the vendors all the time. Make sure you have a reference about using the technology and are able to get feedback from those customers.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are knowledge, being able to support us and availability.

As far as I know, we do not have any plans to consider IBM for cloud, hybrid or box solutions.

Regarding new analytics or content management services that we are now able to provide to my organization, we haven't really gotten that far. We're taking our steps slowly, right now, because we are just trying to convert all of our departments into ECM.

Automation and capture were existing services that we are now definitely able to provide better than before.

We have plans to include mobile. That was the reason I attended a session on it at a recent IBM World of Watson conference. We're not sure yet how we're going leverage the mobility part. I just wanted to see what technology we need. According to their content, it looks like we have it; I just wanted to see how they use it.
Usability is excellent. The API website that we're using right now has everything. It's really good because it presents all the functionalities that we need in order to search and retrieve documents, as well as in workflow.

The feedback has always been positive regarding changes to our internal and external customers’ experience since implementing FileNet. A lot of our businesses right now are going to the next level; meaning, automating their business process right now and being able to use e-signatures and all that; integrating with FileNet.

Really listen to your customer, your users, and what they need. Understand what they need from a records management perspective and what they're going to be migrating from and coming into this with. With these solutions, there are a lot of dials to play with and some of them handle that better than others.

It's a very stable platform. It's obviously a leader. When used properly and the customers understand what it's to be used for, it's an excellent product. Whether or not it's as customizable and user friendly, that's where it starts to drop a little bit as far as I'm concerned. When you compare it to the flexibility and what users can do with SharePoint or some of the competing products like OpenText and so on, it seems like there's a little bit more flexibility on the user side for them to do more with those than what you can with FileNet when it comes out of the box. Now, I do understand, IBM is changing that. That's the reason behind my rating.

We are considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions; a little bit of everything. The box solution is a nice way for us to work with outside agencies such as banks and so on, when we do reviews of them and so forth. We would look at the cloud for development systems and things of that nature. I don't see us moving any of our production-level data out to the cloud at this point in time. An in-house cloud, that's different, perhaps.

We’re now able to provide analytics and content management services for my organization that we weren’t able to provide before, because we didn't really have a complete system before we had this system. We're now a records management system for a central bank.

Document management is probably the key existing service that we're now able to provide better than before. As I’ve mentioned, we had disparate systems, many different search engines to find all that data and now we're all kind of coalescing into one.

We have plans to include mobile. It's a little bit further out and, being a central bank, we have some restrictions as far as what we can do on mobile devices and what they can do to access their network. That makes mobile difficult.

The experiences of our internal customers have changed quite a bit since implementing FileNet. As I’ve mentioned, they've got one area to go to find all their data. For the customers that are using it, they like that quite a bit. Being able to leverage new workflows to improve their business processes is fantastic. As far as external customers, we haven't allowed anybody external. We have no external access to it. That's where we might use something like box down the road.

There's an ebb and flow to usability, as far as what you're willing to customize on the user front end. Coming out of the box, it's difficult to say that it's very usable for customers until you get in and really start customizing it for their needs and understanding how they're going to use it in their day-to-day practice. ICM out of the box is OK from a document management perspective, but it's very generic and it needs to be ironed out and customized. I'm not referring to custom coding, but really going in and tweaking the settings to facilitate what the customers want.

If you have a very large-scale ECM system, then I think it's the best tool available, based on my limited exposure. I've been working in a P8 shop for the last four years. It’s my first ECM shop, so I don't necessarily have a lot of experience directly with some of the other tools. For a large-scale solution, like what we needed at my employer, it was great. To my knowledge, for a large-scale ECM system, it's one of the best tools available.

Employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions is definitely a consideration, although my company is only just starting to get into moving our on-prem solutions to cloud. We have to understand a little bit better what the broad-view cloud strategy is from the entire IT organization standpoint before we get to that point.

The experiences for our customers, both internal and external, have changed by implementing FileNet. They're using a different tool set, so that's changed. With our scanning solutions and indexing, and especially from a data perspective, we can better cater to their needs, because of those features that are available through P8.
I don't have a great use case for mobile at this time. Most of the end users that we are providing services to are either physically located inside of a branch or located in our home office, performing more operations functions. They are not necessarily out in the field capturing documents in real-time from customers. It's just not the business case that we're servicing.

The usability is pretty good. There are a lot of great features in the upgraded platform, 5.2 and above, that we're not yet taking advantage of; we're still in 5.1. The Content Navigator, front ends and consolidation of the administration to Content Navigator consoles definitely are benefits. End users definitely benefit from that tool. It's been pretty good for us, even in 5.1.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for me is having somebody that can really demonstrate the tool, has the technical knowledge and can speak to the capabilities; preparedness for the presentation. With the RFPI, I wasn't there, but when we were first looking at vendors for ECM, IBM was certainly the most prepared and had a demo-able platform, as opposed to just something like a PowerPoint presentation. Being able to really demonstrate in real-time what your tools can do is the number one thing that any vendor can do to win over a customer.

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.

If someone is comparing FileNet against other solutions like SharePoint or open-source solutions, I think they should be looking into the scalability, robustness and the whole document lifecycle features.

When I look to work with a vendor, the most important criteria is their in-house expertise, how competent they are, the resources they have in their organization; and then, price. We always have to look at which vendor is good and cheap.

For our custom projects, we outsource to a couple of vendors, such as Imagine Solutions. We work with them. They are vendors for FileNet solutions. They don't compete against FileNet. They help us in upgrading FileNet. Those type of projects.

I have a former colleague that works for another governmental organization and they are also a FileNet shop. They have a slightly different architecture than our own, but when he asked me about the particularity upgrade from 4.5 to 5.2.1, I did tell him it was completely worth it; that he'll have so many additional benefits into how he could manage his object stores and all of his data; and that it is completely and absolutely worth it.

We would potentially consider employing IBM cloud, hybrid, or box solutions. We're trying to find other ways we can add to our FileNet implementation to better service our end clients.

As far as new analytics or content management services that we are able to provide to our organization, we are looking at Case Manager and Box as additional implementations to our current FileNet instillation.

There are most definitely existing services that we are now able to provide better than before. Our document imaging services are much more stable than they used to be, especially given our recent upgrade.

Potentially, our plans could include mobile. We're trying to find every possible way to make it easier for our clients to interact with us.

Regarding how our customers’ experiences has changed since implementation of the solution, there are far fewer calls from the field, from all of our users. The times we have had problems, it has not been FileNet related. It has usually been some other piece of our infrastructure that touches FileNet that might be developed third party or in house. Over the last six months, since our new implementation, none of those problems have been FileNet related at all.

As far as FileNet’s usability, the new component, the ACCE, is a little slower compared to the old FEM, the FileNet Enterprise Manager tool. I see a little bit of room for improvement, especially in the area of searches. Overall, it is nice to have a web interface versus a client that has to be installed on a system.

In some areas, the usability could be a little bit smoother, especially for someone that is not an active developer or a database administrator. Other than that, we're really happy with the product.

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.

I will rate it at eight out of 10, because I think some of the technical pieces, when implementing it ourselves, were something of a roadblock until we discovered the Concierge. Those are some things they have to work on. We'd like to be a lot more independent for something like that. But outside of that, from what it delivers in terms of functionality, it's great.

My advice would be, respect the maturity of the solution if you're trying to go to a huge scale. Most new stuff breaks.

The cloud could be really interesting, as soon as you don't have any constraints regarding the regulatory aspect, sovereignty, and so on. We have some IBMers in charge of operations, upgrades and reliability of the environment; I think that's very interesting.

A hybrid solution could be something that we can consider. We have some regulatory concerns. Because it's mostly sensitive information that we have on our repositories, we need to find ways to securely involve cloud capabilities. That's something we need to consider but, of course, we are interested.

There are no new analytics or content management services that we're able to provide for your organization, yet, but I'd like to have some more, mostly for the capture part of the process. I'd like to have some more analytics capabilities to classify or extract content, and to structure content from the unstructured content.

We have plans to include mobile as well; that is part of it. We have a few line-of-business applications, so we need to consider it as an integration. It's mostly for supporting documents that we want, too. The IBM Box offering could be something that we can leverage.

With all applications that we are using, we are going to leverage Content Navigator. That's one thing that's very interesting. Case Manager, Datacap, and all of those products are interesting.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are robustness, the fact that they understand our business, they are willing to accompany us with various strategies and various solutions we can implement; not only with IBM solution, but with third parties as well.

I attended the tech track at the IBM conference.

We have not integrated this solution with other solutions.

The only way to really tell is to try it out, see how it works for you. I think it's a great product.

I rate FileNet a nine out of 10. It would be a 10 with closer integration.

In terms of advice, I would say look for something that covers your requirements. From my point of view, FileNet can for sure cover the requirements of a medium and  a big company, because of the scalability and the possibility to connect with many other IBM products.

When selecting a vendor we have to do put out tenders which have our criteria. A big issue is the price for licenses.

Regarding advice, I would say if you're going for FileNet, get FileNet P8 and not FileNet IS. The two products are doing similar things, but in my personal opinion, P8 is more the future.

I would rate FileNet a nine out of 10, because it's a good product, stable, no worries.

This is a straightforward install, and it works well. It has been very hands-off and seamless in terms of supporting it. In terms of researching it, these are really good considerations.

We have been running FileNet for 18 years. It has been a very good relationship.

This product requires that you take a long look at it, because it provides a good solution. It is used across many industries, and it has a solid reputation.

Most important criteria during the evaluation process: Familiarity with the product. The people who were doing the selection had a prior knowledge of the product from a prior company, and it had a very good reputation at that point, even 20 years ago, and the product has maintained that reputation.

I have recommended FileNet to friends of mine at other companies.

Make sure you know what you want to do with it, how you're going to do it, and plan.
Nothing's perfect, but it's very good. It's above average.

I might give it a higher rating if it cost less; as with anything else, licensing is an issue. Anything with business boils down to money.

With anything, the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is cost, system stability, features, and different components and third-party apps that'll work with it, for any company that has existing storage and hardware.

It’s possible that we would consider using IBM in cloud, hybrid, or box solutions. We are looking at cheaper ways to store items; faster retrieval. Maybe in the future, making the items more cognitive; getting the wealth from the data, the value that we have in the data.

At this moment, I don't have any plans to include mobile.

I'm not sure if there any new analytics or content management services we're able to provide for our organization. I'm not in that position, so I really can't answer.

There are existing services we're now able to provide better than before: quicker response to customers in the data center, when they call in, to answer questions about forms and medical records that they've received from us.

The usability is great. It's not difficult at all.

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.

When selecting a vendor what's important are the 

• product
• service, response
• name and reputation.

We definitely look for somebody that we can trust, that understands our vision, that is reliable, that really is going to do their best to kind of help meet our needs without necessarily trying to push us into a corner.

I would give Case Manager a seven out of 10 at this point, because I think there has been some challenges with trying to get the language library. I know that we do have some individuals that do need to come up to speed on it technically, and the only onsite training for Case Manager is in Europe, there is not a lot of US-based training. So they have to do all their training online rather than being able to go and have a good bootcamp-style training somewhere nearby.

In terms of advice, I would say use our partner, Vega, because they've done a really good job. It's been, honestly, one of the quicker implementations that I've been part of, overall. They've done a really good job coming in and understanding our business scenario, our business case; the speed of delivery is actually really impressive. We're going to be going live either end of this month or beginning of next month. It's been six months to replace something that has been broken into two different pieces that we're merging into one, but that have been parts of solutions that have taken us much, much longer to put together.

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 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.

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.

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.

It is a very stable, scalable system, but it needs a little improvement. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Price
• Name
• Expertise
• Reference.

Reference is very important for us, because we are a government agency and prefer to have a government agency reference.

It's not an open source product, and IBM support is very good.

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

When I select a vendor, the most important thing is the possibility to move to other technologies, connectivity for the digital ecosystem, and sharing; how the product shares sets for other companies.

I rate it eight out of 10, because it's stable, it's elastic, but difficult for designing the business use case.

Before implementing the product, try to pilot it, in a small division, work it in a small division and then try to scale.