IBM FileNet Reviews

The most valuable features for FileNet are the ability to do information governance, compliance, and implement case-centric or content-centric workflow solutions; to provide enterprise search capability; and we have Content Navigator. Those are a few.

It has provided our users the ability to conduct their business processes more efficiently. They're able to search documents faster; integrate with the external systems. We're still at a point where there are a lot of improvements that can be made through newer versions of the newer FileNet platform that is coming from IBM.

We are looking for real-world capabilities within mobile, which has annotation features. We saw a lot of things at a conference but we are looking for more advanced rule-based – or, even if not rule-based, a better – cognitive approach that can be applied to cases.

Those things, and we are also looking for an improved mobile experience for our customers.

I haven’t rated it higher because of the workflow engine. I believe it can be improved upon, looking at other workflow solutions like Pega and Lombardi. FileNet has room for improvement there, as well.

We do have certain concerns about stability, especially with large volume, even within that, around web service APIs. That is something we'll try to prove out in a lower environment. Outages have become a regular thing, especially with our C-MART on-demand APIs, not so much with the FileNet. We are having some memory leak issues. We are working with IBM on that, but we are looking for alternatives to see how we could mitigate those.

If you implement the infrastructures correctly at the beginning, it's a pretty scalable solution. The platform is scalable, both vertically as well as horizontally.

I have used technical support a lot. A lot of times, it is 10/10; sometimes 8/10; sometimes 5/10. That's how I would evaluate it.

We have a good partnership and we get a lot of good support from our IBM sales partners and through our PMR support, but occasionally we run into certain issues where I'll evaluate it a little lower.

I was not involved in the initial setup of FileNet at my current organization, but in the past I have and we are right now, as I’ve mentioned, working on a road map and that will require a setup of FileNet in the organization.

From when I set it up in the past, while not exactly straightforward, if the methodology is followed, it is pretty streamlined and not so complex.

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.

The most valuable feature of FileNet is its out-of-the-box functionality; not a lot of custom coding that has to happen for the solution to work.

We have access to all the documents that we need. We have all kinds of documents. We have access to all of those documents from anywhere within the organization. With Navigator, it is essentially browser-based access.

They are already working on the areas with room improvement. It's being accomplished now. There's FileNet Enterprise Manager, affectionately known as FEM, which has functionality that is not completely in ACE yet. I know they're working on getting all of the functionality from that tool into the ACE tool. There are certain functions that we still go back into FEM to accomplish. They've been working on it. Each one of the releases, they include more of the functionality. That's the roadmap: to get rid of the FEM and have all the functionality in ACE.

It is very stable. We have had no outages. We've had planned outages, as far as upgrading. That's another benefit; we've found upgrades to be quite simple, quite easy. Even now, with the latest versions, we can do that without taking the system completely down. That's partly because of WebSphere, which allows us to upgrade on the fly. That is important to us.

There are no scalability limits. The scalability is everything that we've needed.

We have used technical support. During the initial launch, there were a few issues, I guess, with the multi-value fields, but they were resolved fairly quickly.

Technical support was not excellent, but very good.

We were previously using other ECM systems in the corporation. There still are, but there's a standardization going on towards the FileNet, the P8.

Initial setup is somewhat complex, especially if you've had no exposure to it previously, but it wasn't a terrible task. It was doable.

There was Documentum, and we still have a limited Documentum installation. There really weren't many others in the running.

One of the reasons we eventually chose the IBM solution was the peer reviews, as well as from Gartner, industry reviews; peer reviews from other, not necessarily banking customers, but other customers in our area. They have FileNet P8 installations and have had good experience with that.

We encountered these reviews by word-of-mouth, associations, networking with these other companies; that proved very beneficial to us. A good recommendation from somebody that's already using the product is worth a lot.

The decision-making process lasted a number of months, not years. One of the factors that expedited that process were the good reviews or good experiences by others that proved to be helpful to us.

In general, the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are reliability and the customer service being able to respond to our requests. That's important. Then, we don't like to be on the leading edge of technology, but certainly have the capability to stay current with changes, the technology. We've seen that with the HTML5 viewer that was incorporated into Navigator. We went to that immediately, as soon as it was available.

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.

We're an IBM business partner. We work with customers who purchase IBM and we help them implement business solutions. Often times, we just influence their decisions. Most of the time FileNet is being used for automation projects.

An example is one of our customers, an insurance company. They didn't have process-automation before. We helped them implement an IBM product suite with FileNet content management with workflow and analytics. It helped that company reduce processing costs. It helped them unify processes in 21 countries where they have a presence, and they use it as an IT framework that helps them integrate other companies which they acquire. They're big on acquiring smaller organizations to help them grow.

Productivity gains come where workers can focus on more important tasks, higher-value tasks, and where the repetitive tasks are delegated to software.

In the end, almost every solution that we create for our customers helps reduce costs. In most instances the solution has saved time as well. Where we do get statistics from our clients, on average we see 20, 30, or 40 percent gains in terms of turnaround time. You can see that, for example, processing a complicated claim would have taken weeks and with the software solutions built on top of IBM software, sometimes it gets down to days or even hours.

It has improved business processes or case management for our customers. That's the primary purpose, that's the reason why they're investing in the software.

The most valuable features of FileNet are its comprehensive ability to store content, to get insights from the content, and to use that content for making decisions routed through workflow.

Nowadays, with the new capabilities, the unattended task processing - so-called robotics or digital employees, digital agents - is where this industry is heading.

I think it's to the point where there are probably too many features. Every software, as it matures and graduates, grows the list of features. What many of our customers express is that it's just too complicated. They're using maybe five or ten percent of the features but they're having to pay for 100 percent. There is room for improvement in terms of simplifying it. This is a case where sometimes less is more.

Making it easier to deploy, easier to use, easy to integrate are the biggest areas for improvement.

Every new software has bugs, but the FileNet software suite has been around for ages, so it's stable, it works.

The scalability is infinite if you know how to use it in your software products.

Technical support is very decent. We've never had issues with it.

The integration of this solution with other products is where we come in as consultants. IBM software works great in the silo, the silo being that you have an IBM software suite and everything is working together great. But when you have a customer that has IBM and three or four or five other repositories, a line of business systems that need to be integrated, that's where typically consultants, systems integrators like our company, come in.

But IBM provides a great API and ways to integrate the software.

ROI is hard to tell, it varies. Sometimes it's tangible where it can be measured in percentages from 10 to 15 to 20 or even 40 percent. Sometimes it's intangible, where companies can get ahead of the game, get ahead of the competition, and get their products to market faster.

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.

We used it to develop document-management solutions for various public sectors, in India. We also use IBM BPM on top of it, which is primarily used for Workflow, with FileNet as the repository in the backend for document storage. Our solutions manage the entire lifecycle of content, right from creation to disposal.

For example, when organizations receive invoices or proposals, using FileNet we have a solution which allows users to create the content, upload the content, manage the content, and it moves through the workflow.

Our solution is called E-Office is, which handles the entire file movement, correspondence, file creation, committee meetings, etc. Wherever content is involved, the solution is involved. All day-to-day, paper-based activities have been automated using the help of BPM and FileNet.

It's deployed as a hybrid. It's mostly on-premise but some of our customers have part of it on cloud.

It's not only about productivity but utilizing resources effectively. Because of the automation, they use a lot less paper for printing. And on top of the resource benefits, there are also a lot of cost-savings as a result.

In addition, because offices are located in different locations, they now work together virtually. It is very difficult to transfer this kind of data through emails. Our solution has really helped with that. Productivity is a primary focus for every automation we implement. And our client companies have seen that as a result.

Our clients are saving a minimum of two hours a day in work time. They no longer depend on couriers or whatever they were using to dispatch and move files. Everything happens in the solution.

The most valuable feature is the suite of IBM products. It's a packaged solution. We have IBM Datacap which is used for the OCR capabilities. FileNet is the repository for document management. BPM is primarily used for workflow. Then we have Red Hat Linux or AIX, which is an OS from IBM. There is also Db2 which is a database, again from IBM. We get all these products straight from IBM. We don't have to rely on different vendors or products when there is an integration issue.

The FileNet Navigator, which came out four or five years ago, was really a major upgrade from IBM in terms of the UI. Users are happy with that.

FileNet has the capabilities to meet compliance and regulatory requirements. It is very secure. That is also one of the key requirements of any automation that we do.

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

FileNet is stable. A lot of our customers are actually on older versions, so we've been upgrading their systems recently. The current version is really stable because it has been rewritten. Since IBM acquired this product — FileNet is not an original IBM product — they have rewritten certain engines in it. The more they release new versions, the more the product is stable, especially in the "five-dot" series. They are really stable. We are encouraging customers to upgrade to the latest version. That is what is happening now.

I don't remember any stability issues recently. Maybe a long time ago, with certain limitations, there were a couple of issues. But we don't have them now. There is a resolution for everything in the current versions.

We were using products like Documentum and OpenText, and we used to rely on different vendors for the database, etc., and we had certain challenges. But the IBM products come as an entire package for us, which is really helping.

The setup is going to be complex but we put the right people on the job. In the older versions, it was much more complex. Slowly it is improving. They started releasing container stuff, recently, which we like. 

I would say it is not too complex or too easy. It's somewhere in the middle. Hopefully, the coming versions will simplify the FileNet setup to help it go more quickly. Currently, it takes at least a day to set up a basic environment.

Our clients have definitely benefitted from FileNet but they don't disclose the numbers.

Some people say it is costly, but when they negotiate with IBM it is sold for somewhat less. IBM gives discounts depending on the customer base. We don't have complaints about it from customers.

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.

As a developer, I am usually supporting this solution. I do things to automate it and make it work for our clients.

We are using automation with cell towers. They are putting all the different information about different cell towers into FileNet, so they can search to know where the different cell towers are. Cell towers are still always evolving, even with 5G. This project has paid for itself, as it would take a lot of manpower in order to find out this information and search for it quickly.

We have increased the productivity of accounts payable. Instead of processing invoices manually, which are coming from vendors, we can now process them digitally. We can index and organize them, then refer to them later, paying things on time.

It does help with compliance and governance issues. We are able to look for things quickly to get back to court cases.

We can often refer to the system to help us to make decisions. We are also able to get the information quickly.

The solution helps improve business process and case management in our organization.

We can move things from paper to digital, making things searchable and easy to access.

The usability is really good. Our business users are pleased with it. They seem to get what they are looking for, and it's very efficient.

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

The stability is getting better. It had a few issues for a while. Our old solution had problems at the beginning and those issues got better, then we move to a new solution. While the new one still has problems, they are getting better.

It's absolutely scalable. It is scalability as far as the servers and systems. The physical systems can scale by being able to attach and hook into different automation that we create and when we link things together.

The technical support is very good. IBM has support which goes around the world, which is pretty good. They have a ticketing system that we are able to use to get support from when we need it.

IBM Services is where we get help. We have a good connection with IBM.

We switched from FileNet IS to FileNet P8.

We are always continuing to move forward. IBM continually offers new products on their roadmap, then we follow along with that roadmap, what is supported and what won't be supported. 

The initial setup was straightforward as to what we were trying to do. However, all the details and different technical things that we were trying to figure out became complex. 

We deployed it in-house.

The solution saves time and money. It helps us to be able to accomplish the goals of our business, as opposed to being tangled in the weeds of what we could do. This solution takes cares of for us.

It reduces operating costs, probably in the millions of dollars.

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 in the FileNet business for 25 years and we have found that 80 percent of our customers use FileNet for Accounts Payable processing. That's the single biggest pain point that larger customers are trying to resolve, uniformly, across industries: ingesting invoices, matching them up with purchase orders, doing the three-way match with receivers - if they're a manufacturing or distribution outfit - and then, potentially, if possible, automating the approval and payment of those invoices so nobody has to touch them. Then, they can focus on approvals and touchpoints only when they have to, and escalate when they need to based on grants of authority and delegate if somebody's not there. They can also make sure they get their prompt-payment discounts and the like.

The other big use-case area is always compliance: Records retention, how do they prove that they're complying with policies and procedures and with regulatory issues - HIPAA, PII, etc.

In terms of how this product improves the functionality of an organization we work with, the Accounts Payable scenario is one. Let's say you're a high-volume purchaser, a retail operation, and imagine that you are getting paper invoices for every case of pineapple and every case of Planters Peanuts that you are getting, and every one of those invoices has to be filed in a filing cabinet. Now instead, we'll scan those in, they get filed automatically, and you trash the paper. And you can find them when you need to find them.

Probably the best example of efficiencies that we've seen was, we worked with a port authority. They get in several large container ships a day that they have to get unloaded. Their customers are either the consignees or they're the trucking companies that move the containers on and off the dock. Every ship that comes in gets a voyage file. When they billed their customers, if a customer called in with a question, they had to go find that voyage file. If somebody else had that file, the person looking for it couldn't answer the question. They were running a first-call resolution rate of 15 percent or less. When we took all the voyage files and started scanning them, putting them online, they raised their first-call resolution rate to over 80 percent. If you resolve their question faster, they pay you faster, and that's money in the bank.

The way that FileNet sets itself apart is along a couple of different dimensions. The first is there aren't very many ECM solutions that scale properly, both up and out. We have customers who hold billions of documents. There aren't very many that can scale that far, and that can also scale out so that they can handle lots of users, lots of documents, and that understand how to handle external users.

Then there are security issues. Everybody ties into Active Directory and things like that, but on top of that are the extra layers of security for encryption, so they can meet standards required by PCI and by HIPAA: encryption at rest, encryption in flight, encryption in the database, all together. There are really only three products on the market that know how to do that, and FileNet is one of them.

First of all, let's be clear, it's a relatively mature product. It's been around, it's been finely-tuned to handle the vast majority of what customers want it to handle. Most customers probably only utilize 20 to 30 percent of the feature functionality.

In terms of functionality, what customers might be looking for is a little more in terms of native-records retention. Records Management is an add-on product. If there were just a little more of that built into the core functionality, that would be helpful. Just like when you set up the document type or the document class, it would be good to be able to indicate the retention for this data. By being able to turn that on, customers might more often default to doing record purges rather than keeping everything forever. But that's just a small item.

We're fully certified to provide first-call technical support to our customers, which we do for the majority of our customers. Our customers like doing that with us because instead of logging into IBM's site and opening a PMR and all that, they call me and say, "Fred, remember that thing we saw two weeks ago, well it happened again. What do we do about it?" And because I have to live with the problem, I don't first have to ask them what version they're running, etc. We can solve it much more quickly.

On the other hand, IBM's technical support itself is very professional, very capable. You have to learn how to work with them. We know what they want. Before we even open a PMR, we go collect what we know they will want and we send it to them. When they say, "Okay, where's all this information?" we tell them to look at the attachment. They go off and we get a resolution more quickly that way.

It's a pretty complex product to set up because it has so many touchpoints. You have to integrate with your Directory Services, you've got a large database component, you've got a large web services component, you've got a large storage component, and you've got a big security component. At the same time, you've got an application server that you have to set up. By nature, it's a fairly complicated setup, it's not for the faint of heart.

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.

In our organization, we have a lot of documents, such as policies. It is very critical for our organization to have safely and securely stored content in our system.

FileNet is the best tool in the business for our organization to store all our content, policy documents, and claims.

We have been using FileNet since 2000. Since then, we have been upgrading our file systems with a lot of tools and the latest file systems.

It has improved my organization by how we release documents, claims, and policies. It is very important to quickly review documents to make the customer satisfied. This is solved when we use the product.

It is a faster, robust solution. The platform compatibility is very good.

To start with there are too many add-ons, which makes it hard for us. If they simplified the add-ons and plugins to be added to our existing systems, it would definitely help us in the future.

Stability is really good. Earlier, we used to have a lot of issues with the stability, especially with the updates for the new products. The new additions made now are so stable. It is a very good for operating systems. They have simplified it using products in different situations.

Scalability is really good. Earlier, it used to be a cluster-based solution. Now, with the latest versions over the last five or six years, we have a form architecture, which we produced. We find that it helps for scaling all of our systems to our service.

We use IBM support quite a lot. We have a license with this product, then whenever there are any issues, we always contact IBM to get them resolved.

The beauty is the response time. It is very good nowadays within the platform.

Earlier they used to have a very basic version of FileNet, the content services. That was back in the mid 90s. We also had the product that were being used on the FileNet site and also having too many issues. They came up with the new products like FileNet, which made it easier to store the documents. They added more security on top of the documents. So there's a lot implements that happened over time.

The main product we use is IBM based products, FileNet, the case manager and that stuff. On top of it we build a lot of APIs and other services and that includes supplemental customer applications. So for that, we mostly work with our participating companies who are rather preferable for our company.

It was complex. There were a lot of dependencies depending on the product. It had to be compatible with the Windows matching. All the time it had to be compatible with X and OS, so we did not have dependencies with all the operating system rights. 

For the medium scale or large scale, I would recommend FileNet. FileNet is free of licensing expenses, thus good for the money. It is not expensive, but worth for the money, especially for medium scale and large scale industries.

For small scale industries, they allow different options. They can do open source. It is the complexity of the data security that they should think about before they choose.

There were a lot of other vendors trying to overtake it, like Hyland, for more than 15 to 20 years. FileNet has had the same platform which is stable, but it is very compatible with our requirements. It supports OS, Linux, Oracle and digital, making it more flexible than most products on the market.

It just allows us to do a lot more data management, just because we have a lot of services, as well as the whole content management we had to do. The whole the FileNet solution that we have integrated allows us to do all of that.

The benefit of this solution is that it provides the whole file services, given that we have a lot of content management. There are not a lot of other technologies available out there for us to efficiently manage the whole FileNet services.

They should continue having the same stack of stuff. There's nothing new that we are expecting. Given our use cases, this is pretty much what we need at this time.

Stability is pretty good, because we've evolved over a period of time. Initially, we used to have it at a different data center. Currently, we've evolved into a place where we feel much more comfortable, in regards to the stability of the system.

Scalability is also good. Although, I'll have to admit that with our use case right now, we have a very good prediction of the number of customers. So, we've been able to meet our benchmark. But, at the same time, if it has to become much more larger than that, I'm not quite sure about where we would end up.

Technical support is pretty good, given that we have a very good partnership with IBM.

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.