IBM FileNet Reviews

It is our unstructured record archive solution.

It is mainly for internal users. We don't have end users for it, since it is only used internally. It has captures a maximum part of our organization to help with the efficiency in our records.

It has a process interface for a lot of different aspects of our business, which makes record archiving very efficient.

With our organization being in the financial sector, it has a lot of records: millions to billions. These were very tough to manage overall. A solution like FileNet has definitely improved our business. It keeps legal focused on what is required, and what is not. It has also helped the overall organization to focus on what is really needed, and what is not.

The product has helped with compliance and governance issues. There are some archiving policies which a financial organization has to keep. Our organization can keep up with them because of the IBM product.

It does help the legal team with their decision-making. They can hold and sweep the records based on legal actions required on any particular record. Therefore, it does help on the compliance.

It is very user-friendly.

In the next release, I would like to see automation and simplicity in the installation.

I feel that there is not enough ease on the initial front part. The ease and flexibility could be improved.

The technical support is good and efficient. I would rate it an eight out of ten.

In the past, we did have some other custom solutions. We have also tried some other vendors and they did not covering the platform 360 degrees. When we opted for this particular product from IBM, we saw that it has the overall coverage which is not being provided by any other vendor. This has improved our productivity.

The initial setup was pretty complex. There are too many options, and it can get a bit confusing.

We implemented it in-house.

It has not done much for operations costs because there are still operations involved in it. However, I still see a percent or two difference.

We did a PoC. We tried multiple vendors and compared them on different aspects. Based on the simplicity, ease, convenience, and many aspects of this solution, we made the decision in the past to work with it. We plan on continuing doing so in future.

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.

We use FileNet with our Cognos. We used to store all of our report history within Cognos, inside the content store. We've removed it from the content store and put it inside the FileNet system. Our users can still access their reports, but we don't have to store it in our content store.

Our main benefit is keeping our content store small, where our content store was about 5.5GB. Best practices from IBM is about 3GB, so we were way over that. By moving all the report history out of the content store, we're now down to about 1.5 to to 2GB.

Keeping our content store small. That helps our DBAs when they have to do the backups of our audit system, or of the content store. It's in SQL Server, and to back up SQL Server of something that size takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. But now that we've shrunk that down, it's a little bit more manageable to handle backups. I know if we do ever have to restore our content store - which we hope we never do - we're able to do it in a more timely fashion because it's smaller in size.

It does what we need for it to do. As long as it can continue to handle the volume that we're throwing at it, I don't think that it's going to be a problem.

We've been using it now for about four years. When we first went to it, we were having some issues, communication across the network issues, but we have had very few issues with it. 

We add stuff to it all the time, so it's scaling vertically all the time, and we haven't had any issues with it. We started out around 3GB, and we're up to about 5GB, and we expect to be somewhere at around the 10 to 12GB mark by 2020, just because that's the way our business is growing.

One of our account reps was very instrumental in getting us set up, but we really haven't had, other than network latency issues in the very beginning, a lot of issues where we needed to go to technical support for it.

We were using the out-of-the-box content store of Cognos, and we were just busting at the seams, so we had to come up with a solution. One of our account reps actually came up with the solution. We looked at a couple other things, but this was a solution we decided to go with.

The important criterion for us when selecting a vendor is mostly that it's going to handle volume. Our particular company is a distribution system, and so we have tons and tons of data, so we need to be able to handle volume. What we typically run into is, people give us a proof of concept, and it will handle it with a small use case. But when you try and explode that use case into something that we need, at the volume we're working at, many of those solutions just fall flat at that point. This particular solution, that didn't happen. 

It was pretty straightforward. Like I said, the biggest issues we had were on our company side, the network latency of moving that much data across our network at one time. Once we opened up a dedicated pipe for that data movement, we haven't seen any issues like that.

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.

The primary use case is for collaboration of data files through CCM with IBM Connections. It provides an information sharing space and ability to create folders, thus managing the data. We are a worldwide company with offices all over, and there is a community room setup leveraging CCM with FileNet as the back-end. Therefore, all these users upload their files and collaborate on them in this space.

Now, it is performing pretty well, since I have upgraded to the 5.5 version. Historically, we have had a lot of problems with it. 

IBM FileNet has improved our organization with its single collaboration space.

• The ability to manage the content well. 
• To create folders (unknown: how much is on the FileNet back-end versus CCM front-end).
• The ability to tag data, as it seems to be indexed well. It is a good space to manage data, keep track of it, and organize it.

• A little better control into the ACLs of FileNet and databases. 
• A better administration tool. At the moment, we are using the ACE tool, which is a web-based administration tool whenever we have to deal with the FileNet back-end directly. It is kludgy and slow. They used to have a rich client tool that performed much better, but they discontinued it. I would love to see that tool come back in order be able to do more effective, efficient administration of FileNet on the back-end.  
• It needs better collaboration between the IBM teams on the FileNet and CCM sides.

Now, they are pretty good.

In previous versions of Connections 3.0, 4.5, and 5.0, I had a lot of stability issues. It gets a little muddy, because when I would open PMRs, sometimes they would be on the connections interface on front and sometimes they would be on the back. One of my challenges seemed to be that there seemed to be a lot of disconnect between the two teams. It is empirical evidence, but it seems to me  that the Connections developers leveraged the FileNet capabilities and the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing. There seemed to be a lot of disconnect between the two teams. I would bounce back and forth between the two teams for weeks or months just trying to get support on performance and stability issues. With the most recent upgrade that we did a year ago, these issues pretty much stopped. 

Scalability is so far good. We have great adoption with the tool. For the users that we are supporting to date, it seems to be handling the load and performing well. 

My experience with the technical support is mediocre. Often times, I would open a ticket and the technical support would label it as a FileNet issue, then send it to the FileNet team. The FileNet team would receive it and declare it a Connections issues, thus creating a back-and-forth between teams until I insist on getting both teams on the phone and fight it out. I am the customer in this situation. I just want the issues fixed and resolved.

It has gotten better. However, I do not have many issues with the system now.

I do not know about previous solutions, but the business decided that it wanted CCM, which leverages FileNet. Therefore, I installed, configured, and built the infrastructure.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The Connections teams, as far as the FileNet tool, were able to integrate it with CCM. They made it easy to set up. At the time you install Connections, you point to the FileNet installers and it does all the work for you. There are a few manual steps, but all of that is pretty well documented. It is a lengthy process and straightforward, but it will take a lot longer than five minutes. 

None that I am aware of.

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.

The most valuable features of this solution are:

• The ability to do version control in the documents that are stored within the IBM FileNet solution.
• To be able to retrieve the history accordingly.
• To be able to work with those in a microservice environment.

The data can be integrated into a microservice architecture. It has allowed us to more deeply integrate the ECM or the FileNet solution into various aspects of our product, where we may need to provide user access to documents, that might be within FileNet. They don't need to open up a specific page or request mechanism to get to them. They can be embedded directly within the page itself or the app itself or within the context of whatever the user is doing. Thus, this just improves the overall efficiency and productivity of our organization.

We've actually had this solution since 2008, so we've had it for a long time; it's really not new to us.

The stability has been good.

Scalability is excellent and actually, it has been really great. It scales really well.

Previously, we were using just a file-based solution. It was not an equivalent solution and that was the reason as to why we moved over to IBM.

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.

The most valuable feature of FileNet is the storageand records management capability. It allows us to records manage our content properly.

It's allowed us to consolidate content all in one spot, to make it easier to pull out all of the customer-related content for a single customer. We provide better service to the customers. It can be more efficient, if they're not looking in various places.

We've talked a bit about Content Navigator on top of it; some improvements there right now. We use a customized viewer, because ICN doesn't have a couple of features we need around security, restricting content; who can see what content within the repository. We want to roll that out.

We’re also looking at other solutions that work with FileNet. It's a pretty bulletproof back-end solution, but we want to look at what else can we use, the cognitive and so on.

It’s lacking from our standpoint. We haven't done it. There have been different priorities. With things like box and so on, they're rising to the top because we need those types of solutions to go with the mobile or with the customer interactions.

It's been great; very stable; very few issues.

No scalability problems at all.

We have not used technical support, because we have an IBM service team that we use directly. They're not the actual tech support guys, but we do have an IBM team that does a great job.

I do not find it particularly expensive. We're having some discussions around licensing for external customers, and some of the licensing seems pretty expensive; the records management piece of it that's layered on top. You can get enterprise agreements on that sometimes. For smaller companies, it might be a pretty big ticket, though. If you're smaller, cost-wise, maybe it's not something you need.

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 integrates other solutions with my business applications; the APIs, the web services, all of the frameworks that we have developed around the FileNet solution.

We have used FileNet for legal proposals, digital governance and storage; digital documents that we would otherwise have to store physically. We have reduced costs for storage, by using digital and electronic documents instead of physical. That also makes us faster. For example, with our storage policy built into the application for electronic documents, we can now easily print the document.

I would like to see analytics from the unstructured data. Our documents are not always prepared in a way that Datacap and other tools can recognize or extract text from them. I don't know; maybe analytics from two rows or from handwriting.

It is very, very stable, like 99.9%.

Scalability is great. We have increased our size in FileNet. We have doubled its size in the last year and it is working well.

We have not used technical support.

We were looking for a BPM solution, and we found the FileNet BPM solution. It was integrated with ECM. We decided that it was a great integration, the way FileNet was showing the way to solve the problem.

Initial setup was a little complex but that was before the FileNet was part of IBM. It was many years ago. It was complex, but we made it. We had to change our document process, and define the governance policy for the documents. It was kind of difficult to figure out the right way that FileNet could do that at the time. That was difficult, but we found the way to do it right.

We considered solutions other than FileNet, but I don't remember which ones. We had three proposals at the time. We chose FileNet because of the integration, the brand name and the way that the brand would support us in the future. Then, IBM made it better.

The decision-making process took 10 months. The price was higher than we thought they would be. We did not consider building a solution on our own.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is the brand support; the way that they can improve the product in the future and work with you with those solutions.

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.

There are many aspects that can be improved in this product. We're doing a lot of projects with customers. It would help if there was a summary of the products. They should be able to do more upgrades of the product or offer new versions. They could also improve the user experience.

They have to think about how to make the environment over. Make it in some containers, for example. The complexity of installation can also be improved. They should re-imagine the way that they install products. 

The solution is very stable.

The solution is very scalable.

We use various solutions that aren't really similar, but are in the same field. There are lots of products that pretend to do enterprise content management. I have sample projects with SharePoint, and Microsoft Checkpoint among others.

In terms of the initial setup, you have to have some requirements. I am technical specialist in finance, so I can do installation as well, but it's not easy for everyone to handle. 

You have to know it takes time, you have to be very careful and know exactly what you are going to do. You need a good knowledge of the production system, middleware, application services, servers databases, etc. It's not as easy as other products.

How long it takes to deploy the solution depends of the requirements. It can take from six months to two years. It depends on a lot of factors including the modules, because you want a summary, and which remodels are the customer needs. The solution is modular, so you may have lots of modules. 

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

One of the primary use cases is for documentation processing, including image processing and all the content. It is also used for archiving and document management.

For example, in the mobile telecom or financial industries, there are requirements to retain a customer's documents, depending on regulations, for five and sometimes ten years. In this instance, FileNet is used for archiving all of the documentation.

We are using it for documentation automation projects, especially for content management such as customer contract management and some vendor contract management.

It has reduced operating costs, especially postage and courier costs and the cost of printing hard copies.

It has also helped with compliance issues. Instead of archiving hard copies, where there are regulations regarding the conditions in which they are stored, which means there are energy costs for climate control, FileNet saves on those energy costs. There are also savings on the cost of renting warehouses for the hard copies. Keeping everything digital means there are a lot of savings.

One of the most valuable features is FileNet's ability to capture things from the stack, from e-mail, to scanning of Excel and Word. FileNet can also convert many types of files to PDFs very easily.

Also, when the Content Engine processes files, it can reduce the size by up to ten times by compressing them. It has a very low storage profile. This is very important because storage is something that adds to the cost. In this way, it can reduce costs.

It is also possible to search any customer's documentation. If you want to find historical documents, you can find them very easily.

With the application layer you can install it with Windows Application Server to create web logic. 

You can also use clusters.

When requests come from users, you can extend it horizontally or vertically. You can put a lot of application servers in a vertical arrangement, so it's very flexible.

It's very simple to integrate it with other solutions. The business process management layer makes it very easy.

It's really user-friendly. Everything can be managed via a web application, a web console. And for non-technical users, it's mostly web-based now, so it's not so hard for them to use. Especially in the mobile industry, most workers are not technical. They are sales-based and are not familiar with a lot of technical features. But they find it very easy to use.

Finally, behind FileNet is IBM, which is a big company.

It is very stable because FileNet is mostly compatible with Unix, Solaris, and also IBM Unix (AIX). It's also compatible with Windows but the Unix system is really robust. When I was working with FileNet for a telecom company, it never went down. The uptime was five-nines.

Scaling is easy. You can scale vertically because in front of the application server there is load balancing. You can put a lot of application servers behind the load balancing. It's very easy. We were using Oracle Database and we could scale the database very easily as well. You can upgrade and scale up without any downtime. That is very important.

The initial setup is very easy. You first implement the database and after that the application. You can even install it on a remote site. It's that easy.

However, the configuration does take a long time. Every company needs its own configuration design. It depends on how many applications are connecting to FileNet. It can take a long time, depending on the application count.

The installation itself only takes one or two days, but the configuration can take a long time. The first time we configured it, it took over 20 days.

First of all, the automation means there is no more dependency on hard copies. Storing those documents was dependent on the environmental conditions, and if they weren't right, the documents could break down. And they had to be sent via post or courier.

By using FileNet, especially with bigger contracts, it doesn't take ten days or two weeks to receive and store the documents. Instead, when the documents are emailed it takes under one second and it arrives to customer service. Once they open the email, they can activate the customer's product immediately. The customer doesn't have to wait two weeks and it means the company can earn money for the product sooner. It helps with time to market.

Overall, ROI depends on the particular project. Every project is different.

Licensing costs depend on the size of the storage.

I also know SharePoint and Documentum. When I looked into them, Documentum was harder to use than FileNet and more expensive. Implementing and integrating Documentum was much harder than with FileNet. I'm not sure how it stacks up now. SharePoint was not robust or sustainable, in my opinion. FileNet is much better than SharePoint in those areas. 

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.