IBM FileNet Reviews

We store policies, documents, and customer data in the FileNet repository.

The solution has increased productivity. We're a life insurance company. We get claims. It becomes much easier to view documents on the screen and process the work immediately so that the next person can review it and the next business user can view it. It makes the process very easy.

It has also reduced operating costs and saved us time, on the order of days. It used to be that processing applications would take weeks. Because we have different departments, physically moving documents would take a lot of time. Now where everything is online, they can just read the document and pass it to the next person. Things get done within days now, not weeks.

The solution has helped us with compliance. The documents are highly sensitive, they contain PI, so we had to make sure that only authorized people can access them. We have defined the security structure within FileNet. Only the people who have access can read the documents. That's how we ensure compliance and security on them.

In addition, decision-making goes faster. We don't have to wait for physical documents. Users can log in to the application, look up the information, and take the decisions quickly now.

The document storage is the most valuable feature. And then, searching those documents by users is helpful.

The usability is very good. We like the Content Navigator. It's very easy to use the search and retrieve for documents and has a lot of options for the user to download documents or send an email.

In Content Navigator we want to see the ability to view different types of video. They have come up with video support. We are using HTML 5 but it's very limited. They don't have a lot support for a lot of video formats. We definitely want to see support for most types of video formats in the market. That's the main feature we are looking for.

There is room for improvement when we need a fix to a bug in the application. That has to be a little bit quicker as compared to other solutions. It takes time for them to release any interim fixes. That impacts business on our side. We have had to wait for the solution, and sometimes it takes three weeks, sometimes it takes more than a month.

It's very stable. We haven't had any issues as far as stability is concerned. It's highly-available, so it's definitely stable as compared to other products.

It's easily scalable. We have multiple environments for FileNet, millions of documents. It's easy to scale and we don't have to worry about downtime.

Technical support is good. When we have any issues, we open a PMR with IBM and we do get the response on time. The only thing is that if there are any bugs, it takes time for them to come up with the fixes. But other than that, the technical support is good from IBM.

We did work with Documentum and Alfresco, but we went with FileNet because we had been using it for a long time and we are happy with it. It's more reliable. And support is also very good when compared to others.

If you ask a "fresher," the setup would be a little bit complex for him. But if you ask an experienced person who knows FileNet, it's easy for him. He knows exactly what to do.

In terms of integrating it with other solutions, we use Content Navigator within our in-house applications, and for the document viewing and searching. So we have created plugins and they use those plugins to access those features within Content Navigator.

Everything was done in-house.

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.

We are a ratings company. We store all of our ratings documents in a FileNet Content Manager. We also use the Datacap scanning solution to extract the data, then index it into FileNet. That is our main usage of the FileNet platform.

We store documents on-premise. As a ratings company, we are not storing anything on the cloud at this time.

The usability is very good. Our customers are happy. The stakeholders allow the interface and platform, which comes with a CMIS. This allows our external applications to talk to FileNet using the CMIS platform. It is a win-win for everybody.

• Stability 
• Scalability
• IBM support

The most valuable for us is the ease of operations in Datacap, especially to extract data, along with the robust platform of FileNet, as a content management system. 

It is very user-friendly for business users. They can create their own searches. They are not dependent on administrators to create searches for them. It is self-service for them.

I would like to have an offline DR deployment. If that is doable, then it would be a big win.

The installation needs improvement.

A lot of the solution is GUI-based. If that could be automated, that would make the solution better.

It is very stable. We hardly have any downtime or any major issues.

The scalability is very nice. It is very scalable. We are in a high availability mode.

The technical support is very good. We are very well partnered with IBM support. We have AVP Support, which is very valuable.

We did not have a different solution prior to FileNet.

The documentation was very well done. The initial setup was straightforward with our experience and in-house knowledge. We also had the IBM engineers available, as needed.

We deployed it in-house.

It has reduced operating costs by reducing the amount of manual work needed.

Datacap has helped to increase our productivity.

We use extraction. Therefore, we can see 80 to 85 percent accuracy on data extraction. This reduces the manual indexing part, which is definitely a gain on performance efficiency.

If we can achieve 80 percent automation with it, then it will save us 80 percent time.

I have used other products as well. However, stability-wise, I am more comfortable using this product.

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.

Very easily, the most valuable feature of FileNet is its reliability. We've been using FileNet Image Services since 1989. I average under one hour of unscheduled downtime per year. I have 800 million documents of patient records and patient financial information that reside on my box. It is sub-second response time and it just plain works.

It has done a significant number of changes. One, it has gotten us off of paper and it has also allowed us to streamline some of our work processes, so that we are electronically controlling those as opposed to doing them in the paper-pushing world.

The key to me is the ability for Watson and other analytic opportunities to be able to reach into the dark, unstructured narratives that are a key component of our medical record and read them, ingest them, and apply their analytic skills to them.

We will not have that until we complete the migration onto the FileNet P8 platform. Then, even then, we expect that there are going to be some significant challenges. I'm confident that IBM, which has very smart people, is going to be able to figure it out. That's absolutely something that I’m looking forward to them adding onto the solution; 100%.

The stability is second to none. We have consistently, year after year after year, been able to maintain an uptime of, I don't know how many nines it goes down to, but you can do the math; I have under one hour of unscheduled downtime per year.

The scalability is phenomenal. It just keeps growing. I've often likened FileNet to a teenager at an all-you-can-eat buffet, where you can just keep on feeding it and it'll keep eating and eating and eating. You'll run out of food long before the teenager stops eating.

We do use technical support. I'm a member of what IBM calls the AVP, Accelerated Value Program. They're phenomenal. These guys know their stuff. They are responsive. I have a wonderful and long term relationship with Peter Fagan, who is my AVP tech. I absolutely love the guys.

The initial setup was 1989. That perhaps predates many of us. I joined the firm in 1995, so I was not there for the initial set up. I've been there for, I believe, a representative period of time.

I’m involved in the decision process to continue making upgrades, absolutely. In fact, it's a very small team of very dedicated and focused folks who have all been with the firm for approximately 20 years like me. We don't have turnover and we don't want turnover in our product line.

From time to time, we do explore options. We looked at EMC's Documentum product, for example. We found that the migration to it was going to be as painful if not more painful as the migration onto FileNet P8, and was going to have the added detrimental aspect of bringing in an entirely new relationship. We were not confident, honestly, that the product line was going to survive for the long term.

When I’m selecting a vendor to work with, I need one with vision that is going to be able to stay with the course over the period as long as a decade. Things do not move necessarily at the speed of light. We need to know that a product line that we spend a year or two or three migrating onto, is going to be consistently available and enhanced over the next decade.

I'm not convinced that migrations can ever be made easy. I think migrations are a pill; you swallow it, it works its way through your plumbing and it comes out the other end. There are various times in the process when it hurts.

As far as building a solution in-house, I'm not sure that an enterprise content management solution is the kind of thing that is buildable in-house, though there are some who are perhaps arrogant enough to think that they can pull that off.

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.

We use the platform for the automation of business digitalizing documents. We can turn the digital content into workflows for automation and monitoring processes.

It is a superior product based on Gartner's classification. It provides good stability and scalability for huge enterprises as well. One of the valuable features is the ability to digitalize documents, including enterprise content. We can store the information in video and audio formats. It provides efficient security. Only authorized users can view and edit the stored documents in a role-based user group. Another form of security is redacting documents, where one can view only selected parts of the document. It allows us to share crucial documents like contracts by ensuring that confidential information is redacted.

The platform's price could be better than other products in the market. It could be simpler to use, considering multiple use cases. We could deploy it easily with some training as well.

IBM offers distinct features through different products, such as IBM Enterprise Records for record management, IBM Datacap for document scanning, and IBM Business Automation Workflow for complex workflows. They could include all the features into one application, similar to other vendors.

We have been using IBM FileNet for eight years.

IBM FileNet can add and manage processes for a minimum of five and 1000 users.

The initial setup and maintenance are complicated. It requires authentication to be able to deploy and maintain the certificate. We need to configure different protocols for different user groups. We require an administrator to conduct the deployment as large enterprises involve several roles and lengthy processes. We first deploy it in a test environment. Once approved, we implement it in a production environment. It requires a month to complete.

The product generates a return on investment.

We evaluated Alfresco. It offers a community edition free of charge.

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.

All of our customers are using it to ingest, process, and retrieve their documents on a daily basis.

Automation is definitely the most important thing for large enterprises because they can't process many documents without it. Our clients are definitely planning to expand the use of automation. The more automation they get, the happier they are, because they don't want to spend too much time and have large overhead for processing their documents.

There are different stages of automation. For scanning, our clients use Datacap and, once everything is configured and fits their needs, they scan and process all their documents automatically. They don't need to do a lot of extra steps to get all their documents into the system.

After that, they need to search and retrieve those documents, which is also really nice in the way it is automated. There are different options. They can use Records Manager to create records automatically and keep them for, let's say, seven years or ten years and, after that, they can delete them, but not before that.

We have a customer that was using an obsolete system from 1990-something. They switched gradually, business-unit-by-business-unit, to FileNet P8 and that changed their way of handling everything. It changed the time it takes them to do their jobs and it also completely changed their end-user experience because of all the new technology and all of the automation. It completely changed their business process.

It definitely has reduced our clients' operating costs. It also saves our clients time.

FileNet has also definitely helped them with compliance and/or governance issues. That's another thing that is specific to IBM. They're the best in the business for compliance for all kinds of regulations, laws, state law, etc. They know how all that works. Out-of-the-box, it's really easy to configure according to whatever state they live in and the specific requirements they have. Everything is already in the product. They just need to select and configure it, but doing so is really easy and, once they set it up, they just use it. There are no issues there.

There are a lot of valuable features, but the biggest advantage is that this system is stable; it's always online, it always works. In addition, there are not too many changes or updates that cause issues. It's both the system and the environment around it that are stable. For large and enterprise customers, it's the best solution because, once it's configured and running, we don't need to touch it and constantly make changes to it. It's a low-maintenance platform.

While the system is stable, at the same time, the end-user interface, the Content Navigator, gets updated frequently so that it can match the requirements from the end-users. That way it provides new features and makes sure that everybody is happy.

To summarize, the back-end of the system always works and at the front-end you have an application that gives the best user experience. It's a great combination.

I would like to see support for different databases, like MySQL. I believe it's a good thing to have options. I don't think that there will be a lot of customers doing that, but nowadays people like to have options.

There is room for improvement in the scanning solution, Datacap. It's improving all the time. But since it's more an end-user software, the end-users are constantly improving their processes, and I believe that sometimes we're not catching up with their requirements.

The stability and usability go together. The backend and the front-end are separate but they work together. Still, we can handle them separately, from a technical point of view.

The whole solution is based on IBM WebSphere, which is basically a complicated website. So all the applications are running on that IBM software and you can create a cluster, more than one server which is handling all those requests. So you can scale it up to as many servers as you need, which increases the performance significantly. Also, you have redundancy in this case. If one of the servers doesn't work, the rest of the servers automatically handle the workloads.

I use IBM's technical support all the time. They're extremely responsive and very helpful. They always ask all the questions. They give us all the information upfront. If we need them to join in a call, they always do so really fast. That's been my experience for the last seven years. Every time I need help from IBM, I get it immediately.

If a customer is using legacy software that they want to move away from, the primary reasons in the decision-making process that they decide to go with FileNet are the stability and, at the same time, a really nice end-user experience. Also, out-of-the-box, they have all the government and state requirements. The whole solution gives them everything they need.

With a lot of other solutions, you get some of the features but not all of them. So you need to compromise and probably build your own end-user experience or add something on top of it. With FileNet, you get everything you need out-of-the-box.

The initial setup is really easy. If you're going to use all the features out-of-the-box, you just install it and it starts working. You don't need to do anything.

We have customers that have their own end-user solutions or very specific needs, and then we have to spend a little bit more time with them, but that's because they have their own software on top of it that they like to use it. That's more an issue of end-user software and not the actual FileNet system.

Our customers integrate it with other solutions. A lot of the time it's their own software that they have developed in-house. They use FileNet to connect to other platforms such as FileNet Image Services, which is the older product. But there are no issues because FileNet has an API and they just connect to the API and use it. It's well-documented, easy to use, and they don't have any issues.

I'm more of a systems engineer so I work on the technical side. I don't see the numbers.

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.

Our primary use case was to have our complete documentation digitized and provide secure access to it for all employees in our organization. Along with that, we were to develop a workflow for check-in and check-out of the documents.

We are currently using FileNet but for a limited purpose. We have just one workflow configured in it. It's only used for document scanning and retrieval.

FileNet has not improved any of our organization's processes or functions. Our aim in 2013/14 was the same. We wanted to have complete automation, a paperless-office scenario. But that aim has not been fulfilled. 

The basic and fundamental point about FileNet is that the interface is very bad. It's just not appealing so people are reluctant to use it. Nowadays, when you go to any web application or mobile application, the interface is very appealing and very intuitive. These aspects are not available in FileNet. People are very reluctant to use that kind of application, one which has a very plain UI.

It should also provide different APIs to interface with multiple applications. There are some connection services for SAP but we have found the extent of such connections is not usable for our needs. We want a side-by-side type of a scenario where we can open an SAP transaction on one half of a screen and on the other half we should get a document from FileNet. That functionality is not in the version we have right now.

In addition, it needs a very smooth storage and retrieval process. 

Along with that, the workflow should be very simple to configure. Currently, we are capturing most of the information in Excel and then interface Excel with FileNet. That should not be how IBM FileNet works. They should improve on how the workflows can be automated with minimum effort on the programming side.

The product is very stable. We don't have much of a problem as far as the stability of the technology and the product go.

We awarded the contract to another party and they outsourced it to somebody else. So it wasn't that easy for us to implement FileNet. It took a lot of time for us to implement and install. 

The plan was that once everything would be digitized and we had a paperless-office scenario implemented, we would have high-availability, to have complete redundancy of the applications. Whenever one application would fail, another would take care of it automatically without the end-users knowing about it. But that wasn't set up properly. We then managed with Microsoft Cluster between the two nodes. That also wasn't that successful. So there were issues.

We are now looking at another DMS which will have a better look and feel and be easier to operate.

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.

We provide the content management platform for the company for official and unofficial records for all business processes.

We consolidate the content management. We've become a central repository for the company and are able to migrate content from our business units into the central service, especially as we acquire other companies. Thus, we can simplify our technology portfolio.

The standard spaced interfaces and features that any content management platform would provide, plus the API's extensibility. 

We are also moving into using the newer user experience provided with the product.

We would like to have more automation of rollout solutions. We've done some of this on our own. We've created what we call a repository builder that will build out a standardized solution meeting the needs of most of our customers initially. This has saved us a tremendous amount of time. We did this using the APIs the product provides. They just don't always provide those same sorts of tools. 

The user interface is also extensible through programming. Although, it's not easy to set up, so some improvements along these lines would be good too.

At its core, it's stable. In its basic implementation, it's stable.

Scalability is where we run into some challenges because we use it to scale where most customers don't. Therefore, we sometimes have unique problems or find some product limitations that other customers don't.

They're always very responsive. Though, sometimes we have to dig a little to work through the layers of technical support in order to get the people with the right level of expertise.

It was a fairly straigtforward implementation. 

Though it has so many options, we have to be discerning about what we will deploy because each option will require additional support for our customers.

We have also looked at Documentum, OpenText, and SharePoint.

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 is our integrated document repository that we use in conjunction with Connections. It performs extremely well for us and has been very successful.

It has given us a whole new environment to do document management and document storage. Before we used heavily used file servers and file shares, and now we are promoting the use of Connections. This has made Connections more successful for us.

The integration with Connections, where it is basically transparent for the end users, and very seamless. They can go ahead and store multiple tiered folders of documents in multiple tiered folders without any technical assistance of any kind. It is very user-friendly and easy for them to use.

Continuous work to continually refine and improve the user interface a bit, but it is basically pretty good. Therefore, I do not have any strong impressions of things that need to be changed.

A lot of people are familiar with the Microsoft interface and Windows. It becomes more intuitive if it somewhat mirrors Microsoft characteristics, but it is very usable as it is.

I am not aware of any recent issues. It is very stable for now.

Scalability is one of it strengths. It is growing pretty rapidly. 

We have not seen any interruptions, and I am not aware of any scalability issues right now.

I have not personally contact them. I am sure there are some other people in the company that have, but I have not personally contacted them.

We were using the native files capability of Connections, and it was very limited. So, we were informed that this was an option, and it has pretty dramatically changed our use with the original Connections files option. We probably would not have seen adoption so strongly without it.

I would advise a little on the product early on, but I did not actually do the setup of the product.

The initial setup was a bit complex, but it is a very elaborate application. The people that I talked to said it was not extremely difficult. It took some work, but it was worth it.

I was involved in the decision-making process.

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.