IBM FileNet Reviews

We store our medical records.

The solution is used by business users in our organization. However, in our organization, the business users are connecting into the FileNet system via a set of middle tiers. Their user experience is based on their middle tier application, not my back-end. This middle tier is an integration that we have done on the product.

All ECM systems save time, especially on systems that are well-designed, because the users can retrieve their content in a much quicker and more consistent fashion.

• The uptime
• Stability
• The speed of retrieval

We found that it is incredibly usable and rock solid. FileNet P8 is probably the most usable, extendable option out there in the ECM space.

I understand that video is becoming more prevalent on some of the content which they are storing. We are very happy with that.

It is ability to display legacy content needs improvement.

I've never come across anything better for stability.

The key way that this product has improved the way that that our business functions is by its stability. Its ability to remain up despite other pressures, its consistency, and lack of downtime are really the greatest things that it brings.

There is difficulty in the upgrade path when new versions come due every other quarter.

Absolutely best in market for scalability. You can scale it, and it just keeps on going.

I evaluate technical support every time that I make a technical support request, and they do very well. I am very happy with them.

My previous system, Image Services, was being sunsetted.

The initial setup is very complex, but we expected that. This should be expected with this product. The setup process was complex because it was a migration from the previous system, which was also a FileNet system, and image services. This was a multiyear effort which involved enormous challenges due to the volume and complexity of the data.

We used a business partner for the deployment, who was 100 percent top-notch.

I would recommend finding a business partner who is skilled, then staying with them.

There were no other vendors on my shortlist.

Our primary use case is a medical record, and there isn't an enormous amount of business process management that occurs around that. However, we have seen limited improvement in business process management. 

We expect to be using the solution for automation projects by the end of the year.

Content never dies is the biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution.

I would rate it a nine (out of ten) because of its scalability, uptime, and support.

We use IBM Case Manager as our platform for deploying our telemedicine solution. The use case is delivering connectivity between patient and doctor without any third parties. The cognitive capabilities of Case Manager and how we're able to create a case, which is a patient, are very valuable for us. Everything that goes into an object is about the patient, versus it being event driven.

The most critical benefit has been ease of use. It speeds along our development, helping us go to market a lot sooner.

It's cognitive capabilities and scalability. 

I'd like to see more cognitive. That's obviously where all of our world is going. I think if we can have more of those types of features and functions as a core, out of the box, that would be very helpful for us and our space.

Excellent. It's probably one of the most mature pieces of technology that IBM offers. 

I believe we built it on that platform because of its ability to scale to whatever size we need to go to.

We're consistently using technical support and they're doing a great job to this point.

We started with IBM Case Manager after doing our research on some of the other ones, just sampling them. We saw that the other ones didn't have the scalability and were very easily breakable.

For me, the most important criterion when selecting a vendor is trust.

There's a level of complexity, but our exposure, for starters, has been with the IBM Concierge, where the solution is fully loaded already, Case Manager on all of its platforms. But when we try to do it ourselves, that's not as smooth. 

We started with considering doing a peer, mobile-first type application. Obviously, from a mobility perspective that's great, but you need a lot more heft from data storage and otherwise. 

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

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

It really has improved our organization, because it's the repository of all our documents, PDF, etc. That's where we are archiving and storing all those documents, so it's critical.

The natural interoperability with IBM Datacap, that is a key component of our solution, as well as with BPM, and WebSphere Portal. That's why we prefer FileNet instead of some other, less world-class solution.

Support is good. When they have to escalate internally, in order to get some more expert advice internally, they do so and it's okay.

No problem. We've were helped by IBM. That is, you always have problems on a project, but what I ask is whether the solutions have been solid. Yes, they have.

The most valuable feature of FileNet is the capability to manage a large number of various documents, dynamic documents. In our case, we are using mostly transactional documents. It provides the ability to attach all documents related to transactions that we want to manage and provides guaranteed support to the transactional aspect with unstructured content.

It supports and provides the capability to expose content to line-of-business applications.

FileNet is mostly internal for us. It is very interesting because it is providing capabilities that, in the past, we would have had to retrieve boxes of paper documents, and so on. It's easier. We are in the process of straight-through processing and the digitalization of processes. Of course, content is a major part of that. We definitely want to investigate that and leverage content into transactional and improvement of processes.

I would like to use the analytics features more. That's part of the solution; it's already there. However, for the ECM part, we don't have any experience with the analytics. That's something we can envision and would like to consider integrating into the solution. However, at this time, it's not part of it. It’s definitely something we're looking for to provide value and more intricate information that we cannot consider with the basic connection process.

When we compare it to other vendors, there are some capabilities that we might improve.

We have some applications that we can build on and an API is also available; that gives us some capabilities.

We don't have any stability concerns for FileNet. IBM manages it on our site. IBM is our outsourcer. Stability’s OK on the site. We don't have major failures, or anything like that. We are considering a different approach for DR. But otherwise, it's okay.

Scalability’s something that we want to consider. With the cloud offering, that's something that we can definitely leverage. In terms of scalability, cloud offers us something good and new. We discovered at a recent conference that IBM has an interesting cloud offering.

We have not used IBM technical support for FileNet.

Initial setup was done a long time ago. I was not at the company at that time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are using this product in Beijing. It is a good product to use.

Our team programmed an automation workflow to use with it.

Our upper management encourages us to use this solution with automation.

It has increased our productivity.

It is easy to use. You can put everything in it, such as, documents. It is really easy to access and pretty easy to set up.

My colleague and I have a lot questions about the Datacap related stuff.

While the stability is pretty good, there sometimes can be issues with the database connections. FileNet has too many outages because things are broken in the database.

There are some issues when contacting technical support. It is not a very satisfying experience.

The company had a training session and decided based on that to implement the solution.

It has saved time for us.

I attended the tech track at the IBM conference.

We have not integrated this solution with other solutions.

It is primarily used for storing documents and other content in our repository for underwriting purposes.

I have been using it for a little over two years now. I think it's been working out great for what our needs are.

Case Manager is a web-based application. The product we were using before Case Manager was a desktop application. We had a lot of issues with that product. Ever since moving over to Case Manager, it's been really easy and simple to use, and it's just perfect for the job.

I think it's valuable that users are able to create their own content, and they can manage their own sets of tasks, to work at their own pace and get their jobs done.

In terms of upcoming releases, I was in a couple of sessions on the IBM Case Manager roadmap, here at Think 2018. I think it's really cool that they're now taking the time to listen to their customers, and bring features in that customers have been asking for, for years.

One of the features that I thought was very cool is that you can edit your documents within your repository straight from your desktop, from your device. You don't have to have a special editor. It will just connect to the native application that the file works with, and you can just check right back into your repository. I thought that was very cool.

In my opinion, it is very scalable. We have couple of smaller solutions that are maybe 20 to 30 users, and then we have bigger solutions - we're talking hundreds of people using it at the same time. I think it's pretty scalable and stable.

I have been using IBM technical support to work with IBM to hash out their glitches, bugs on the product. I think that IBM has been very helpful. They are very professional when it comes to working with their customers. It's very helpful.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

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

We use it to manage all the documents, for all the working groups we have, for management meetings, and for all the projects we run. The advantage is to have a unique place where you can store everything and then we connected it with the another IBM product, IBM Connections. So it's a new way to work, to collaborate, and to exchange documents; even on mobile, especially for people traveling a lot, like me.

It's performing quite well, there is a high level of acceptance by the end-users. Obviously it's all part of the change management that we are running in parallel, and that's so the people can get used to it and discover new features every day. We're quite satisfied, it has performed quite well. 

We have reduced paper, because people, especially at the management level, but not only, use tablets and electronic documents more and more, because they know where things are stored.

And they can access the documents in different ways, like from IBM Connection, from Lotus notes, and all the documents are in FileNet. That's a big advantage because you can save time and you can easily distribute documents to all the people, for example in a project or after a meeting.

For me it's the possibility to share and to collaborate, the possibility to connect FileNet with many other IBM products as well. It helps avoid the possibility of creating "island applications." We have an ecosystem where everything can be interconnected. The people are getting used to it.

In any product, what I would like to see is integration. Because for me, what is important is to be able to give stability in what we provide to the final users. So integration is the keyword for future releases and maybe even new products.

I think it's quite stable, it's a very robust product and we haven't found any major problems or issues, so far.

It seems to be very scalable. We don't have millions and millions of documents, but it seems to be quite scalable and the performance is also quite good.

We are working with a business partner in Switzerland. We work with them for every new release and for configuration. Our experience with them is quite good. We have been partners for quite a while on many different projects with many IBM products, and we are quite satisfied.

Previously we were using, as in many other companies, Windows Network Drive. Then, some years ago, before I came to the company, they decided to invest in IBM FileNet because, in our company, we have used IBM for many years and many purposes, and we were quite satisfied. The consultant proposed this solution and we started with FileNet. Later on, we installed IBM Connections and many other products. We are satisfied, as a long-time IBM user.

For me, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor include that they have to be close to the customer and they need to understand not only the technical point of view, but the business point of view. That is very important. The risk in many projects is well-known, you build a perfect technical solution but maybe it's not covering the requirements, or it's not close enough to business needs, so people don't use it. So the returns are only on paper.

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

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

First we used it as a document management system only, now we have some workflows too. It's one of the biggest applications in the government of Switzerland. We are using FileNet to build up these workflows.

It's a single a solution. Before, we had several products but now it's all in one hand.

Resiliency.

We'd like to use the docker, to have it containerized, that would be great for us.

It's very good.

We did have some issues with Web services. It was a version conflict, because two Web services were deployed, an old version and a new version, and both were accessible. So we had some problems with that but it wasn't a product failure.

It's very good. We have millions of documents. We have no problems with scalability. It runs fine.

We didn't buy the product from IBM itself, it was from a business partner. So, issues first go to the business partner, before they go to the IBM. As soon as it's at IBM, it's very good. Before that, it depends on which person is available.

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

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

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