IBM FileNet Room for Improvement

KS
Chief Information Officer at OGDCL

Currently, our primary ERP system is SAP S/4HANA. Despite this, we have encountered difficulties integrating the solution with it, which remains an unresolved challenge for our team. The renewal cost has significantly increased since we adopted the solution, posing a considerable challenge. Previously, we paid an annual maintenance fee of 22 percent, but now the renewals have become expensive. This cost escalation may prompt us to consider replacing the solution in the future due to pricing concerns.

We need training programs for the solution by IBM here. My team could benefit from getting certified and improving their skills. It's something we haven't seen much of in our country. So, if IBM could provide training, it would be helpful.

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Moshe Elbaz - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager & FileNet Specialist at IFN

The user interface of IBM content management, including the ability to customize screens without the need for coding, could be improved. Customers can use it to split the screen, enhancing its suitability for office use cases.

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Bilal Nasser - PeerSpot reviewer
Telecom & IT Lead at Dar Al Handasah

The application's processing engineer needs to be more advanced.

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Enterprise Content Management
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JP
Senior Consultant at Northern Trust

Before we ask for any documents from customers, we would like to automatically see if any of them are already in our system. Are the documents signed already? We need to know before we have them sign a document that the document has already been signed. That is done manually, it's not automated.

Also, I have heard that there is already an integration with DocuSign. That was one of our needs. We brought DocuSign into our company's solution three years before. At that time there was no direct integration. We wanted to pull documents out from FileNet, push them to DocuSign and, when done, retrieve them and store them back in FileNet. We wrote our own custom solution for that. It would be nice if there was some tool we could have used to do that.

It would be helpful if I could submit a question and get a bunch of documents back. I would like to be able to query the documents that are already in the system and then we wouldn't have to worry about some of them because they're only year-old documents. If there is a document that is three years old we may have to re-ask for it from the customer. Such a rules-engine is not available.

Moreover, the questionnaire we use to generate documents is in XML and then it's coded in a scripting language. If there were rules it would be easy to configure them to pull out a specific document. The business cannot find what documents are in a given area right now.

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BO
Managing Partner at Inception Business Concepts

Our client feels FileNet does not provide them with content searchability. They feel it's cumbersome. They're only using Metadata. If the Metadata is not well-populated, it becomes a problem to retrieve a document.

Aside from that, they feel the interface — when they look at modern interfaces — is not robust enough for them. However, they're on an old version and I wouldn't know what the current interface looks like.

For non-technical users, with what we currently have on the ground, which is the web services, the only challenge we have is that content searchability is not available, because it is an old installation.

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SS
Software Architect at Deloitte

The new software and trends with the cloud solution is a little slow. I would like them to move toward more cloud-based and microservices rather than a SaaS model. This is where the industry is going and what customers are asking for.

The usability is a lot better than it used to be.

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it_user632724 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP Shared Services at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

There are no additional features that I would like to see included in the next release. I need to implement the existing features. We are not yet using the solution to its full capabilities.

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it_user543237 - PeerSpot reviewer
Delivery Director, Imaging and Workflow at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The platform is large, is vast. I see a little bit of ambiguity in the area of integration with Box. I hope this will be clarified in the next steps. The IBM Content Navigator is a great product. It was very much needed. It came at the right time to fill a gap in the user interface area. I think this product, because it does integrate with a variety of IBM products, as an end-user application, it's complex and a little bit more difficult to set up. I would like to see a little more simplicity and ease of use in ICN going forward.

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it_user543231 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Architect Executive at Anthem, Inc.

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.

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it_user543273 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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BZ
Executive Director at Intellective

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.

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GV
Senior Architect at Tecnics

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.

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PO
System Analyst at AT&T

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

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FH
Director Network Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

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it_user543282 - PeerSpot reviewer
ECM Filenet Architect at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user632799 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a wellness & fitness company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user543219 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see a hybrid cloud, where we could have a cloud solution behind our firewall and use the benefits of the cloud without exposing it to the outside world. I would like a private cloud in conjunction with an external-facing cloud, like the box solution that they're talking about now. We don't have that right now.

We have a different use-case for our ECM solutions than most. We are a government lab with high security requirements. I probably would never house much of our data on an external cloud. The access that administrators would have to data does not meet our security requirements (i.e., Security Clearance for the US Government and ‘need-to-know’ requirements). However, I feel that cloud technology is a much better way to secure and share data. I would like to utilize cloud technology that we could implement on our own servers behind our firewall in conjunction with an external cloud for storing data outside our firewall or maybe in a DMZ to enable collaboration with our sister labs and customers in the government and industry.

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YJ
Administration Division Support and IT Services at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We do not know how to use the FileNet API. It seems like it is very difficult and not transparent. They could also improve on the solution's resource consumption and cost.

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WP
Senior Consultant at pITsolutions

The area of migrations to new versions must be made easier. It's quite good that they have now begun to improve the API area, to modernize the interfaces, but there's always a very big investment involved in migrating from one version to another. That prohibits rolling out new functionalities to customers. It's not so easy. You can't release a new version every three months to bring in new capabilities. That is the old-fashioned, the way it worked ten or 20 years ago. That is bad. In that area, they really must improve.

We have FileNet, Content Manager, and TSM in our own installation. We migrated that installation three years ago to version 5.12. Now we have to migrate to 5.25 to bring in new facilities, and it's a big task. We have to do it in addition to our other tasks where we support customers. We need a parallel machine and to set it up there and to migrate step-by-step, then test it and roll it out. It's not so easy. That is a big area where there is much to be done to satisfy the needs of customers.

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Moshe Elbaz - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager & FileNet Specialist at IFN

The analytics in FileNet are too complicated and they consume too much infrastructure, memory, and CPU. They're too expensive to work with.

The usability, with the addition of Content Navigator, is not good enough. We're building our own interface, doing a facelift of the product, to satisfy our customers. People here in Israel are generally more Microsoft-oriented. They're used to the SharePoint look and feel, the Outlook look and feel. When they see Content Navigator and its features, it's a bit different for them. It's hard for them to get used to it.

Most of our customers and users are asking for features with a file-system-type look and feel. For example, when they open a folder in their file system they want to see the hierarchy of the folders. If IBM built something like other products, like M-Files for example, with a file-browsing feature, into P8, it would be a very good feature. Most customers around the world would use it.

That is what we're trying to build on our own. It would be easier for the customer to work with, in the same way IBM did with the Content Navigator Office Integration. There, you can browse through Office, the folders, and find things. You can drag and drop documents from Word, from Outlook, straight into the file folder in FileNet. If they would bring these kinds of features into the file system itself, without Office, it would be a killer feature.

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it_user842880 - PeerSpot reviewer
Supervisor Of Information Security Risk at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

If there was more AI capability, into Watson, that would be a benefit.

Also, where are the users going to find the documents? Because that's a path we don't see. We know that they're looking at documents, but we don't know what documents they're actually going and finding the most, or where the bottlenecks might be. It would be nice if there was some interconnectivity back into Bluemix to say, "Ok, you've got a workflow problem here." That would be a neat feature moving forward because we've got a lot of users that would just say, "The system is not working." We had a few threads would get hung up because they were just constantly banging on these few documents. If that were the case, if we knew that ahead of time, then we could fix that, change the search sequences to make it more efficient. But we were blind to that until the users said it's not working.

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it_user543243 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Over the years, it's actually improved quite a bit. I do like what they are putting into the product itself. Previously, your process engines and all these different components were outside of the actual FileNet Content Manager product and now more of that is coming internal to it; that makes it easier to deploy. I like the fact that it's easier to deploy; upgrades are much easier.

From an improvement perspective, one of the things we often have challenges with is, within the FileNet product, changing properties or just general configurations within the product to support a business. That's been one of our biggest challenges, to automate that and make that an automated deployment, rather than somebody having to go in all of the time and click on the button to make that configuration. More automation in that area would probably be one area I would like to see.

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it_user543276 - PeerSpot reviewer
ECM Program Coordinator at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have Content Navigator and it seems like we still need to do a level of our own coding for plug-ins and so on. I'd like to see something a little bit more out of box, where there are plug-ins that we can get to do some of what we need to do, instead of having to build it ourselves, to make it simpler. Faster time to market is important and we're not really there.

I still think it's kind of expensive. I didn't notice that the cloud offerings were going to be any cheaper. Expense is probably another area with room for improvement.

Also, when I attend conferences, activities are shown that sound very easy. "Oh, look at this bright, shiny thing." But then, when you really start digging, it takes a lot more work to implement the bright, shiny thing. It's a nicer on a PowerPoint.

We have a lot of content stored on server shared drives, and because there is often no naming or filing standards, or metadata, users find it difficult to locate documents. Also, users tend not to go back and delete items per our records retention policy (which can be decades depending on the document), and content can continue to clog up servers. It is helpful to setup automation of records retention.

Users also keep documents on their computer drives making it difficult to share. We also have a lot of legacy documentation in file drawers that could be digital for easier sharing.

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MA
VP at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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BT
Enterprise Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user842877 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal It Operations Specialist at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • 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.
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it_user543255 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director, Retail Operations, ECM and Forms Technology at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user543246 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Architect at Suramericana

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.

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SaidGaga - PeerSpot reviewer
Self employed ECM BPM Senior Consultant - Project Manager at Gacosi

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. 

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VC
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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RM
Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user543288 - PeerSpot reviewer
SysAdmin - FileNet at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

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%.

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BN
Product Development Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

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AD
Sr. Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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.

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SP
Dy General Manager (IT) at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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TJ
Senior Systems Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user840870 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of user services at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user543291 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT System Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

It's a big tool. It's heavy, really heavy. Because of this, and with it being highly available and robust, it's not so easy to manage. It's not like the new, light technologies. You cannot stop it in seconds, stop and restart it in seconds. That takes minutes. This can be improved, I think.

For example, WebSphere has a new application server named Liberty, especially in the front-end layer, with so many new technologies. IBM is construing it with Content Navigator, but we might not use it. Both parts have options that can be developed.
Management is an issue because the tools are so complex.

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it_user543282 - PeerSpot reviewer
ECM Filenet Architect at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

My thought process is that, we use a lot of FileNet products, and with the new versions that come from IBM, we were expecting IBM to provide some extended support for the products that we use at the customer's level. To make sure when we go to upgrade, we should have enough time to do any kind of upgrades or migrations.

I attended an IBM World of Watson conference to find out what new products they have. For example, we need more data analytics than we have now.

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it_user543300 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The particular aspect that I would like for us to improve on is the ingestion of new documents to data capture. We're looking at ways to more automate our document capture, more automated categorization of documents.

We were looking at the Datacap product. We're currently using Kofax. We're looking at Datacap to see if that might do it better. We don't know the answer to that yet.

It does what it's supposed to do well: you start a document on it; it pulls the document back; it displays the document. For what we use it for, I can't think of features that it's lacking. Now, there are other aspects of it that we don't use. There's a whole BPM system that's tied into it that we've never used.

Going back to data capture, that is not part of the FileNet P8 system. You have to have something to pull the documents in. IBM’s solution is called Datacap. Cofax is another company who we've been using. I went to a recent IBM conference hoping that they had the Datacap products smarter; all the talk there was about Watson and how smart it is. They have a new version of Datacap called Datacap Insight Edition. I was hoping that it was actually really smart; you could give it a bunch of documents, it could understand what the documents are, sort them out for us and extract relevant information. It's not there yet. The hype exceeds the reality.

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DL
Works at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I did hear that maybe there are some errors in relationship to another product that they offer, like SmartLock. There is something going on there which is not good.

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EC
Corporate Vice Presidents at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Some of the user interface stuff might be a little more complicated than it needs to be: the native user interface. However, we traditionally develop our own UI.

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it_user842895 - PeerSpot reviewer
Server Manager at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would love it if single sign-on was a lot easier to set up. That's the most difficult part of it.

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DO
SAE - Services Account Executive at RICOH

IBM has a lot of documentation but the kind of information in a lot of the documents can be confusing to our clients. It would be easier if they used video tutorials. Right now, the information is too hard to understand, and there is a lot of it. If they used videos I think FinalNet would be easy to use for an end-user.

The technical information is hard to understand at times, especially on the installation of the product. And that's particularly true when you have to install FileNet with high-availability.

In addition, there are a lot of use cases for FileNet as a platform. There are other tools on the market with demos or models, ready-to-use use cases that can be configured. With FileNet, all projects we have to be developed step-by-step. IBM should develop some use cases or pre-configured models, across use cases. That would help us speed up implementation a lot.

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BH
General Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like IBM to improve with each release, continue moving towards a continual, tighter integration, and build solutions that take advantage of all the different modules the platform has from one place.

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MR
Operations Specialist at Fairfax Data Systems, Inc.

I would like to see in FileNet integrated with Watson, which can read something and send it without any human contact or interaction.

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it_user1220604 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Developers like us have an upgraded interface. That interface does not work in the process that we have today. It hangs and is not user-friendly.

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Muhammad Kamran - PeerSpot reviewer
ECM Consultant at Ora-Tech Systems

We have been working with it from version 4.0 and now it is at 5.3. They have improved a lot already.

However, there is room for improvement in the file management. It's very complex. 

In addition, they should have a built-in application for directly capturing documents from the scanners. Currently, they have that, but it is a separate product. They should have a built-in solution for that functionality.

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it_user631788 - PeerSpot reviewer
CIO at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

In the next release, I would like to see features for how to move it to the cloud and enhance functionalities as you are developing new products.

Also, I come from a Spanish-speaking country. Sometimes, you have to work with people that don't speak Spanish and that makes that the overall solution a little trickier to implement, because of the language barrier. So, I think that a strong knowledge of the technical issues by people that also have good knowledge of the mother tongue of the country, that would help a lot.

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it_user543285 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President, Enterprise Architecture & Strategic Initiatives at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see better integration with other tools. For example, we use IBM Security Suite. We also use IBM's Business Process Manager, Rules Engine, Cognos, and so on. I think IBM products can be better integrated across themselves. We find that, sometimes, we have to jump through hoops to get one product to work with another.

I would give it a perfect rating if all the upgrades had been smooth.

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it_user844500 - PeerSpot reviewer
SME at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see Azure AD added.

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it_user841959 - PeerSpot reviewer
Financial Informatics Analyst at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

What I would want to see is heavier analytical ability within it, but we've purchased the cognitive piece of it. I haven't seen that implemented yet, but that would be the future; I think it may already be there but I just haven't seen it yet. Something like indexing for unstructured text.

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it_user543249 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would rate it higher if they improved the usability, because as a product, it went through iterations and things like that. If it was supposed to be a perfect product, Content Navigator would have been developed earlier, so that people would have been using the system much, much better. We still have lots of customers that are used to using XT; migrating them from one environment to another always causes issues. Training them again on the new product for the same backend, for the same solution, that always creates some issues. It's the response from the customers, mainly; the end users. When there's a change, there is always resentment. You have to deal with all of those things.

It would have been better if things were what they are today five years ago or seven years ago. The product could have matured quicker.

Because it's a content management solution, they could start providing an analytics component on it. They already have the content, so they could start adding components. Usually, they rely on third-party or external products to do those things. If they start doing the analytics, that would make it easier for me, instead of implementing other products, but I guess that's the trend now. You have to go with that. It's something that we don't currently have that I would like.

The way I see it, IBM is going more towards cloud-based solutions; more towards Box being a content management solution for the cloud. Even with the delay, how that's going to fit with the Case Manager, I don't know. I don't know what the future is going to be for content management.

They could have done things differently or better. No product is perfect 100% of the time.

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SK
Manager Operational Excellence at Cognizant

IBM File Manager should improve the UI. There should be more customization based on the user.

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IR
CTO at a healthcare company with 1-10 employees

It is really not useful for us as a front-end tool. If somebody wants to access documents, I would not let them use the FileNet interfaces.

I would like more controlled APIs, tools, exception handling, and ways to globally monitor it. Something that would make it a true back-end system. 

I would like to have more governance features with more supervisory layers.

Access control integration would be nice. You can actually control access, but it's not that easy to integrate. It is all up to our software to make sure that we do the job, and we don't always do. We all screw up.

The API needs improvement.

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VH
CEO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

It would be nice to have additional integration features, which could be integration with IoOT-based products and solutions that also have automation requirements on the IOT side. Anything can be integrated from a Gateway or API perspective would be a plus.

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it_user543225 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I've been working with our business partner on what we can improve, more on the presentation layer, on our content, as well as being able to provide us with more recommendations when it comes to how we apply the technology such as DataCap or Case Manager into our business right now. We're not quite getting that on the presentation level, because we need someone who will be able to present to us the latest and the greatest when it comes to technology, when it comes to ECM, so that we could present it to our business and say, “Hey, we have this.”

We're in our baby steps on this. After we have implemented a solution, we do a review and see how we can make it efficient. In that respect, I’ve mentioned the presentation. We're in banking, so there's a huge need to be able to see our search results and images, rather than just a text result panel. We're implementing that right now. I know ICN just came out about a couple of years ago. I wish they were fast enough to develop APIs for that. The presentation site that we use through our business partner is not quite developed yet. I wish that was developed already. I think the responsibility for that falls on both IBM and our business partner, but more on our business partner.

There's always a need for improvement. As I’ve mentioned, I wish the ICN part that our business partner is actually developing right now was already complete because we ended up purchasing an application that sucks. We're looking to replace it with the ICN.

I might give it a perfect rating if I was able to use DataCap as promised, definitely.

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it_user543252 - PeerSpot reviewer
ECM Architecture Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as SharePoint; that would be a key one. IBM knows that we want that. Integrations with that and other solutions, in general – other records management solutions, other document management solutions, including those from competitors; that is key for us. While we're trying to coalesce everybody into one system, for the most part, there are other systems that we still have. We still need the connectors to go out to them and connect up everything.

Also, their integration between their own products, such as Watson; things like the Content Collectors and so forth. It would be much better if they made all that work seamlessly together. We've had some troubles with FileNet working with Content Collector, working with Watson and working with Classification. You would think that these things would work seamlessly together but the bridges aren't there. All of the connections aren't in place. It's taking time for that to happen.

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it_user543297 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's a very good tool. The one feature or direction I would like to see IBM move the tools, is to make them more tolerant for or lend itself more to continuous integration, continuous delivery; the DevOps model that most organizations are adopting.

We're on a lower version and we need to upgrade our platform, but there is still a lot of configuration that somebody such as a system engineer has to do by hand that isn't easily scriptable. It's done through configuration consoles such as FEM. That might make it difficult to deploy, for example, once an hour, like Amazon does, or every five minutes, or whatever their continuous delivery model is. We're still only deploying the production once every 10 weeks. We could deliver a lot more features to the business if we had the capability to deliver new features to them on a daily basis. That's kind of the holy grail of continuous delivery and DevOps. As of today, I don't know that we could really accomplish that with P8.

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SC
Founder at intellicon systems

I would like to have easier steps for setting up the application. They should have an easy one step process for the whole installation. Right now, you have to know the application well to set it up and have IT expertise. 

I would like them to have a document distribution feature, even if it is developed by a third-party, just as long as it has a seamless integration.

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it_user631716 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project manager at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

The user interface for FileNet can be improved. It was not very professional, you could say, in the beginning, so we developed a custom user interface. With the new ICN, they have come a long way, but they still need to work on the ease of use for the user/customer. So, the user interface is one thing where they're lacking.

It's very expensive, so they could make it a little cheaper but still, it's good.

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it_user543228 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Professional 3 Filenet Administrator at State of Nevada

Technical support is amazing. With our upgrade, it was massive project and I had to interact with three different IBM personnel. The wealth of knowledge that they were able to give me took so much of the hassle out of that implementation.

With our new implementation of a database based ObjectStore, there is not a great deal of documentation in regard to installation/implementation of database based ObjectStores. I encountered quite a few issues with that particular ObjectStore that required a great deal of assistance from our DBAs to resolve. I was consistently referred to our DBAs to resolve database issues during the implementation, because the documentation should have been either more readily available or handled by whomever was handling the PMRs that were open in regard to it.

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PC
FileNet System Admin at Emug

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.

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it_user845697 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at a tech vendor with 1-10 employees

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.

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it_user543279 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect Integrator at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

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.

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WC
System Tech Oracle Database at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

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

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it_user845661 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Developer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user841941 - PeerSpot reviewer
Digitalization at a transportation company with 201-500 employees

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.

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AS
Area Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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it_user841908 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Lead Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I would like to see the dashboard be a little bit more robust and a little more user-friendly. Right now, unless you truly know FileNet, you do not know what you are looking at in the dashboard. From what I understand with the latest release, which is what we are getting ready to go to, a lot of that has already been solved, but I have not seen what it really looks like yet. 

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it_user840834 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise ECM Program Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

We would like to see, in FileNet, the ability to manage video and audio.

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it_user543240 - PeerSpot reviewer
ECM Administrator III, Enterprise Content Management at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

One of the things I'd like to get installed is the Content Navigator. That offers a little bit more scalability for the users. It's not as clunky. It's a little bit more user friendly, with anything that reduces the number of clicks the user needs to get to the content.

Right now, I'd like to get upgraded to the 5.2.1 environment. We're kind of behind the curve on that with the rest of the country. I know you don't need the 5.2.1 environment to employ the Content Navigator. You can deploy it with 5.1, but it is something that we're going to move forward with.

One thing I'd like to have is SQL 2014, but we really can't move to that until we're on 5.2.1. Our current version doesn’t integrate with it.

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it_user574764 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect of ECM solutions at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

For end-users there is a lack of administrative features. The interface of basic FileNet is not very good.

IBM is doing a lot of work to combine the abilities of its major products, BPM and FileNet, into one product, either IBM Business Automation Workflow, or Digital Business Automation. These are two major offerings from IBM. These products are very tightly integrated. I'm waiting for the moment when, in one or two years, it will be only one product which will combine the major strengths of these products. This is the right way forward, from my point of view. IBM is moving quickly in this direction.

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it_user845688 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Architect at a non-profit with 1,001-5,000 employees

One of the things I know is a bit of a challenge for them - because I know that it lives on top of FileNet, so it's not necessarily living on top of a relational database, per se - is that we also are using it as our system of record for our language management and our language definitions. I know that that was a little bit of a challenge, just because of the underlying architecture.

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GS
Information Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The usability is fair. It could be a bit better. It could be better designed. They could put more effort into the user experience and do a better job of integrating other components, like Datacap, to be a bit more seamless.

I would like to see more integrated support for records management functions. I would like to see ICN be more integrated from a desktop standpoint with records management. Especially since, compliance and issues like privacy, which IER is uniquely capable and designed to handle, are becoming more important for users, things like advanced search and the ability to find data with privacy issues. Some work on that type of interface would serve everybody well.

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it_user1081452 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Of Information Technology at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Simplifying both training and maintenance would be an improvement.

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AK
Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

There is always room for improvement.

The pieces that I have been looking for are becoming available. I am learning they are either on the roadmap or already been released. I am just not in a version of software that is capable of using it yet.

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it_user998295 - PeerSpot reviewer
AVP Technology at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Technically, the product is pretty good. In the area of AI and whatever new technologies are coming, I would like to see it able to capture NLP in an advanced search. It would also be good if it could capture images and segregate them in categories within a span of seconds.

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it_user844512 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a government with 11-50 employees

I would like to see expanded search features, like content search. The search needs to be improved. 

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MY
Deputy CEO at IFN

This solution could be improved with the ability to present the file system from FileNet.

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it_user783108 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Commercial Officer with 51-200 employees

Many customers leave FileNet because of the licensing cost.

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FC
Business Solutions Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Preforms could be useful for specific projects.

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it_user803040 - PeerSpot reviewer
Content Services, Digital Transformation Thought Leader & Strategist with 10,001+ employees

It is still a leading ECM solution provider, however the cost to implement and maintain are higher than other solutions.

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it_user836502 - PeerSpot reviewer
‎Senior Development Manager, Business Systems at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We are looking at FileNet on AWS cloud. To date, even our IBM rep cannot be certain if it will work. Similarly, Amazon did not clearly state that they can work with IBM FileNet.

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it_user845700 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Development Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I would like to see them improve the capabilities in the cloud, and the analytics.

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it_user798636 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultor at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
  • Accounting
  • Collection
  • Operations
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Buyer's Guide
Enterprise Content Management
April 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Microsoft, OpenText and others in Enterprise Content Management. Updated: April 2024.
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