OpenText Content Manager Reviews

Our primary use is Records Management, with a secondary push by some to use it for all document management to include all draft work and convenience copies.

We are required to have a robust Records Management system. It does this job. We had it integrated with HPRM ver 8.3, but dropped the integration when we moved to HPE-CM 9.1.  Integration was not well documented.                                                          

It has a robust search but has often been difficult for people to learn.

This is a client-side app, and a web-based app would be easier to support. 

Easier integration with SharePoint and other apps would be an improvement.

Our Organization has had it since 1999 as TRIM, by Tower. I personally, for 5 years.

The stability is reasonable. Although, like any software, it has areas to improve. It seams sensitive to configuration changes. Misconfiguration causes problems very quickly.

I don't know the server model enough to know if it is scalable. I have brought up the topic with a Micro Focus sales rep and did not get much of a response. 

For our organization to fully utilize HPE-CM, we'd need a more robust server farm. 

Over the earlier owners, the support was lacking and we had to use third-party vendors. We are using a third now and have had no interaction with Micro Focus directly.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

We contracted it out to avoid problems with complexity.

We used a vendor team for implementation. They seemed reasonably well versed in the system, although there were a couple of misconfigurations that caused downstream issues. 

Hard for us to gage. We are required to have a RM program. This system eats up a lot of staff time for support, administration, and use.

I would suggest that you do a thorough evaluation of all competing products and look for support for these products in your local area.

Due to very limited use in the industry, vendor and contract support are hard to find. We are using a consultant on the East coast which is four time zones away. 

There is more call for this product in Australia. The development of the product has moved to the UK. 

US support will probably remain spotty. 

This product has changed hands twice, from Tower to HP and then to Micro Focus. This has made support more difficult for us. 

Setup within the system is important. We have many users that really dislike the system, and I believe much of that has been due to setup and training. 

Drag and drop: With users having dual screens nowadays, this functionality is used a lot by staff and is also a good way to show people who are new to TRIM (HPE Content Manager) the simplicity of how things can be done. It is also handy if your MS Outlook integration breaks or crashes; the drag and drop of an email into TRIM usually still works. Then you can fix the actual problem with the integration later, as it becomes less of a priority. It is also handy to show people how they can drag and drop from the desktop (or network share) into TRIM, as well as drag and drop internally within TRIM. When dragging and dropping multiple items at once, a TRIM Queue window is bought up, which is pretty neat.

The online audit log is part of the reason people buy and use TRIM, as there is a requirement to have an audit trail. The audit trail is very handy, though, to be able to see exactly what has occurred when there is a problem or issue. The audit trail does not lie. Also, when sending out information in emails, I attach a TRIM reference in the email to the actual information, which is in TRIM. I can then see who has actually looked at the information via the online audit log rather than wonder who has actually read it.

Simple workflows (actions/procedures) such as “Review” and “Approve” are better than multiple copies in various iterations existing within emails. The “Actions” also replaced the need for a signature (for internal documents), which means there is no printing of paper, signing, and scanning back in as a PDF.

There is no integration with social media. Functionality gets removed as new versions are released. The full client has had no new functionality since HPE bought it in 2008; only functions and features removed. (Document Assembly, Web Content Management, long-term email preservation format VMBX, all removed. The Meeting Manager was rendered useless.) A simple and important feature was to be able to default a record type at the document level. This can no longer be done with the release of HPE Content Manager. This means you now have to teach everyone about record types, and therefore records management, which they may not be interested in. So you lose them at the start, rather than just being able to keep things simple, such as default record type.

I have used the current and previous versions since 1997.

The database configuration would need to be redeployed to servers after a restart, even though everything looked OK and reported as OK. Clients could not resolve the data-source until the configuration was redeployed.

We have not encountered scalability issues.

I haven’t used technical support that much, but the times I did use it, it was OK.

We did not have a previous solution.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Try and do a deal. The prices may seem fixed, but are not really, and if you can get hold of an account manager and say “this price or nothing”, then you might be able to strike a deal, especially if you offer to pay maintenance as if you bought it for the full price.

We did not evaluate alternatives.

Know what you are doing from an information management (IM) perspective. The IT side of it is easy. If you get the IM components wrong, or not optimised, then you usually become part of the problem that the solution is trying to solve.

The product allows us to run our Notice of Destructions seamlessly and produces our annual folders with ease.

Notice of Destructions: We rely on the software to accurately identify those documents/folders/boxes that are eligible for destruction each year and segregate them into a session. The software produces a list that we in turn route around to our Notice of Destruction approvers to obtain sign off electronically. Once all approvals are obtained, the session is processed and the documents/folders/boxes are deleted from the system.

Annual Folders: We rely on the software to identify those folders need to be duplicated for the following year. The software produces a list which we review before we produce the next year’s folders. We use the Duplicate functionality to produce 3,000+ folders each year during our Annual Folder process.

It helps us manage records more easily and allows users to search for information without leaving their desk.

Many users have expressed that it is too hard to find what they are looking for. I’m not sure that the functionality can be improved. Most of this issue is due to user training and the users not using the system every day. Enhancing the full content searching capabilities by including some refiners could possibly help.

We purchased MDY FileSurf back in 2007, went through the acquisitions of CA, Autonomy, and HPE. We are currently using Autonomy 12.6.2.2 and are in the process of upgrading to HPE CM 9.1.

We have not really had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

Technical support was phenomenal when we were with MDY because we had more of a connection with the help desk. Through the acquisitions, the technical help has been OK, but less personal. Technical support for Autonomy Records Manager 12.6.2.2 will cease as of February 2017.

We previously used a custom “in-house” solution, which did not allow us to manage “electronic items” as records.

Setup was complex because we were migrating from a custom “in-house” product to an “off-the-shelf” product.

Research and understand pricing and licensing, especially the consulting services needed to implement the software.

At the time, we evaluated TRIM and others that I can’t remember.

It always takes more time and money.

HPE Content Manager is a complex product with a great deal of functionality for managing paper and electronic records on a very large scale. The security model is excellent, the locations management is extensive, records options are abundant and metadata search is very efficient and allows for precision searching. Functions to modify records en-masse are handy and powerful, integration with other products is better established these days and the ability for HPE Content Manager to manage large amounts of content is integral to many organizations. Not only does it handle large amounts of content, but if configured and structured properly, it can manage content for you over the long- to very long-term and in accordance with legislation, many international standards and other compliance requirements.

HPE Content Manager provides organizations with a reliable system for managing massive amounts of information. It does so in a structured, compliant and secure way. This is not easy to achieve. I have seen custom-built systems and other systems used to try and manage various types of content, and I can say that none of the ones I have seen provide the same level of functionality and reliability as Content Manager does. It just works. All organizations I have worked with use Content Manager in a different way, because each organization functions in a different way. This flexibility to set up a structure that works for us has been vital to managing our records properly. When it comes to organizing information at the organizational level or the organizational-unit level, Content Manager has no match.

Many government (and other) organizations struggle to find a system balance between user requirements and records requirements, and HPE Content Manager is no different. Users are intimidated by the Content Manager client application, especially when it comes to searching and managing content at an individual’s level. The “tray” system, the limited “favourites” options and the inability to “share” content in an effective way (at the user level) means that users are confused about how to find content and manage content for themselves. This means that the power inherent in the product, particularly with the “trays” and metadata searches, is lost on users. Extensive training is required for users to get the most out of the product The good news is that if you train users to a certain level of competence, they tend to love using it.

Other feedback regarding the client suggests that the check-in/check-out requirement for records is cumbersome. It does not allow for concurrent editing of documents. Document preview and search-word highlighting could be improved.

Integration with Outlook could be improved, and a more-intuitive and less-intimidating search function could be implemented.

I have used Content Manager for 13 years; from TRIM Context versions 5 and 6 to HPE TRIM 7 and HPE Records Manager 8. I am now working on HPE Content Manager 9.

Considering the complexity/range of functionality, and the sheer amount of content it can handle, the stability of the product is impressive. The database side is excellent. The document store is reliable, as well as the workgroup and event services. Most user problems occur because of network connectivity issues or issues with client applications such as Word or Outlook and are not related to Content Manager directly. Outlook integration and, in versions 7 and before, content index searching has been a little flaky (it may have improved since they changed to IDOL searching). Other than that, I’ve seen the HPE developers continually improving the product and resolving any issues that arise (most of which are not significant).

It is difficult to backdate the separation of your document store and the database. So, if you wanted to split your document store and then transfer older (and less used) content on cheaper storage, it is quite difficult to do so. This means planning document store/data tiers is advisable prior to implementation.

Support has improved over the years, and the online forum and support content resolves most of the issues I cannot troubleshoot myself. The support desk is generally quick and will endeavor to help you as much as they can. The complexity and uniqueness of each organization’s infrastructure, standard operating environment and third-party applications make it difficult in some cases to get the help required. Also, many organizations I have dealt with have customizations of their own, which complicates matters.

I have used custom and integrated SharePoint systems that were not able to handle large amounts of content as easily as HPE Content Manager. Managing the moving of content was particularly difficult and SharePoint’s security model doesn’t allow for security classifications to be added to content to restrict access. The long-term management (applying retention schedules) of content for archiving was much more difficult to implement.

Technical side: Initial software setup would benefit from specialist involvement. The documentation is comprehensive, so it’s not absolutely necessary to engage a specialist as long as all the documentation is read and understood. For experienced installers, the setup is actually very straightforward and can be done anywhere from a half a day to a few weeks (depending on existing infrastructure, database access and complexity of system). I would recommend specialist knowledge for software/schema upgrades to prevent potential loss of data.

Content structure and administration: A successful implementation requires an experienced Content Manager business analyst and administrator. Planning the management of content before you start is integral, and a good business analyst will be able to identify the functions and activities of your organization and structure your Content Manager environment accordingly. Setting up appropriate security classifications, security caveats, business classifications schemes, record types and locations structure would benefit from a Content Manager administration expert.

Ensure you have enough licenses for all your users. Invest in more intuitive search modules if available/required.

We have seen several SharePoint-based products and other custom-built systems; however, I am not an authority on these.

Firstly, plan, plan, plan: Hire a good business analyst and assess how your users work, what type of content they create and how you want it structured. Planning your content structure is integral to a successful implementation. Ask yourselves the questions: How do users want to search for content? How do users create content? How do users collaborate/share content? Then ensure you have a good migration plan to transfer content from your current system to your new one.

Secondly, training: Training your users comprehensively, to the point of confidence, will see a much larger user uptake. If they are unsure of themselves, they will not use the product.

Thirdly, infrastructure: Make sure you have good, reliable hardware for your Content Manager servers and database servers, and that your network is stable and fast.

Fourthly, change management: Different things could work for you here. Examples of things that I see work are constant, positive communication prior to implementation; lock down shared drives and easy migration to new system; top level-down migration. Management buy-in is integral and they need to use the product. If they do, then their staff will follow.

Currently, we are just using the full client version of the application without using workflow or the web client. We do not use the desktop application (HPE Desktop) due to its limitations.

Our primary application has an embedded workflow, so we do not use the workflow capabilities of Records Manager.

There many ways that this application has improved our organization. The most significant is the reduction in paper generation and the ability to electronically annotate and manage all our documents.

Our approval process for claim invoices uses a manual workflow and utilizes the annotation capabilities of HPE Records Manager.

Along with our primary documents required for our insureds, we also store licensing and other departmental information in department-specific folders. This has significantly reduced the number of file cabinets and our reliance on paper. We have even extended the life of our printers from an estimated end-of-life in 2010.

Drag-and-drop in a Windows 10 environment has been an issue, but 9.01 resolves that issue.

Another resolution in 9.01 will be the removal of the custom email format. Currently, we must manually extract email messages when we want to distribute claim files on a CD.

There is no direct link from Adobe into HPE Records Manager. Since we work with a lot of PDFs, users must save to the desktop and then drag-and-drop into HPE Records Manager.

We currently use 8.x as our production client of Records Manager. That version does not support dragging and dropping of documents into Records Manager when your operating system is Windows 10 (It gives you an OLE error). This is a known issue by HP and they have no plans to upgrade and fix this in the 8.x clients. To resolve this issue we install a 9.x client on our Windows 10 machines. But this introduces another error. Now the Windows 10 users cannot edit custom properties on the records. This is due to a change between the 8.x security model and the 9.x security model. The 9.x client is not fully backwards compatible to the 8.x server. The solution is to upgrade our server to version 9.x (and all of our clients) and we have that scheduled for the spring.

In 8.x and earlier, Records Manager stored emails in a VBX format and the native format (optional). When you do a super-copy of the folder, for distribution on a cd, it extracted the emails always in the VBX format. Most people do not have VBX readers installed on their machines so our customers (or the lawyers who request the CDs) could not read any of the emails. Today we have a process of super-copying all of the appropriate records and then manually opening up and re-saving all of the email messages in an Outlook format.

It would be nice if Records Manager had a way to extract for offline reading and distribution, like ImageWrite, but we have managed to work around that requirement.

We initially went into production in June 2008. We are currently running 8.30 in production but have validated and scheduled migration to 9.01 (HPE Content Manager) in spring of 2017.

Microsoft Office disabling the HPE Records Manager integration is an issue.

As our document stores have increased in size, we have a desire to split a document store into multiple stores. This has not been successfully tested with our current version. While this is not a pure scalability issue at this time, it does make it difficult to manage large document stores.

I would rate technical support as fair, as we have retained a consulting firm to supplement the support from HPE.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

The initial setup was somewhat straightforward. Our only major issue was that the guidelines for setting up our document stores were not geared to scalability.

We have not had any issues with the pricing and licensing of this product.

When we were evaluating this product, it was just being purchased by HP. This product was not very well known in the insurance industry and we located it through a general document management search. We also evaluated a number of standard insurance document management solutions including ImageRight and ImageNow.

One advantage of this product is that it allows us to determine our own structure. Some insurance document management solutions require you to follow their structure. This has advantages and disadvantages, and you really need to understand and plan how you want to organize your data.

Organize your information in a way that makes sense for daily activities and working with documents. Do not fall into the trap of organizing data for searching. We have a few structures that have grown difficult for day-to-day work because they are optimized for searches that rarely occur.

The most valuable features are primarily the record web services interface and SharePoint Integration, although there is a lot that can be worked upon in the integration space.

Integration helps organizations build internal relationships with other products and communicate effectively. No wonder sole EDRMs like Objective, etc., are losing their charm as they remain into their own space without considering the overall enterprise paradigm. Look at SharePoint. It is good, but cannot replace HPE CM, as it doesn’t handle a large capacity of storage units.

RM 8.3.9365 or patch 3 is still under development. I myself have suggested a lot of improvements and defects, and they are being addressed. Although it is user friendly, it needs work to be at it’s best.

IDOL integration: With as much as 180 million records and 80 TB of data and 18,000 users, I can see IDOL not behaving as expected, and I work with IDOL experts to seek workarounds to issues. IDOL is a good product, but more careful planning could have been done to see some more robust outcomes. Performance across 40 content engines is poor, as some CE’s don’t work compared to others in the engine layer.

I have used Records Manager 8 for about a year now, but TRIM for many years.

We had stability issues primarily with performance, where title searches slowed down compared to previous versions. TRIM was stable with DCI itself, although it had its own bottlenecks.

We now have 2 proxies, 5 distribution servers and about 40 IDOL engines with tons of data on CEs. It is a scalable solution, but we see performance degradation and maintenance nightmares. Design could be improved to allow vertical build up as opposed to the horizontal approach, which is what HPE proposes now.

Technical staff/support is good. Some of them whom I deal with are pretty good and some of them are just smart spokespersonnel who could just confuse rather than convince.

Support staff overall rating in my view is 4/5.

TRIM is a reliable solution and has EDRMS compatibility, which others products lack. Hence, we never really looked at other products.

Initial setup was straightforward and clear.

It is expensive, especially the CM versions. But if you need it, you pay for it.

We evaluated Objective and SharePoint mostly.

Go for it. It works reliably for average-sized organizational structures.

All features are important for a complete solution since any solution will need to cater to drive the transformation from the reliance on paper-based processes to digitized solutions, as per the following:

• Inbound processing – capturing incoming traffic through inbound scanning, conversion to long-term preservation PDF format, document classification, metadata extraction, capturing emails.
• Repository/storage of content – ingesting all inbound traffic to a reliable ECM system with governance capabilities relating to records and information management with the capacity to identify records, storing, retrieving, collaborating, tracking, security, lifecycle management – disposal and retention, etc.
• Outbound processing – documenting composition and dispatch and database storage.

Many organizations are facing the same problems with their operating environment and scope of responsibilities. Due to the fact that collaboration with external stakeholders has grown in scale and complexity, keeping track of important business decisions and ensuring that all relevant internal and external stakeholders have timely access to this information, is now a major corporate challenge, as in the exponential growth of paper, shared drives and emails.

Government agencies and private organisations alike expect to do more with the same or fewer resources. Giving staff the tools to enhance productivity is essential to help meet the increasing demands and expectations of the Government and public in a constrained fiscal environment. Changes to Government policy concerning digital records management, security and amendments to legislation such as the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts are also expanding compliance requirements for employees and corporate IT systems. Digital Continuity is an approach to creating and managing information that can be trusted and used for as long as needed despite technological change.

This is how the solution has helped transform business organisations. Businesses are facing the same problems. Network drives, accumulation of paper records, and email used to manage documents and other digital format records of business value do not adequately support the information management compliance requirements. This lack of an enterprise approach to information access and management is limiting organisational efficiency, responsiveness and capacity to maximize business opportunities.

Investment in a modern EDRMS solution has been identified as a key component for addressing efficiency and compliance business needs. Electronic business will mean the necessity to become more diligent and smarter in terms of the information management of the department. Usually a staged approach is taken to select and implement a commercial-off-the-shelf EDRMS. Hence the above vendors cater for these goals and objectives to some degree with integration to Record Management software capabilities, as well as OCR, conversion capabilities and content management.

In line with any digital continuity policy an EDRMS solution is about making sure that information is complete, available and therefore usable for business needs. Information is usable if people can:

• Find it when they need it.
• Open it as they need it.
• Work with it in the way they need it.
• Understand what it is and what it is about.
• Trust that it is what it says it is.

So any product vendor solution must be able to meet the above minimum requirements closely aligned to an out of the box solution such as MS SharePoint has perfected.

Perhaps:

• Cloud computing could be added.
• The ability to substantiate adherence to Australian security standards.
• Better ways in managing extraction of metadata.

In the case of SharePoint you rely on user selection but vendors should try to alleviate human intervention where possible.

I have used the above products for the last 20 years.

Many projects I've worked on encounter issues in production relating to load balancing and throttling where systems cannot cope with the volumes and capacity of transactional processing.

In the case of conversion of Adlib software polling MS Exchange and writing to an HNAS drive, it managed to bring down both servers. It's paramount to adequately plan capacity and preventive maintenance.

They need to support the processing by adding CAS servers, etc to manage extra loads. Also there is the importance of creating an active/active redundancy topology.

The technical support is OK as long as you pay for ongoing technical support structure to get appropriate support during critical breakdown when time is money and have the vendor understand your backup and recovery needs for transparent BAU continuity.

We have used many that do not deliver what they say so we chose the above because they deliver the goods. However, licensing is always an issue.

Initial setup is always complex to get all integrated processes/technology/software working together. For example, Adlib software will poll exchange mailboxes to ingest and process emails and create conversion and content metadata XML output as well as PDFA documents including native formats. OpenText OCC will poll the HNAS drive to ingest the output files that Adlib produced and to OCR all documents and create full text index to extract all metadata and them apply customization code that ingests the Adlib conversion metadata and merge the OCR content metadata then output the transformed XML with the PDF files ready for the next step.

Any content management software will then poll the output directory and ingest all files into the ECM system to store in a database record management system. Paper documents digitized by an external provider were transferred via secure FTP to a shared drive which the ECM system utilities would also poll to ingest and create the records in the EDRMS.

Some implementations were in-house and others were through vendor engagement.

Initial ROI is not appreciated but if you look at the time it takes to process for example, claims, then you are providing an optimized business model where you are competitive because you are more responsive to customer requests and processing.

Claims don't take a week or a month, instead they are processed daily and get into a downstream workflow system that sends notifications and gets assigned to the relevant teams to action. This creates a more sustainable, competitive, government compliant, and secure solution in the long term which pays off on the investment.

Be very clear with functional and non-functional requirements. Set forth minimum mandatory baseline business requirements in order to meet overall EDRMS objectives, aligned with the Principles and Functional Requirements for Records in Digital Office Environments and compliance. Also identify non-mandatory features deemed desirable but not mandatory.

In addition:

• Provide the organisation functional requirements specific to the use and operation of the EDRMS.
• Detail the relevant standards and specifications applicable to the efficient management of public/private records – NAA or PROV.
• Provide the mapping and traceability between the Business Requirement and NAA standard/business and specification with the functional use case as context.
• Provide guidance to vendors in the implementation of the EDRMS system, testing and user acceptance testing.

All requirements should be uniquely identified for tracking purposes and have a business priority assigned to provide an understanding of business importance.

The priorities should be derived from an EDRMS strategy to ensure consistency across business units. A code should be provided to indicate EDRMS’s (Vendors) ability to meet the business, compliance and functional requirements. There should be clear traceability in their ability to meet expectations. What is their ability to meet functional and non-functional requirement statements? Can they fully meet, partially meet, conditionally meet, solution not concluded, cannot deliver, etc.

Stipulate your complexity model to identify what requires complex customization, requires complex configuration, requires minor configuration or is an out of the box requirement. Identifying these components will make it easy to manage the vendor's deliverables and gives the business a better grasp on the monetary bottom line expectation and where the money is being allocated to. Create transparency where you can.

Records management tracking and workflows.

• Eliminated the need for paper records.
• Increased compliance with our internal approval processes.
• Helped us with grant, contract approval, and retention.
• The workflow routes the contract/grant through our legal group and then on to the department and/or finance department and/or city manager for approval.
• Can use the workflow to see where in the process their contract/grant is and where it may have gotten stalled.
• The contract/grant route is dependent on what kind of document it is, what agency it is with, and the cost.
• Helps with the filing of the records and to track and close contract tasks.
• Our agency doesn’t want too many different workflows: It gets confusing for users to decide which one to use.
• Too many options on the workflow for users to select

• Having a workflow tool that is a little bit smarter. This means being able to leverage the metadata entered about a record in order to make workflow decisions.
• Having a workflow template designer that didn’t require adding in a whole lot of steps in order to make the circuit work.
• The retention tool is probably fine. It just needs a lot of trial and error to get more comfortable. That is probably a user issue on my end with me.
• The reporting tool is very clunky and it is hard to make it do what I want it to do.
• There is very little information in the online help. Just this week I was trying to build a report that would have a simple signature line at the report end with some standard text. I was limited to how much text each box could have. I couldn’t find a simple way to set a margin for the report that wouldn’t have the signature line drop off the page.
• Trying to figure out which versions of which fields to add to the report.
• Tying everything to the “bands” isn’t that intuitive either.

I have used HPE Content Manager since 2006.

The product is very stable.

We have not had scalability issues.

Technical support is very frustrating. It is difficult to get a good response from HPE and even more difficult to find anyone that can really help us with the product.

It doesn’t fail often. When it does, it is usually something unusual and out of scope for our regular group that handles common errors.

The initial setup was complex.

Make sure this is really a product you are going to use fully. Otherwise, you are paying for a lot for a product that won’t get utilized.

We evaluated EMC and OpenText.

You can’t pre-plan enough on how you want to organize the records. The more planning you put into the implementation, the more you will get from the product. Don’t discount the amount of hand-holding and change management your organization might need.