IBM FileNet Reviews

The most valuable features are the flexibility and broad capabilities. It covers anything a small company might need, all the way to what a large enterprise may require; a full feature set.

For us, it manages the transformation from a paper-based organization to a digital-based organization. What we do is, we digitize all our content, place it into the FileNet repository, which allows us to share the content across multiple teams. This is something we could not do when we had a paper-based organization. You can't share a piece of paper unless you ship it around by couriers or something.

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.

It is very stable. It's mission critical. We run it 24/7, 365.

It scales very well. We just keep adding on capacity. We have about 750 million documents in it, with no problems.

Technical support is not bad. But the problem with the technical support is that it is time zone-based. So, if we have an issue that is brought across a number of time zones, this will happen: We'll start working with one technical resource; we'll finally start getting working on it when, all of a sudden that technical resource has to leave, and we have to start with the next technical resource in a different time zone. Then, we have to bring them up to speed with what we're doing, and so we lose a little bit of time. The fact that the same resource isn't on it for the entire problem sometimes is concerning.

We've always had this. When I came to this organization, we've always had this solution.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I didn’t look at other vendors, because I was already here. But I would look at FileNet and Documentum. I would look at a wide range of content management solutions, and then we just narrow it down from there.

We chose IBM because we have a longstanding relationship with them, and we're trying to buy an integrated stack. So, instead of buying just an ECM solution, we're looking at content ingestion, content management, and content generation. The stack, and not just the one off solution.

When selecting a vendor, my most important criteria are the solution, the technical support, the thought leadership, and cost.

Evaluate FileNet. Find out what capabilities you need. You may find that FileNet has way more than you'll require.

You need a lot of senior technical resources to get the best bang out of the buck for this. They're not easy to find. The solution is highly capable, but it also is highly complex.

FileNet is a really robust and powerful tool for document management environments. It's very well designed, especially on the storage side, and also on the application server side. It's really powerful, robust, and highly available. In our environment, we store more than six billion documents. Some of these documents are more than 1,000 pages.

We also have other FileNet environments – FileNet Image Services environments – and we have federated these image services to a FileNet P8 environment, first as a federation. Then, we have successfully migrated all our old documents to the FileNet P8 environment without any demolition of the documents. It was a nice project.
Also, the elasticity of the APIs IBM provides us is powerful. We are also using IBM WebSphere as the application server. We are hosting our FileNet P8 services on top of WebSphere. It serves as a powerful tool.

Troubleshooting is very proactive. We can easily monitor the system, and we can easily define the problem and take action on it.

ECM is our heart on branches, for example if you cannot check the id and signature of the customer, you can do nothing. Also it’s very vital for us to predict how long does the the operation take for each customer. These makes stability as one of our major concerns Based on 9 years of experience with IBM ECM solutions; I can say that, the power of IBM products comes from stability predominantly. Both FileNet Image services and FileNet P8 are five-nines percent successful on this manner.

Document management is a new concept for some managers, and some kind of innovative concept, also. When you have content, when you get the documents, then you can fetch the data from that document. You can do analysis, business analysis, predictions with that data, especially in banks, mostly because of regulations.

We have buildings we use for physical documents. Some of them are photographs, images; some of them are computer output data; some formatted, some non-formatted. With FileNet, especially by creating our services for capturing solutions, we can easily store and analyze these documents through the FileNet environment. It's a huge benefit to us. Our response times are no more than 300 milliseconds. We have so many branches all around Turkey. Some of them are more than 500 kilometers away, and we have this response time also in those locations. It's also very fast, and for customer satisfaction, it's a nice feature for us.

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.

We moved to P8 six years ago.

It's very stable; no downtime, especially in the daytime because there were some. Think about if you are in a branch, you're an officer, and there's a queue; they're waiting; and the system is down. That was happening beforehand, but now, it is available five-nines percentage, almost no downtime. Response times are very fast, and we are keeping track of the number of operations the clients have done, and those numbers have significantly increased.

Actually, high availability and scalability are related.

There is no longer a document limit. We can easily scale both the systems and storage areas, no problem, without any performance degradation, without any high-availability degradation. We can easily scale.

We have the AVP premium support. They are very fast for first response, and they are very productive providing right solution in the right time.

We were previously using FileNet Image Services. It was a natural progression to move to FileNet P8. It has direct interaction, with a CFS tool, content federation services tool. We can easily integrate it and migrate our documents without any problem.

We did the initial setup because we have experience, but we worked with IBM and our local partner on the design. For a WebSphere-experienced application administrator, initial setup is very straightforward and very fast; we did it without any issues.

We considered other vendors. There are two factors for us. We have so many documents, billions of documents. Performance is one of the hot topics; fitting into our environment, fitting into our architecture because our architecture is generally based on WebSphere. Also, it was easy to integrate with FileNet Image Services. These were our major concerns. On top of that, high availability is a really important feature for us. These were the reasons we chose FileNet P8.

The decision-making process took more than 3-4 months because we did all the PoCs. We did a stress test; we set up a small environment. It took more than 3-4 months.

We also considered building the whole solution in-house, and we are doing it for some type of documents; non-critical, but agile documents. Performance is the first concern for that. We are only using disk storage, and then a single interface before the storage. Without any sub-tiers, we can directly reach the document, but there are some concerns about security, backup, and high availability.

We are not considering replacing FileNet P8, but using that for different use cases.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are adapting new technologies, and being the leader. IBM is the leader in this area.

See the product on the road, so to speak. Set it up and do a PoC and see the architecture; see the design.

My rating for this product is because of the high availability, scalability, robustness, adaptability, being the leader in the sector. These are the major reasons. I have not given it a perfect rating because it is not suitable for smaller environments and it could offer more features for different use cases. Consider, for example, on the database side, there are non-SQL databases and SQL databases. The big one would be providing both SQL and non-SQL together in the same environment. P8 is robust and for the heavy side, that is OK, but for the light side, it is not. Maybe they can add a light environment; work in it can be better.

We are considering employing IBM in cloud, hybrid, or box solutions, but in Turkey, using cloud, especially if there is customer data in the environment, is restricted by regulations. It's not clear. If this issue is solved, we will seriously consider it, including in the document management environment; not a public cloud, but maybe a private cloud, also. We are waiting for these regulations for it, but we are considering the technology, so that we do not fall behind.

We have some mobile applications; we are also providing documents to mobile applications. Our clients can also scan and submit some types of documents. They are inserting some type of forms, for example, credit card application forms, through mobile devices, but it's our own solution, not IBM's Content Navigator or other solutions. Nonetheless, in the back end, we are using FileNet. For the front end, our architecture decision is to use our own native applications because it's easy to build and customize. For our needs now, it's the best solution. Maybe in the future, we don't know. Technology is rapidly changing. Maybe we won’t have to create everything ourselves or invent everything from scratch. Maybe a surprise will occur in technology and we can use it, but now, we are using our own solution.

There are new analytics and content management services that we are able to provide for our organization. We have our own solution on the content analysis side also. Our R&D department have developed a project. They are doing human-made documents. These are unformatted documents and free texts, sometimes handwritten; especially faxes, for example. They are fetching the data, doing ICR on faxes. With an NLP-like algorithm, they are deciding which document it is, which department should be responsible for it, and sending a task to that department. The analytic operation is done in our own environment.

Since we implemented FileNet, there are services that we're now able to provide better. Before FileNet P8, we had another document management system, FileNet Image Services. It had some pitfalls, including, for example, a number of documents limit. We have overcome this after implementing FileNet P8. Also, the response times severely decreased. There was no high availability; it was an active-passive cluster on Image Services. After FileNet P8, it is an active-active configuration. These are huge benefits in terms of high availability, and customer satisfaction, also.

The experiences of our internal and or external customers both have changed because we implemented FileNet. External customers generally use internet banking, mobile devices, etc. Before making the document management environment highly available, we couldn't provide, for example, credit card statements as a document to the clients. We were only providing data, and they could see their statements, for example, for only the previous six months, not earlier. They were only seeing the data, not the exact statement I sent them. Now, we are providing exact statements. They see everything in it. They see the benefits we provide with this statement also. Yeah, that's a huge benefit for the clients. Even if it's more than 10 years ago, they can see that statement. For example, sometimes they can need it for legal issues.
Also, for our internal clients, there is no downtime and fast response.

As far as the usability of FileNet, our customers don't have any direct interaction with FileNet. We have our own applications. They don't see FileNet; any FileNet screens. They only see the document.

The people actually using FileNet, they only feel the response time and availability. That's easy and strong for them.

The most valuable features of FileNet are the enterprise depth and strength, scalability, integration ability, richness, and functionality; the ability to do a lot of things across the different business units; and integrating with all kinds of solutions. At the same time, I think they did a great job in improving their web clients, such as introducing products like ICN, which is more configurable rather than customizable. The strong foundation behind FileNet in terms of the workflow; the business project management; the content engine; the ability to handle a humongous amount of data in a very high performance mode are what provide a lot of value in this system, in my opinion.

Throughout our journey using FileNet, we were able to significantly improve our business process operations’ efficiency. Think of scenarios where we provide access to the business documents to people who are dispersed across the world; people are working from home or our offshore offices. They don't have to have access to the physical documents. The authenticity of those documents allows our call centers, which are dispersed in different locations in the world, to instantly access the client documents to verify any piece of information.

Beyond document sharing, access, and high performance, the ability to integrate easily with other solutions, our line of business applications, is fantastic. You have a variety of technical options to do this integration. We have legacy systems, and we have newer, more modern solutions; finally, just being able to deal with all of that.

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.

The platform is part of our journey since two decades ago.

Stability’s been great, knock on wood. It's been very solid. It’s funny; we had an outage the same day I provided this review, but it was not caused by FileNet. It was caused by an infrastructure change over the previous weekend. FileNet has been very, very, very stable.

Scalability is fantastic. We did a major replatforming a few years ago. We moved to a newer platform of our AIX, WebSphere, etc.; all virtual. We are able to scale out, scale up. We were able to change the configurations and that has improved the performance of the system by 75%.

We subscribe to the premium support with additional charges, but it is worth every additional dollar that we spend on that, because we saw a huge jump in the quality, responsiveness, and the attention. When you have a dedicated technical account manager that looks after your technology, PMRs, support requests, etc., that is fantastic. We are able to do things far more things more quickly than before. I would say this is an A.

Look at the scale. Look at the enterprise scale. Try to set up the product to leverage it more, maximize the use of the product. FileNet as a stack has massive capabilities. To justify the cost and investment in the product, try to get as many of your business units and business processes to leverage this platform.

Try to consolidate. This is what we have done. We consolidated our content into FileNet as a mainstream platform for ECM. That has paid dividends. We are able to use it as a shared platform. We set it up as a shared service. We charge back to our clients. With that, we are able to measure the value per business unit, compared to the volume that they are using the system, the number of transactions, number of users, etc. Look at the big picture and try to expand as much as you can.

I don't think there is anything perfect, per se. We have been very successful in using the product. We have a lot of opportunities to even add more use cases and so on. The product has been very stable. We have a great relationship with the product owner. Our team is able to do a lot of stuff with the product. It's a solid platform.

Considering that the platform has been stable and scalable, how the experiences of our internal and or external customers changed since implementing FileNet is a big area of focus; number one in terms of evaluating the product. Our clients have been quite satisfied. When I mentioned we were able to improve the performance of the platform by changing the infrastructure and tuning the performance, that has resulted in great savings. Imagine 75% improvement in performance, response time of the system, that is directly linked to the productivity of the end users who number in the thousands.

In general, the most important criteria when selecting the vendor to work with really depends on the use cases. If it is a situation where critical business processes will depend on the product, the stability, the availability, and all that stuff, then I definitely would have to scrutinize each and every area of the product. In general, we take care of our own development. We rely on the vendor for only specialized skills. The ease of use of finding resources in the market who know the product is very important. When the vendor is flexible in attending to our needs, this is very important because if I compare FileNet to other systems in our area, it's like day and night between the two vendors, where, if I try to get something done through the other vendor, it's more of a challenge.

We are not considering employing IBM cloud, hybrid, or box solutions in the short-term, but we are assessing this.

As far as new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide your organization, we are implementing IBM Case Manager, including the analytics piece of it. We are very interested in exploring further content analytics. It's still on our roadmap. We're taking some steps to explore that.

There certainly are existing services that we're now able to provide better than before in some client processing areas with our business partners. We have taken some strides in improving and renewing the solution from a legacy, hard-coded solution on all their platforms; it has influenced our way of dealing with those business processes.

We certainly do have some plans to include mobile, and that is still in the process of maturing the business requirement.

We use FileNet as an enterprise content management storage for our underwriting policies and our claims documents. The major products of FileNet that we use are Content Manager and ICC for SAP.

It's very robust. It's very good at document retrieval and storage, as well. The solution that we deployed is really good and it works fine.

FileNet provides secured facilities, which helps a lot.

A few products that we use in FileNet that really help our organization a lot. For example, Capture Pro and ICC are the important products that we use. They save us a lot of time.

We also use Image Services, which is another strong product from IBM. That also has a lot of features. It helps a lot to do annotations and then print services. The other features on that are excellent.

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.

Some days, stability’s really good, especially with the product running with AIX and DB2. We have never had any bad experiences; it runs very well along with that operating system and that database.

For scalability, we have a load balancer and the AIX systems, which really help us to handle the volume and the user input also.

Technical support is 10/10.

It has been there for many years; they've been using it in our organization for more than 12-13 years.

They have been using a few products, but definitely the features and because it is an IBM product. We are basically an IBM shop, so we just prefer to use IBM products. That's why we are moving towards going to the ECM solutions from IBM.

Over time, initial setup has become more simple. Initially, with previous versions, it was harder. Now, it's getting very simple, because IBM has come up with a new hardware architecture, which helps a lot to simplify upgrades and installations.

They do have SharePoint for a few applications, but that doesn't really solve what the business needs. IBM FileNet is the right solution and we are currently using it. We'll be adding more features and more products into it to make it better for our customers.
We also have custom developments on top of FileNet.

The decision-making process takes about 6 months. We have a process to be followed. It takes a minimum of about 6 months to go through all the approvals; the business as well as our directors have to approve it.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is most likely the complexity. When there's any kind of situation with any architecture being introduced, that's when we need to have IBM or anyone to be involved directly to help us out.

Depending on the business needs, I would suggest FileNet and the architecture, as well as the features that it has. I would definitely recommend it.

According to my experience, over time, it has become perfect. The early versions had a lot of issues. It was running on different platforms, which had some issues. We had terrible outages in a back in 2008-2009. Over time, the new version upgrades really helped out a lot. With the current versions that we use, it's really great.

We are considering using IBM cloud, hybrid and box solutions. Those are leading features that IBM is coming up with. We definitely look forward to utilizing those products in the future.

We have a few analytical products, Hadoop and a few other products. They be working with a different group of teams, so they are definitely looking forward into it.
There aren’t really any existing services that we're able to provide better than we were before.

We do not have any plans to include mobile at this moment.

Most of our customers are in Dunwoody and external customers only use very few applications. We provide external login access to them, which helps a lot. We mainly now use FileNet to store the policy documents and the underwriting and claims documents. From a retrieval point of view, it's very fast. The security is very good.

We have about 6,000-8,000 users and there are no complaints from the usability perspective. With some other products, such as Case Manager, when the new thing comes out, we need to make sure that the users are comfortable using it. Then, we look forward to switching to that.

The most valuable features for FileNet are the ability to do information governance, compliance, and implement case-centric or content-centric workflow solutions; to provide enterprise search capability; and we have Content Navigator. Those are a few.

It has provided our users the ability to conduct their business processes more efficiently. They're able to search documents faster; integrate with the external systems. We're still at a point where there are a lot of improvements that can be made through newer versions of the newer FileNet platform that is coming from IBM.

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.

We do have certain concerns about stability, especially with large volume, even within that, around web service APIs. That is something we'll try to prove out in a lower environment. Outages have become a regular thing, especially with our C-MART on-demand APIs, not so much with the FileNet. We are having some memory leak issues. We are working with IBM on that, but we are looking for alternatives to see how we could mitigate those.

If you implement the infrastructures correctly at the beginning, it's a pretty scalable solution. The platform is scalable, both vertically as well as horizontally.

I have used technical support a lot. A lot of times, it is 10/10; sometimes 8/10; sometimes 5/10. That's how I would evaluate it.

We have a good partnership and we get a lot of good support from our IBM sales partners and through our PMR support, but occasionally we run into certain issues where I'll evaluate it a little lower.

I was not involved in the initial setup of FileNet at my current organization, but in the past I have and we are right now, as I’ve mentioned, working on a road map and that will require a setup of FileNet in the organization.

From when I set it up in the past, while not exactly straightforward, if the methodology is followed, it is pretty streamlined and not so complex.

It does most of the things that an ECM platform can do.

In the future road map, we are looking at mobile, the cloud, and those kind of things. We plan to use mobile in 2018. First, we want to try out search and retrieval with Content Navigator, possibly, and maybe through DataCap Mobile. Either one of them would be the first.

We’re also considering employing IBM cloud solutions at some point, but there are certain regulations and compliance that we have to factor in before we can do that. But we're thinking in that direction.

Cloud gives us benefits; for example, the infrastructure will be handled more efficiently. The cost can be reduced. We are also looking for a partner. It will also provide a partner who can manage our lower infrastructure rather than us having to keep upgrading ourselves and putting in those patches and stuff like that.

There aren’t yet any new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for our organization, but we were looking at those at conference, looking for cognitive solutions for Case Manager and DataCap. And we'll see an opportunity there.

We are actually at the onset of a transformation. We are looking at services we have not yet provided. We are looking at those opportunities as we do, what we are calling, our ECM transformation starting next year.

With the new Content Navigator platform, the usability has become a lot better and it has become integrated. I think it's becoming better with the new mobile integration; it's getting better and better.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for me are scalability, security, and that we also have strategic partnership with the vendor, somebody who can meet our roadmap objectives.

We use the Case Manager component of FileNet, itself. It helps with the business process, mainly; incoming documents; and then collaboration of the underwriters or adjusters. Besides that, we consolidate all documents within FileNet, so nothing is going to be left on a file share or somewhere that is not going to be found down the road. It's very important for the company to have something like that in place, to control every asset of the documents within the enterprise.

Documents used to be everywhere; anybody's desktop or shared file systems. Now, everything is in one location and people can share or view the same document at the same time, without waiting for each other to finish a folder, paper or document, to go ahead and work on them again. Basically, that's it. You can have many people using the same document at the same time, sharing it without any problem; annotating on them, if need be; having it all in one place; and being easily accessible.

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.

It is stable. We have no major issues.

It's an enterprise solution. Everybody, from coast to coast, is using it. It's not only departmental or one geographical area. It's enterprise, coast to coast, and it’s being used.

My advice wouldn’t be positive because, as I see it, everything is going cloud-based. Everything is going in a direction where content management is becoming like the database products used to be 10 years ago; they are in the back room and nobody knows about them anymore. They do their job, day in and day out, but they are in the dark now. That's the trend I'm seeing with the content management. They're going to go in the back room and nobody's going to be dealing with them. They will just sit there and do their job; collect the content and then do nothing else. That's where it's going.

Just because it's not sexy doesn't mean it's not good. Everything runs on the databases but they just sit there; nobody cares about them anymore. The same thing goes for content management. That's my impression. That's my gut feeling about what's going to happen.

We're looking into the IBM Box solution, for cloud collaboration with external vendors, external users and external suppliers. That would make it easier for them to come in, send documents or upload documents, without having to go through emails, which is currently the case. It makes the work process easier, document management easier.

As far as new analytics or content management services that we are now able to provide our organization, we are doing some proof of concepts but nothing in production yet; mainly content analytics, not streams or anything that's coming in from other sources. We're doing analytics on the content that we already have. We're looking into the sentiment part of the documents that are coming in, to see if it’s something people are going to be using, or to escalate it to be looked into right away, or it's something that anyone can view anytime they want; there's no urgency on it.

Regarding existing services that we're able to provide better than before, it's easier to respond to documents that are coming in or are requested; coming in from brokers, for example. It's easier to work on them. It's faster to work on them. Turnaround time used to be two or three days; now, it's minutes or less than an hour.

Mobile is probably going to be part of the Box solution coming in but nothing has been decided yet.

As far as usability, it's user-friendly. Now that we're using Content Navigator, it's easier to use and easier to present it to the users. Training-wise, it's much easier because you teach them on one application so everybody knows how to use the next application that's going to come on as a solution. That's a plus.

The most important criteria for me in selecting a vendor to work with is how accessible they are; how support is available, especially IT or technical support; and if we're doing development, how fast they're going to respond for problems that we encounter. Those are the things that are important.

Since we implemented FileNet, the users are happy with the experience. The users are using it on a daily basis, especially when they don't deal with paper. Whenever they need, it’s there and they don't have to worry about paper. It helps them in their daily work and job.

We recently upgraded to P8 Version 5.2.1. We find it to be incredibly stable at this point. We find it to be incredibly fast in our particular implementation.

One of the best parts of it is definitely the stability. We have a lot of outside entities that attach to our FileNet infrastructure. Because a lot of it deals with court cases, it's absolutely vital that someone be able to access the information when they need to.

It has definitely made it easier to become a paperless organization. Just within the last year, we have removed eight million pieces of paper from within our organization and digitized it into our FileNet infrastructure.

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.

It's just amazed me how we were able to scale it, the size of it and its stability going along with that size.

Going forward, it could be made a little bit easier for the end user. We're a DB2 shop. Our implementation against DB2 could be a little bit cleaner in some ways. Not every shop is necessarily going to have a DBA in house that can handle those duties. In some of the FileNet implementation, I saw that there was a fair amount of database work that needed to be done and that wasn't clear at the outset.

I felt that support often times “dropped the ball” during our implementation. I will add that other than the database related issues of our implementation, the support I was received was excellent. However, the database related support, or lack thereof, stands out.

An older version of FileNet was already in place when I took over my position.

It was a very complex installation and upgrade because it was a forklift upgrade, but IBM's assistance was invaluable.

When we decided to invest in the upgrade, no one else was considered, to my knowledge, because we were already on that path and we saw a lot of benefit to upgrading. It was a natural step to upgrade.

In general, the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are stability and excellent support. When something breaks for us, it affects thousands of users. It can cost us thousands of dollars and man hours. Since no product is fool proof, excellent support is an absolute must.

I have a former colleague that works for another governmental organization and they are also a FileNet shop. They have a slightly different architecture than our own, but when he asked me about the particularity upgrade from 4.5 to 5.2.1, I did tell him it was completely worth it; that he'll have so many additional benefits into how he could manage his object stores and all of his data; and that it is completely and absolutely worth it.

We would potentially consider employing IBM cloud, hybrid, or box solutions. We're trying to find other ways we can add to our FileNet implementation to better service our end clients.

As far as new analytics or content management services that we are able to provide to our organization, we are looking at Case Manager and Box as additional implementations to our current FileNet instillation.

There are most definitely existing services that we are now able to provide better than before. Our document imaging services are much more stable than they used to be, especially given our recent upgrade.

Potentially, our plans could include mobile. We're trying to find every possible way to make it easier for our clients to interact with us.

Regarding how our customers’ experiences has changed since implementation of the solution, there are far fewer calls from the field, from all of our users. The times we have had problems, it has not been FileNet related. It has usually been some other piece of our infrastructure that touches FileNet that might be developed third party or in house. Over the last six months, since our new implementation, none of those problems have been FileNet related at all.

As far as FileNet’s usability, the new component, the ACCE, is a little slower compared to the old FEM, the FileNet Enterprise Manager tool. I see a little bit of room for improvement, especially in the area of searches. Overall, it is nice to have a web interface versus a client that has to be installed on a system.

In some areas, the usability could be a little bit smoother, especially for someone that is not an active developer or a database administrator. Other than that, we're really happy with the product.

FileNet is very robust and it’s scalable. It's unlimited as far as size and file types that we manage. It's very accessible. It really works for us, for what we use it for.

In ECM, the M is management. Before, we didn't really manage very well. We had shares with files stuck over here; a laptop with some important files on it over here that are important to our enterprise. FileNet has allowed us to have a true enterprise system for all of our employees, customers and so on.

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.

It's very stable.

Scalability is unlimited; it really is.

Technical support is good. We rely on them a lot. We think of them as a partner. They're excellent, for the most part. We've had a few times when we were stuck and never had a solution. It was because we were way outdated on our system. For the most part, IBM, they're good. They're really good.

I have given it a high rating because we've analyzed other systems; compared everything out there. We do that because our CIO's office wanted us to. There just isn't anything better out there for what we use it for, for ECM.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is that they deliver what they promise; not just a white paper but actually implemented it and it's working. If they do what they say, I think that's most important.