IBM FileNet Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is that every solution is unique. In general, out-of-the-box, it can meet up to 80 or 90 percent of the requirements, but you still need to gear it a little bit differently for different customers. Every business has its own requirements.

My advice would be to make the right choice, which is IBM. It means less trouble for the customer and less trouble for the engineer installing it.

In terms of the usability of the solution, once we configure and set up everything according to the requirements our customers have, they are really happy with what they get. That's why we spend a lot of time working with them every time there is an upgrade or whenever we implement it for the first time within an organization, to make sure that every single business unit gets all it needs. The solution is used by everybody in the company and they find the solution usable.

I would rate FileNet at ten out of ten because it's great for the customers and it's great for all the engineers involved in the process. It's great for everybody.

I work in the account-opening process, and we have IBM BPM, Workflow, and FileNet document repository. We use different products to generate documents. Our solution uses IBM BPM Workflow in which people fill out a questionnaire. That gives us a document that we store in FileNet. We deliver those documents either physically or via DocuSign. We get them signed to open the account.

It has increased productivity. And while I don't know for sure, because I am not from that group, I believe the solution has reduced operating costs. It has saved time as well. I have heard that it has reduced the time needed to open an account from 20 to 25 days down to a day.

Because the account-opening process varies on a case-by-case basis, we may have several documents generated for a particular case. We would like to put them in one client section. API-wise, it gives us the ability to create an end-to-end transaction.

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.

Stability-wise, the solution is good. There is not much downtime. I don't see any issues with it.

In terms of scalability, we started with about 100 relationship partners and now we have around close to 1,000 partners, so it's quite good.

Technical support is going well. There are a few issues, but we have set up several monitors for our technical modules.

The initial setup is a bit complex unless you know some scripting languages. It's pretty complex.

Within the solution we have several products like BPM, Oracle Service Bus, as well as a lot of custom applications. The bank has its own deployment procedure that we follow for the specific products. IBM BPM is separate and we have laid out our own process. There are a couple of automated ways of doing it, but we follow the bank procedures.

The products we are using from the IBM portfolio include FileNet, IBM Case Manager, Content Navigator is there, and Datacap. We have integrated FileNet with different bank solutions. The integration process was good.

My advice is to set up rules in an outside programming tool. Put them in a separate configuration tool and make an API call to find a list of the documents which match. It would then show the list of the documents to the partner who is trying to open the account. Currently, sometimes they send a request and they get a bunch of documents and they say, "This isn't what I want, I want something else." Then they change the question and the region of the documents. To preview a list of the documents we have to generate the documents. The reason we cannot preview is because the rules are coded in our system instead of being externalized in a separate configuration.

We are not doing anything around automation at this time. We are just capturing the documents but we are not analyzing them. My team is looking into expanding into automation, as is the architecture team. There have been meetings with IBM recently on that.

The use of the solution within our organization is growing. A lot of business units are onboarding the solution now. We started with one and now we've got four or five business units we are supporting.

We have business users using the solution. For them, the usability is not 100 percent but it gives them some flexibility. They still have a problem: they may open an account for a customer but there are five different types of accounts. They have to ask for specific documents each time but they don't want to send the same document to the customer for five different accounts. There is some intelligence we cannot apply at the moment, such as finding which documents are already in the system and that we don't want to send to the client to fill out again. It is manual work as of now. The relationship manager will look into all the documents and say, "Okay, I already have this document from the client in the past couple of months so I won't send it again." Primarily, when we generate documents we don't apply intelligence to validate which documents we have. We don't analyze the data in the system; we keep generating documents.

I would rate FileNet at nine out of ten. All the capabilities I needed in setting up documents or applying security, using content and filters, met the requirements that we had for the solution.

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

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

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

• Stability 
• Scalability
• IBM support

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

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

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

The installation needs improvement.

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

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

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

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

We did not have a different solution prior to FileNet.

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

We deployed it in-house.

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

Datacap has helped to increase our productivity.

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

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

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

I would definitely recommend the FileNet solution.

The integration process is very smooth because we use CMIS. The other application uses CMIS to talk to FileNet, and this is very smooth.

We are not using the solution for case management nor automation.

We're an IBM business partner. We work with customers who purchase IBM and we help them implement business solutions. Often times, we just influence their decisions. Most of the time FileNet is being used for automation projects.

An example is one of our customers, an insurance company. They didn't have process-automation before. We helped them implement an IBM product suite with FileNet content management with workflow and analytics. It helped that company reduce processing costs. It helped them unify processes in 21 countries where they have a presence, and they use it as an IT framework that helps them integrate other companies which they acquire. They're big on acquiring smaller organizations to help them grow.

Productivity gains come where workers can focus on more important tasks, higher-value tasks, and where the repetitive tasks are delegated to software.

In the end, almost every solution that we create for our customers helps reduce costs. In most instances the solution has saved time as well. Where we do get statistics from our clients, on average we see 20, 30, or 40 percent gains in terms of turnaround time. You can see that, for example, processing a complicated claim would have taken weeks and with the software solutions built on top of IBM software, sometimes it gets down to days or even hours.

It has improved business processes or case management for our customers. That's the primary purpose, that's the reason why they're investing in the software.

The most valuable features of FileNet are its comprehensive ability to store content, to get insights from the content, and to use that content for making decisions routed through workflow.

Nowadays, with the new capabilities, the unattended task processing - so-called robotics or digital employees, digital agents - is where this industry is heading.

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.

Every new software has bugs, but the FileNet software suite has been around for ages, so it's stable, it works.

The scalability is infinite if you know how to use it in your software products.

Technical support is very decent. We've never had issues with it.

The integration of this solution with other products is where we come in as consultants. IBM software works great in the silo, the silo being that you have an IBM software suite and everything is working together great. But when you have a customer that has IBM and three or four or five other repositories, a line of business systems that need to be integrated, that's where typically consultants, systems integrators like our company, come in.

But IBM provides a great API and ways to integrate the software.

ROI is hard to tell, it varies. Sometimes it's tangible where it can be measured in percentages from 10 to 15 to 20 or even 40 percent. Sometimes it's intangible, where companies can get ahead of the game, get ahead of the competition, and get their products to market faster.

I would advise a typical due-diligence process. Get hands-on with it, try it out. Do the same with competing products and decide what works the best.

Usability of the product is a complicated question. Anyway it is created, software cannot serve everybody's needs. Most of the time we'll work with very large companies and all of them have their unique needs. We oftentimes start with a base and customize it for each customer and their specific use case. You'll find a number of users that can use software out-of-the-box. But we often have to change it, tweak it, tune it, to tailor it to their specific environment.

FileNet is a nine out of ten. It's been around forever, it's stable, it's mature, it works. We know how to use it. We can confidently recommend it to customers without impacting our reputation.

As a systems integrator, for us, every customer is unique. In every environment there are very distinct challenges, so it's hard to take the knowledge from one client and apply it to another. Every time it's a journey. Sometimes there are technical issues we have to overcome. Oftentimes there are challenges, the business challenges that we help our customers overcome. The exciting part is that it's challenging. Challenges are always exciting, and that's what the software helps us with, overcoming challenges.

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

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

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

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

We have been using IBM FileNet for eight years.

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

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

The product generates a return on investment.

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

I rate IBM FileNet an eight out of ten. I recommend the product. I advise others to go for it if they have the budget. It is a mature product with enough resources and support partners in various regions.

We use it to document content management. We have a payment system for every corporate payment that goes through our bank, it has to go through our application. We use it for the business process management data where multiple things have instability for that transaction.

They do validations on it to see if the transaction is valid and next we use it according to the guidelines of the governments of countries like Singapore, India, and the USA. Every now and then countries impose sanctions on different countries and they have to make sure that the payments do not go in or out from those countries.

We use it to audit.

I like the security and also the configuration. It is easy to configure and most of our business use cases have everything just with the configuration itself.

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.

I have been using IBM Case Foundation for the last five years.

It is stable. There were a few bugs. They should release the fixes for the bugs a little more quickly, maybe within a month instead of waiting six months. I think they do it quarterly now. If possible they should release small patches again.

It is scalable.

In my previous company, we had an issue with one of their products. We could not find anything on the data documentations or on their website. We approached them and they accepted that there is a problem with the product itself and so we got in touch with them and they tried to fix the issue. 

The initial setup is quite complex, not straightforward. 

Deployment takes around two hours roughly. Depending on the setup, it can take half a day. 

We used consultants for the deployment. 

My advice to someone considering this solution is that there are a lot of open-source tools available. Other than going for IBM FileNet you should look into other options too because even we are not using the full potential of FileNet and we are paying a huge amount of money for it. 

I would rate FileNet a seven out of ten. 

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. 

The solution is very stable.

The solution is very scalable.

We use various solutions that aren't really similar, but are in the same field. There are lots of products that pretend to do enterprise content management. I have sample projects with SharePoint, and Microsoft Checkpoint among others.

In terms of the initial setup, you have to have some requirements. I am technical specialist in finance, so I can do installation as well, but it's not easy for everyone to handle. 

You have to know it takes time, you have to be very careful and know exactly what you are going to do. You need a good knowledge of the production system, middleware, application services, servers databases, etc. It's not as easy as other products.

How long it takes to deploy the solution depends of the requirements. It can take from six months to two years. It depends on a lot of factors including the modules, because you want a summary, and which remodels are the customer needs. The solution is modular, so you may have lots of modules. 

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

One of the primary use cases is for documentation processing, including image processing and all the content. It is also used for archiving and document management.

For example, in the mobile telecom or financial industries, there are requirements to retain a customer's documents, depending on regulations, for five and sometimes ten years. In this instance, FileNet is used for archiving all of the documentation.

We are using it for documentation automation projects, especially for content management such as customer contract management and some vendor contract management.

It has reduced operating costs, especially postage and courier costs and the cost of printing hard copies.

It has also helped with compliance issues. Instead of archiving hard copies, where there are regulations regarding the conditions in which they are stored, which means there are energy costs for climate control, FileNet saves on those energy costs. There are also savings on the cost of renting warehouses for the hard copies. Keeping everything digital means there are a lot of savings.

One of the most valuable features is FileNet's ability to capture things from the stack, from e-mail, to scanning of Excel and Word. FileNet can also convert many types of files to PDFs very easily.

Also, when the Content Engine processes files, it can reduce the size by up to ten times by compressing them. It has a very low storage profile. This is very important because storage is something that adds to the cost. In this way, it can reduce costs.

It is also possible to search any customer's documentation. If you want to find historical documents, you can find them very easily.

With the application layer you can install it with Windows Application Server to create web logic. 

You can also use clusters.

When requests come from users, you can extend it horizontally or vertically. You can put a lot of application servers in a vertical arrangement, so it's very flexible.

It's very simple to integrate it with other solutions. The business process management layer makes it very easy.

It's really user-friendly. Everything can be managed via a web application, a web console. And for non-technical users, it's mostly web-based now, so it's not so hard for them to use. Especially in the mobile industry, most workers are not technical. They are sales-based and are not familiar with a lot of technical features. But they find it very easy to use.

Finally, behind FileNet is IBM, which is a big company.

It is very stable because FileNet is mostly compatible with Unix, Solaris, and also IBM Unix (AIX). It's also compatible with Windows but the Unix system is really robust. When I was working with FileNet for a telecom company, it never went down. The uptime was five-nines.

Scaling is easy. You can scale vertically because in front of the application server there is load balancing. You can put a lot of application servers behind the load balancing. It's very easy. We were using Oracle Database and we could scale the database very easily as well. You can upgrade and scale up without any downtime. That is very important.

The initial setup is very easy. You first implement the database and after that the application. You can even install it on a remote site. It's that easy.

However, the configuration does take a long time. Every company needs its own configuration design. It depends on how many applications are connecting to FileNet. It can take a long time, depending on the application count.

The installation itself only takes one or two days, but the configuration can take a long time. The first time we configured it, it took over 20 days.

First of all, the automation means there is no more dependency on hard copies. Storing those documents was dependent on the environmental conditions, and if they weren't right, the documents could break down. And they had to be sent via post or courier.

By using FileNet, especially with bigger contracts, it doesn't take ten days or two weeks to receive and store the documents. Instead, when the documents are emailed it takes under one second and it arrives to customer service. Once they open the email, they can activate the customer's product immediately. The customer doesn't have to wait two weeks and it means the company can earn money for the product sooner. It helps with time to market.

Overall, ROI depends on the particular project. Every project is different.

Licensing costs depend on the size of the storage.

I also know SharePoint and Documentum. When I looked into them, Documentum was harder to use than FileNet and more expensive. Implementing and integrating Documentum was much harder than with FileNet. I'm not sure how it stacks up now. SharePoint was not robust or sustainable, in my opinion. FileNet is much better than SharePoint in those areas. 

In terms of the biggest lessons I've learned from using the product, when we installed the first time, I didn't know anything about document management. But with time, I learned that the most important thing is choosing the best infrastructure.

My advice would be to use a specialist in documentation management to implement the solution. That's not just true for FileNet, it's true for other solutions as well.

I would rate FileNet at eight out of ten. No product is perfect. You will always find some bugs.