IBM FileNet Reviews

We store our medical records.

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

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

• The uptime
• Stability
• The speed of retrieval

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

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

It is ability to display legacy content needs improvement.

I've never come across anything better for stability.

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

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

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

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

My previous system, Image Services, was being sunsetted.

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

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

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

There were no other vendors on my shortlist.

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

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

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

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

Our primary use for this solution is implementing business automation from document collection, capture, and indexing through management and workflow up to document analytics.

This solution has improved our organization in terms of automation, business process management, and document control.

The most valuable features for us are Wex (Watson) for search, Datacap for OCR/ICR, and Automation Anywhere for RPA.

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

Our primary use case for this solution is document storage and retrieval - Workflow.

IBM FileNet has given us a much better platform than our previous ECM platform. It's more stable, more flexible and more powerful. The only downside is that it takes a dedicated staff to maintain it and the learning curve is pretty steep.

The features that I have found most valuable include the Data Capture and Case Manager features.

Simplifying both training and maintenance would be an improvement.

We did not have any stability issues.

It's very scalable.

IBM technical support is pretty good.

We were previously using a different solution but the previous platform was obsolete.

The initial setup was fairly complex. You will need help from IBM or a third party.

We implemented through a vendor team. We did not have a great vendor experience initially based on not having a clear set of deliverables.  

Hard to calculate since the old system was so bad.  A couple of improvements were noted immediately:  

1.  Training time was cut for the new system by 80%, 

2.  The business unit was able to absorb a 30% increase in workload with adding staff or overtime, and

3. Processing errors dropped by 40%.

1. It will be more expensive than estimated to setup.  
2. You will need to double the staff while you are running the old system and installing the new system.
3. Depending on the number of documents to be migrated, make sure you understand the potentially massive amount of time and effort required to migrate the existing content to the new platform.

We looked at multiple vendors: Perceptive, Hyland, and Dell EMC.

Do not underestimate the staffing component or you will fail.

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best I would give IBM FileNet an 8 out of 10.

It is usually the client's system of record for their documents. In addition, it can be used for digital assets, like video and recordings.

It provides a centralized system of truth around their documents. It also allows them to automate their processes and gain efficiencies in cost reductions. 

It puts governance in place around the content and processes:

• People can only see what they should be able to see.
• It is auditable, so you have an audit trail.
• Access levels can be set to certain parts of the document based on role level.

Our most valuable feature is it's highly scalable. There can be up to billions of documents or content items. It can support thousands to tens of thousands of concurrent users. There is also tight integration between the content and process functionality.

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

It is stable.

It is used by large enterprises. It has to be scalable and robust for them to use. We have seen that on multiple projects over the years.

We work very closely with IBM and their technical service as part of a solution proposal. We also work with them to support and implement our client systems. It's a team effort.

We have been using the platform over the years. They have continued to make the product easier to install. With the new release of container support, it's becoming even easier to install. The trick to it is the design architecture which allows you to scale, and also putting in performance tuning for the scaling to happen.

Some of our customers are IBM shops and work with IBM exclusively, but there are also customers who look at other solutions.

Overall, IBM has a great end-to-end solution. I would highly recommend it.

Most important criteria for our customers when selecting a vendor: stable and scalable. Performance is a very big deal for most of our customers, and knowing it's a secure platform as well.

A lot of the time Datacap and FileNet work in tandem together. FileNet is like a database repository which can be connected to a bunch of different third-party applications or the Web. It's a very interesting technology in the sense of you can pull in a lot of information through the Datacap network, then connect it to servers on the FileNet side. The servers can communicate and assist in the automated workflow structure. This is especially helpful when it comes to multiple parties who are trying to work together.

A majority of our customers use FileNet. It's a valuable software in what it can do. If you need manual processes automated to the point where you are going to have a lot of information in a repository and it needs to be extraordinarily secure, then you need to work with external forces and it's not going to be an all internal processes. FileNet is a fantastic system and almost all of our clients use it. 

We work with Georgia, Connecticut, Minnesota, Montana, Rhode Island, and integrating into New York. Many different state organizations use it because it is secure and highly advanced. 

We were working with the state troopers who needed their FileNet servers implemented with the ability to communicate with a third-party app called a OffenderWatch. OffenderWatch is a database where a lot of the sex offenders are stored. However, with the way that everything works, Datacap and FileNet must stay properly maintained, otherwise there are a lot of issues which might happen. 

The ability to coordinate with automated workflows is the most valuable feature. You have a lot of external servers, and even internal servers, where all the information needs to be housed somewhere securely. If you're pulling information through Datacap, FileNet needs to be able to store it, then also assist in the automation aspect of it.

The ability to connect servers is another big feature. It can connect a lot of third-party people and hold information securely. Security is the big thing for FileNet. 

I would also include the automated word flow structure as a valuable feature.

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

Stability is fantastic. It's probably one of the more highly secure systems out there right now. Though, you have to have the right people to support, implement, integrate, and maintain it. No technology will work completely on its own. Even if it does, one day it might break (and that goes for any tech). 

It is very simple to add any users that you need to. Implement it once, and so long as it works, you can add and train more people to use it. Scalability is absolutely there.

We switched to IBM because it is in high demand in the government market.

If you are looking for a stable, highly secure solution which will work with a capture solution or will work with an automated workflow solution that you are implementing, then you should look at FileNet, especially if you have a very large repository or database.

Going forward, I am interested in knowing:

• Where is AI going to play a part in FileNet?
• Does IBM plan on advancing the technology and integrating it with the newer technologies that they are focusing on now?
• Will FileNet and Datacap one day be replaced by something better?

We provide the content management platform for the company for official and unofficial records for all business processes.

We consolidate the content management. We've become a central repository for the company and are able to migrate content from our business units into the central service, especially as we acquire other companies. Thus, we can simplify our technology portfolio.

The standard spaced interfaces and features that any content management platform would provide, plus the API's extensibility. 

We are also moving into using the newer user experience provided with the product.

We would like to have more automation of rollout solutions. We've done some of this on our own. We've created what we call a repository builder that will build out a standardized solution meeting the needs of most of our customers initially. This has saved us a tremendous amount of time. We did this using the APIs the product provides. They just don't always provide those same sorts of tools. 

The user interface is also extensible through programming. Although, it's not easy to set up, so some improvements along these lines would be good too.

At its core, it's stable. In its basic implementation, it's stable.

Scalability is where we run into some challenges because we use it to scale where most customers don't. Therefore, we sometimes have unique problems or find some product limitations that other customers don't.

They're always very responsive. Though, sometimes we have to dig a little to work through the layers of technical support in order to get the people with the right level of expertise.

It was a fairly straigtforward implementation. 

Though it has so many options, we have to be discerning about what we will deploy because each option will require additional support for our customers.

We have also looked at Documentum, OpenText, and SharePoint.

I would recommend the product with the its core and standard interfaces.

We purchased our product directly through IBM.

Our company continues to reassess what it's doing with content management. We're involved enough in the sort of richness of the feature set that it would be difficult to replace.

We've been in the FileNet business for 25 years and we have found that 80 percent of our customers use FileNet for Accounts Payable processing. That's the single biggest pain point that larger customers are trying to resolve, uniformly, across industries: ingesting invoices, matching them up with purchase orders, doing the three-way match with receivers - if they're a manufacturing or distribution outfit - and then, potentially, if possible, automating the approval and payment of those invoices so nobody has to touch them. Then, they can focus on approvals and touchpoints only when they have to, and escalate when they need to based on grants of authority and delegate if somebody's not there. They can also make sure they get their prompt-payment discounts and the like.

The other big use-case area is always compliance: Records retention, how do they prove that they're complying with policies and procedures and with regulatory issues - HIPAA, PII, etc.

In terms of how this product improves the functionality of an organization we work with, the Accounts Payable scenario is one. Let's say you're a high-volume purchaser, a retail operation, and imagine that you are getting paper invoices for every case of pineapple and every case of Planters Peanuts that you are getting, and every one of those invoices has to be filed in a filing cabinet. Now instead, we'll scan those in, they get filed automatically, and you trash the paper. And you can find them when you need to find them.

Probably the best example of efficiencies that we've seen was, we worked with a port authority. They get in several large container ships a day that they have to get unloaded. Their customers are either the consignees or they're the trucking companies that move the containers on and off the dock. Every ship that comes in gets a voyage file. When they billed their customers, if a customer called in with a question, they had to go find that voyage file. If somebody else had that file, the person looking for it couldn't answer the question. They were running a first-call resolution rate of 15 percent or less. When we took all the voyage files and started scanning them, putting them online, they raised their first-call resolution rate to over 80 percent. If you resolve their question faster, they pay you faster, and that's money in the bank.

The way that FileNet sets itself apart is along a couple of different dimensions. The first is there aren't very many ECM solutions that scale properly, both up and out. We have customers who hold billions of documents. There aren't very many that can scale that far, and that can also scale out so that they can handle lots of users, lots of documents, and that understand how to handle external users.

Then there are security issues. Everybody ties into Active Directory and things like that, but on top of that are the extra layers of security for encryption, so they can meet standards required by PCI and by HIPAA: encryption at rest, encryption in flight, encryption in the database, all together. There are really only three products on the market that know how to do that, and FileNet is one of them.

First of all, let's be clear, it's a relatively mature product. It's been around, it's been finely-tuned to handle the vast majority of what customers want it to handle. Most customers probably only utilize 20 to 30 percent of the feature functionality.

In terms of functionality, what customers might be looking for is a little more in terms of native-records retention. Records Management is an add-on product. If there were just a little more of that built into the core functionality, that would be helpful. Just like when you set up the document type or the document class, it would be good to be able to indicate the retention for this data. By being able to turn that on, customers might more often default to doing record purges rather than keeping everything forever. But that's just a small item.

We're fully certified to provide first-call technical support to our customers, which we do for the majority of our customers. Our customers like doing that with us because instead of logging into IBM's site and opening a PMR and all that, they call me and say, "Fred, remember that thing we saw two weeks ago, well it happened again. What do we do about it?" And because I have to live with the problem, I don't first have to ask them what version they're running, etc. We can solve it much more quickly.

On the other hand, IBM's technical support itself is very professional, very capable. You have to learn how to work with them. We know what they want. Before we even open a PMR, we go collect what we know they will want and we send it to them. When they say, "Okay, where's all this information?" we tell them to look at the attachment. They go off and we get a resolution more quickly that way.

It's a pretty complex product to set up because it has so many touchpoints. You have to integrate with your Directory Services, you've got a large database component, you've got a large web services component, you've got a large storage component, and you've got a big security component. At the same time, you've got an application server that you have to set up. By nature, it's a fairly complicated setup, it's not for the faint of heart.

We've been committed to this product for a long time. We like the product a lot. It's top of the line, it's robust, it's reliable, as long as you implement it the right way, which takes some training and some time. You have to know where the bodies are buried. A lot of people make mistakes when they first do it. We did, we learned, but we did it years ago. It's an industrial-strength, enterprise-class product and they don't come much better.

It is about simplicity. It designs and builds the process, then adds document facilities for the documentation. Therefore, it is easier to model the process and include documents in this process.

It improves processes. For example, it can improve staffing for human resources.

It has the ability to mix document management and process automation. For our customers, it is very attractive that they have a solution which documents their structure and the structure of their data. It also designs the process to complete the automation.

Preforms could be useful for specific projects.

It works for all types of enterprise companies. For larger enterprise companies, there might be other solutions. In general, it should work for all enterprises.

I do not really work with the technical support. The solutions that we are implementing are brand new.

Usually their support is good, though you would have a support contract. I will mention that I think the support could be better, and it could improve.

The initial setup is straightforward. You will need people who know what they are doing, but otherwise it is straightforward.

The reporting is good, and customers value that about the product.