OpenText Content Manager Reviews

The most valuable features are retention and additional field options. Retention is important because we need to know when records are due for destruction for compliance. The ability to add our own user-defined fields allows us to modify this product to suite our needs.

It allows us to be in compliance and we know where every single record is located. This allows us to be efficient.

I would like to see an improvement in the licensing process. It is very complicated and it seems to involve many different people throughout the entire process.

We have used this solution for over 15 years. It was a product originally developed by TOWER Software and purchased by HP.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We used different in-house solutions over 15 years ago. They didn’t have many options and someone in-house had to create and manage them.

This is a wonderful product with many options. We have never been disappointed by it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

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

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

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

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

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

We use it in the legal context a lot for document management and as a repository. It supports our legal document repository and document storage for working on cases.

It helps us in terms of efficiency when working with multiple people at the same time, on the same case. For example, if you have a legal case, there are multiple people interested in the case from various perspectives. It helps us keep everything together for making the case; collecting documents, emails, and many other elements into one environment.

We have not seen the working product yet, so It's difficult to talk about things that are not covered yet. We are still in a stage of getting it working. But we would like it to be more integrated. I would really like to see an ERP-type system for the legal community. There's much more to it than just a document repository. It's also about managing time registrations, and these type of things. So how can we further integrate it? How can we set up and organise an ERP system for legal, which is integrated with Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint-type services, and so on?

Actually, we have not seen the product working yet, to be quite honest. We have seen a demo, but we have challenges getting it working with the metadata we have. In the demo, I think we have been using it for year. Since then we have been struggling to get it implemented.

It is quite scalable if it is implemented correctly; at least within our environment.

We used various experts from HPE to get it implemented. We've had a lot of talks, but not many results, to be quite frank.

We used various tools previously. We want to go to one integrated environment. But we have to benchmark the tools to determine whether they decrease or increase efficiency and then optimize all the processes. We have too many solutions that are too costly, and we want to go to one integrated environment.

We've had it for a year now, and since we started implementation it has been, to say softly, a nightmare. I don't know what the complexity of the tool is, or if it is the environment, but we really have had big trouble.

We looked a some other vendors. OpenText is another one we have been looking at. We have also been looking at Microsoft.

From a product perspective, I would say HPE Content Manager definitely rates an 8/10. But, the experience we have right now is a 3/10. Our problems also have to do with the attitude of HPE regarding our autonomy to integrate it and work to get it done. We've had many conversations on that as well, so we feel a little bit like we've bought something, but at the same time, it is not working. Are we getting the proper support and commitment to really make it work?

It's a great product. But HPE needs to step away from the commercial interest and really help us to get what it is that we are looking for. It always comes with a price, but it looks that it's not just a tick in the box. We want to really see it end-to-end that it's going to work for us as well.