OpenText Content Manager Reviews

HPE Content Manager 9, and its predecessors, is an excellent EDRMS with a strong emphasis on record lifecycle and compliance with government standards. It provides unparalleled storage and search capabilities, and is an invaluable tool to information management units across all sectors.

HPE Content Manager has built-in workflow components allowing users to manage business processes with ease.

Currently in development is a web client version of the software, doing away with the need to deploy full software clients to staff PCs. This web client requires more refinement to be viable as a desktop client replacement.

I’ve been using and supporting HPE Content Manager in its various versions and names for around six years.

Deployment comes in two parts:

• Server-side deployment, which, depending on the scale of deployment, can be fairly straightforward.
• Client-side deployment, on the other hand, can be complex.

In order to maintain stability, some monitoring from ICT staff is required to catch any anomalies before they become issues.

The system is very scalable with the ability to add infrastructure as required.

HPE has a self-help web page and a very active forum for HPE Content Manager. When lodging support tickets, the response time is very quick and the personnel are very professional. It helps to include as much information in the support tickets, as often you will be asked the same questions up front.

I have trialed other EDRMS solutions, though Content Manager is the software leader.

Initial software setup is straightforward, though quite a lot of preparation is required for the information management processes. As the software is very customizable, the actual configuration for business use requires a lot of input from information management staff.

My primary role is actually to implement this solution and, as consultants, I would suggest using vendor/partners.

Content Manager is a software seat license agreement. I would suggest ordering bulk licenses as running out of licenses can be disruptive to business.

Look for vendors or partners in your area to offer advice.

• Audit events on documents, folders
• Ability to manage retention, disposition
• Sharing documents, setting security on documents and folders
• User labels (we wish they were ‘shareable’)

• Sharing of documents
• Reduction of duplication
• Ability to manage retention, disposition and overall records management

• Easier to set security/access at all levels.
• Make the job of the administrator managing the system easier (client setup, position setup, org changes).
• The system options > Permissions tab for each user type: There are too many permissions with our recent upgrade that were ‘clumped together’ that make it difficult to manage what people in the system can do (e.g., Records Coordinators’ vs Records Managers’ ability for document deletion and removal).
• Copying datasets is difficult and time-consuming
• Enhancement requests that have been submitted are either not implemented or take a very long time to be implemented (we’ve stopped submitting them because of this).
• Emails used to be stored in VMBX format (now it is MSG format): This is problematic when trying to pull the emails out of HPE RM.
• Compound/linked files (e.g., InDesign, Dreamweaver, AutoCAD, linked Excel): When filed in HPE RM, the links are broken. This means that several departments at my organization cannot use HPE RM for their documents.
• Help file is not very helpful and has room for improvement.

I have used it since Sept. 2008.

It is hard to get technical support when you try to integrate HPE RM with other products. For example, when implementing a third-party load balancer, the response time was impacted significantly. It is a gray area between technical support and/or consulting, HPE did not provide much support.

Generally speaking, HPE’s support for the product has been weak since the acquisition from TOWER Software. There is a large gap between 1st-level support and the often-required 3rd-tier support. Escalation is often onerous and HPE seems to be focused on closing tickets rather than solving issues. More technical issues that need to go beyond support to the development group are extremely difficult to move forward.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The first level of technical support is not very helpful. All support calls have to go through the first level of support unless you purchase premium support. The application has a complex architecture with lots of arcane configuration settings. Complex issues often fall into the “try this” trap, which can cause serious impacts.

There was no document management system for the entire organization. However, one department (legal) was using Worldox, due the integration with their case management system.

• Issues with setting up and getting the retention schedule triggers to work: The help menu was not helpful and this was not a part of the basic configuration that was initially set up with the consultants.
• Management of multiple offices of primary responsibility (OPR): In our system, we have multiple OPRs, and HPE RM clients were using the owner to manage only one OPR.

The licensing model changed from the original model when we purchased the product. Initially, there was one license type (expensive) and you controlled what the user could do through the user security configuration. The new model breaks the licenses into multiple types, from Admin (full access) down to Read Only. Each successive level has functional areas they are prescribed from using. You will need to map those functions against your internal planned security wants to ensure you are buying the correct license type. For us, other than a handful of Read Only licenses, all new purchases tend to be at least the Records Manager level, as (for us) the lower license type are missing key capabilities.

Hummingbird document management was the only other shortlisted vendor. Others may have been in the initial RFP process. Keep in mind that we initiated it in 2008.

Fully understand the impact of how you set up the system; for example, the internal locations directory, security groups, security/access on different levels (classification, folder).

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have not really had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

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

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

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

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

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

It always takes more time and money.

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.

I use the product mainly for archiving documents.

The product can be integrated with different solutions. There aren’t many products in the market that provide such integrations. We are integrating the product with SharePoint. It is important in content management.

The product could improve its scalability.

I have been using the solution for the last six months.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten. It is quite stable.

I rate the tool’s scalability a six or seven out of ten.

The initial setup was not difficult, but we needed a little bit of background knowledge to deploy the solution.

I am an end user. My peers guide me whenever I face issues with the solution. People wanting to use the solution must go through the demo and try to understand the software before deploying. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

On-premises