IBM ECM Reviews

I can answer a few short questions about my experience with IBM ECM.

On our system, we put documents into IBM ECM, which has helped us with the document management process.

We use the store document and search functionality of IBM ECM.

Currently, we use the standard features in IBM ECM, and we simply add more storage when needed to accommodate the documents.

We integrate IBM ECM via the ECM standard service, though I don't remember the specific standard.

I am going to continue using it because it is a good product for enterprise document management.

The price for IBM ECM is the best for enterprise management of documents currently, but it's only reasonable for on-premises implementations. For cloud implementations, it is not the best option.

The new version of IBM ECM is at the end of support, and we need to migrate to a new version to get open support.

We need AI capabilities from IBM ECM for additional functionalities in the next release.

Specifically, AI is needed for finding documents. The trend is moving toward AI, and for managing many documents effectively, we need AI capabilities.

Currently, IBM ECM only handles physical files, not unstructured files.

IBM needs to work alongside customers and share best practices for IBM ECM. Reading the IBM Redbook alone is not sufficient for the knowledge we need to build the best architecture for my company.

IBM ECM needs to improve the cloud version, such as compatibility with Amazon Cloud, not only IBM Cloud, to make their product more competitive.

I have been using IBM ECM for 10 years.

We open tickets on the IBM website to rate the technical support by IBM from one to ten.

We own almost all the technical knowledge for IBM ECM, so we do not usually request support from IBM.

Positive

We use both IBM BPM and Camunda together.

We still maintain IBM BPM, and for new development, we develop on Camunda.

We continue to use other IBM products.

We use IBM BPM and ECM, but we don't use other IBM products.

In Vietnam, we have some partners of IBM, but we do not use the service for partners.

I work as a BPM consultant for TCB.

I rate IBM ECM 7.5 out of 10.

Most of the government projects use IBM ECM. We have over 60 developers on the IBM cloud network for automation, business development, etc.

Most bigger projects with over 50 million documents use IBM ECM. We have more than 16 such projects in Saudi Arabia.

The tool is a very stable solution with high availability and no information leakage. It has built-in API integration on-site. You can integrate with other components and applications like SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.

The development platform is not local. For example, you need 100 days in IBM, whereas other platforms, like ServiceNow, need only 20 days.

The product is stable.

The solution is scalable. You can increase it by increasing CPUs and servers from one small entity to thousands of concurrent users. It is suitable for small and enterprise businesses.

More than 20,000 concurrent users can use the server.

IBM has an office in Saudi Arabia, and their support is very good.

The initial setup is complex and takes a week to complete, considering stability, configurations, etc.

The product is expensive and has a perpetual license.

Moving to the cloud with IBM ECM is not allowed. In Saudi Arabia, the cloud infrastructure is still non-operational, potentially for the next two to three months. Static clouds are prevalent among foundational enterprises such as IBM and Oracle. IBM offers its cloud insights, maintaining its cloud ecosystem.

IBM's efforts to enhance the user experience within its ECM platform are lacking compared to competitors like OpenText. Progress in implementing new technologies and features seems sluggish.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We have been using it for awhile for the content management purposes of some of the bank's co-functionality.

We have not seen many issues lately, thus, so far, so good in terms of performance.

The content management is all about you as you can make the same content for minimal purpose solutions applications. 

The vertical scalability, as we can use it across some of our applications. However, there is a lot that we must to do as a bank and we have not used some of the features yet.

I would like to see seamless application integration.

Stability is quite good.

I have not tested scalability out, but I believe it is good.

Not to my knowledge. Probably my technical people are using them.

I recently joined the bank, therefore I was not involved in the initial setup.

Reach out to local IBM partners.

We evaluated IBM and a couple other vendors as well.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Local support.

Our primary use case is for policy-holder documents. We're using Enterprise Content Manager 8.5 and we're serving up our documents to our agents so that they can service our customers.

We also have applications that are internal, for different financial and personal products lines, for internal workers. We're serving up their documents so that they can do their jobs.

It has been performing really well. We're enjoying the suite of products that we have.

It has definitely improved the way our organization functions. It has made a lot of our in-person interactions with paper a lot more seemless; we don't have to have as many touch-points. It has improved the electronic routing of information.

The scalability, that we're able to display our documents to so many people.

I think it's already getting away from Java applets. A lot of our users struggle with keeping up to date with Java versioning, so a lot of the functions they're doing, like printing, emailing, and even some of the viewing, they're struggling with.

It seems to be stable enough. We have not had any issues to date.

I have not used technical support for this solution.

We've always been an IBM shop in the ECM space.

We have a very strict vendor selection process. We have vendor management come in. A lot of it has to do with the security and the stability of the company, and where we see it going.

I was involved in the initial setup of IBM Content Navigator, that was my first project coming into ECM, replacing Webby with Content Navigator. It was pretty straightforward.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. There is always room for a little bit of improvement, but it's functioning very well.

I would recommend not going with ECM 8 and going with FileNet instead. It seems like that is the future of the lower-volume repository. It seems like they are moving away from ECM 8.5 so I think we're going to have some challenges coming up, getting off of that technology.

The most valuable features are the enterprise scaling capabilities. It's built on an IBM WebSphere platform and this allows us to scale it. We recently did a banker acquisition, and were able to easily scale the solution. It also performs records management, which some of the other lower-cost ECM solutions don't do. So, it does come with a cost, but those are still the positives of it.

It can store a large amount of content and make it accessible both through APIs and the out-of-box UI. This allows us to segregate content into different repositories, but then provide enterprise access restrictions based on line of business, or roles, or other criteria. This is probably the biggest benefit.

I would like administration to be easier and the product simplified. More importantly, it is sometimes overly complex, and requires a lot of work from the infrastructure and administration standpoint; a lot of hands-on patches. It can be time-consuming. So, simplification of patching and maintenance would be an improvement.

Approximately 12 years, with version upgrades

Stability is good. Sometimes it's a little difficult to achieve; it's a complex solution. Where it's at now, the product wasn't built entirely from scratch. So, there are a lot of legacy components that have been somewhat modernized. But the overall product is still there and it adds a lot of complexity that causes issues at times.

It is very scalable. We have actually taken advantage of that as a result of an acquisition where we went from about two million customers to three million customers. We then acquired additional thousands of employees who also needed access to the repository, so we were able to scale that and test it within a matter of months.

The initial time to answer is quick. But sometimes it can be challenging, even though we've already done some leg work on the issue. Once we provide that information, we sometimes get to the actual root cause and resolution. More often than that, we end up requiring some escalation to get the item resolved. Sometimes, it's the complexity of our own environment. Only sometimes is it challenging, requiring escalation through our channels.

We were using a competing product previously, when we received an unexpectedly massive bill. Within a couple of weeks, we switched vendors to an IBM ECM platform and we've been on it for about 12 years now.

I'm more of a development type, but I was involved with some of the infrastructure sizing and requirements definition. I also worked with the infrastructure team once they validated the platform and transferred of applications onto it.

The setup was complex. We did have IBM involved via our solution partners. They were actually IBM consultants at that time. We've had the solution maybe 12 years now, through various versions. Still, they were with us in that initial setup. We were coming from a competing product rather quickly, so they helped us build that platform. But we've gone through several versions and the platform is changed significantly between them.

Initial implementation was with in-house team and IBM Global Services.

We evaluated the platform that we were on. We were on a product that we had only owned for maybe two years. So, we had already done the evaluations and at that point, it was a quick move to IBM, which was one of the final two that we were considering.

I think that partnership is primary when selecting a vendor, in general, and working with us on where we're going. Additionally, having a product strategy that continues to evolve in licensing. As a bank, reducing expenses is a constant every year. Controlling expenses and helping us with controlling licensing and flexible licensing models is what I look for.

Now, particularly, there are some somewhat lower-cost solutions. But they are also solutions that are more modern and built on more modern technologies, so I would probably look at those first; they are lower cost. Also, look at the requirements. If you don't necessarily need records management capabilities, then there are some other solutions that we continue to evaluate ourselves. We are looking constantly at licensing costs when it comes to renewing with IBM.

We found that this solution was very easy to use for our customers. So, the interface of this solution was the best one for us.

It's a good solution for ECM control. We have evaluated a lot of other solutions and found that this was the best solution to provide to our customers.

The stability is very good. We didn't have any problems in this regards. Our customers are very happy with the stability.

It works with a few users up to hundreds or thousands of users. We didn't have any scalability issues.

This is a good and stable solution. It is a solution that you can trust and is, indeed, the best solution that we found out there.

We try to search for vendors that provide good support for our development and also, we look for out for those vendors that have great cases and other clients, that we can compare with our case.

IBM Enterprise Content Management suite(ICN2.0.3 for Filenet CM 5.2.1) is an enterprise-ready robust collaboration solution for knowledge workers that would meet the broad needs of the entire enterprise(Eg document-records management,search,scanning(datacap). cloud ready etc), compared to the other competitors offerings in the market.

It has helped business areas to centralize storage,usage,search,dispositon of digital content and assets from multiple sources without a lot of training and helped IT to consolidate multiple vendor tools without a lot of customization but certainly with some tweaking-multiple upgrades with assistance from IBM . Our future plans for ECM users is to allow them digitize,store and collaborate easily on one platform.

The IBM Content Navigator product (IBM's new UI and Collaboration) is much stable with fewer bugs but this should not be a surprise as IBM has been shipping poorly QAd/Tested products for many years expecting their customers to provide feedback and improve unlike their competitors and its not even funny.Better QA and product release cycles would be appreciated.

IBM really needs to provide a single ECM management dashboard or platform to manage the ECM components as currently its an sys-administration nightmare especially with one ICN UI platform strategy for all ECM products.

Product licensing can be more easy on customers as there is not a single size that fits all and business area requirements and IT landscapes change every 2 -3 years due to M&A and adoption of new technologies like hybrid cloud.We abandoned our Case manager solution as it was so complex and cost-prohibitive for us .

2007(XT) and the 2014(ICN)

Initial versions of the IBM Content Navigator product 2.0.1 had many bugs that were addressed in successive releases (ICN2.0.2--2.0.3--and now 3.0.0).IBM addressed the bugs and assisted with our deployment to production.Many enhancement requests have also been implemented in the recent major releases.

We adopted the FileNet-XT around the years 2007 for a small business area unit then consolidated and implemented for the entire enterprise in 2014 ECM-ICN.

Initial IBM content navigator releases needed many upgrades to stablize to meet user acceptable performance benchmarks on Browsers and MS-Office ECM client.

The solution is highly scalable and many add on tools can be added at a cost to meet demanding business requirements like records management,datacap-scanning,box-cloud integration etc .The stability issues were exposed as soon as all our legacy data was imported/migrated into the tool .

IBM technical support along with engineering teams have always come to assistance to fix bugs,performance tuning and address enhancement requests .Direct involvement of IBM and a good VAR partner is key to a successful implementation.NEVER attempt implementation of IBM products in-house without an experienced VAR/Integration partner.

The technical support engineers are helpful in terms of identifying the problems and involving engineering teams as needed which will be very often in a new implementation.

We already had multiple tools in our corporate ECM landscape (IBM XT,Sharepoint,WorksiteMP-iManage etc), that we intended to consolidate into one single enterprise platform.

Being Gov. we are a very slow ship to steer by IT with lots of red-tape but we chose IBM after a lengthy RFP process.

The setup was complex because we made some architectural choices of not going with the recommended very expensive WebSphere ND architecture.Product Installations are easy but performance tuning to meet enterprise performance workloads and benchmarks will required direct involvement and assistance from IBM.

IT management team should have resource and training plan budgeted to support this complex platform and business users can loose confidence/adoption momentum really fast if IT doesn't have a team to rollout project of such scale and complexity.Plan the legacy data migration and retention as a separate project task from tool implementation.

We've worked with two different IBM VARs .When possible always go with fixed bid instead of t&m on IBM projects .

TBD and in-tangible so far .We are still stabilizing the solution and are in the process of upgrading to the latest and greatest what IBM has to offer and bringing many more users into the system and rolling out additional ECM tools Eg Datacap,IER,Box Cloud Integration.

Listen to the customers and you should not be vendor-specific or vendor-biased(not uncommon with silos and vendor loyalties and camps) when making decisions. You should capture your requirements correctly and be clear about the financial cost, which includes upfront licensing and maintenance, over a span of the first three years. If you are clear about the top requirements that are absolutely necessary, then a year or two down the line, it is less painful to go and revisit those decisions and make amends.

We looked at all vendors in the Gartner's/Forrestor articles such as the Documentum, SharePoint,Hybase and IBM .

We had a small XT implementation of IBM . ICN/FCM met the maximum checkboxes as an integrated enterprise features ready integrated platform. We preferred this solution rather than getting into customization and trying to make all the moving parts work together to meet the enterprise business needs across the business areas.

The most important decision for enterprises to choose a ECM platform should be a clear IT vision(ECM roadmap 2-3-5 year) and requirements(business area expectations and maturity to accept-adopt change).Then the decision point would be to go with a major-industry-expensive tool(Documentum-D6 or Filenet5.2.x $$$Millions) or cheap/open-source platforms(Al-Fresco,iManage,Nuxeo etc $Thousands) criteria while selecting a vendor .

Also many smaller and cheaper market vendors have great product roadmaps,swissknife functionalities and are very proactive and responsive to the customer's needs and with rapidly changing IT and then there's the new hybrid cloud SaaS offerings (Google Docs or Office 365...) so is it even worth investing Millions into an on-premise ECM tool in 2017 with a 3-5+ year ROI ..

It's actually helped us standardize our content ingestion piece. We receive anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 documents a day. It's helped us standardize that process across six different business units. We've seen a reduction of error rates. We've seen much easier training on the new platform.

We haven't implemented the Case Manager piece yet, but we feel that's going to give us some tremendous benefits in re-engineering business processes, and making the system work more like the business processes.

The usability from our standpoint has been very, very good. With the new version of Datacap that we're on now, what had took nine months to train somebody, now takes just a couple weeks. Datacap is pretty intuitive, the way we have it set up. People are productive within the first day or two that they're there on site.

It provides a very simplified process. It's a lot more flexible than the system we had before. It allows us, again, to create those business processes on the platforms that more closely represent the actual business processes. It's got a lot of capabilities to be extended. We've glued into our infrastructure. Our ecosystem can talk to many other systems. A lot of things that had been manual in the past are now automated.

We are not yet considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions.

We haven't yet leveraged any new analytics or content management services. Because I went to a recent World of Watson conference, my eyes were opened to a whole lot of content analytics that we wanted to do as soon as I got back.

There are probably a lot of operational efficiencies, as I’ve mentioned. I think it's going to make us more acquisition ready. We'll be able to hide a lot of complexity as we acquire new systems. We can glue them into the ECM platform very, very easily; keep a very standardized process across business units. That'll help us acquire companies much more rapidly and, more importantly, absorb them into Western and Southern.

We have plans to eventually include mobile as well, in a couple of different ways: our interaction with our end customers, our policyholders, our contract holders, probably some exchange of information with agents. I don't know, yet, how we're going to fully roll that out.

We've had Datacap in place about eighteen months. It's been very successful in the business unit that's using that. We're still working on the Case Manager piece. The first workflow should go live after the first of the year. We expect a very similar experience with our customers there.

I haven't really found anything that I would like to see improved. They're continuing to improve it; things such as improved optical character recognition, hand writing recognition. I think as they continue to tweak those engines on the Datacap side, that'll get better. I’m looking for more improvement in that, and that’s mostly because the environment itself is very difficult. A hand-written form is extremely difficult to interpret. Sometimes, it's even difficult for humans to interpret it. I think we get about 80-90% readability for hand-written numbers, and 30-40% for hand-written letters. That's the nature of the OCR business. I’m looking for them to improve that, if they can.

It didn't implement as easy as we had hoped. We had some partner issues. Ease of implementation would be really great and make it perfect.

Data Capture has been implemented and providing value for more than 2 years. Our first Case Manager workflow solution should be implemented in the next couple months

Finding external talent for Data Capture and Case Manager has been extremely difficult.

It is rock solid.

When we did our purchase three years ago, we asked them to size it so it would double. They said that would not be a problem.

We purchased IBM Forms in September 2016 and paid a significant amount of money for some custom widget work to IBM to integrate IBM Forms with the Case Manager platform. In mid-December 2016, IBM announced they were discontinuing IBM Forms. In spite of assurances that "they would make us whole", this has yet to become a reality. Moving to IBM Forms Experience Builder is going to result in a lot of throw away work and wasted money. This is significant point of contention.

I have used technical support many times. They're very good; very, very good.

I was involved in the decision process to invest in the ECM solution. I knew we needed to invest in a solution like it because we had a legacy system that just turned 20 years old this past June; it's called the OIT from DocFinity. It served us well over the many years, but we needed something that was a little more flexible for us to design our business processes around.

It is a very complex platform. There's a pretty steep learning curve for it, but it is extremely powerful.

We actually did a big project to do a product selection, and ended up selecting IBM's ECM suite. We looked at Documentum from EMC. We looked at a hybrid Microsoft solution. We looked at some things from Lexmark, which had an offering. We looked at Hyland. ECM was the better choice of all four of those.

The decision-making process took about six months. I think it proceeded on track. We have a fairly robust decision-making process, so we just followed the process: RFIs, demos, and then an on-site bake off. ECM won out.

When selecting a vendor to work with, we put a lot of stock in customer references. We'll shrink it down to a shortlist, based on their reputation in the industry, based on our personal experience. We've got multiple mainframes, so we've been an IBM customer for many, many years. We'll look at vendor reputation, ability to deliver, and the actual platform itself or the product itself that they're trying to deliver. Then we go through as many customer references as we can find.

We did not consider building an in-house solution ourselves.

Look at my presentation, Lessons Learned from Implementing an ECM Stack, which I gave at a recent WoW conference.

A couple of other things: Make sure you have sufficient people in place. Make sure that you understand how complex and what the support requirement is. Make sure you understand that you can't just turn off the legacy systems or put them in sunset mode, because they're running the business. It takes a while to get things migrated to the new platform. You need to staff accordingly. You need to have some guiding principles, because the new platform that you're putting in probably has additional features that your old one didn't.

You don't want to just take the old system and pour it into the new system. You want to re-engineer business processes, as appropriate, and make sure that you've got the right tool for the right need. That's probably the two biggest pieces of advice.

I think overall, now that it's in place, it is a very powerful, complete platform.

We use Advanced Case Management to automate the claims and the underwriting processes. We also use a lot of bulk condition tools where we get unstructured content from various sources. We just kind of pump them through IBM tools into the FileNet depository. That adds a lot of value to the process and it also enhances our servicing capabilities to the end customers.

It is mostly the management of the unstructured content, and defined automated work flows to streamline the processes; those kinds of things.

I’d like to see more analytics and mobility features; I think that is where we're going towards.

There are a lot of things that can be improved. It's a big list; mostly, making FileNet compatible with a lot of the enterprise solutions we have around. I think that's the primary objective right now.

There are definitely challenges. It's not an easy solution. We have multiple applications, content in the millions coming into the system. We are working towards this. We are maturing. It will take some time. Our goal is to move towards a stable solution.

That's where we are working on it. I know FileNet has published articles on scalability and so on, and hopefully we will be able to use. There are a lot of complexities around scalability. It's not just application; it's infrastructure, back end solutions, and some of those things. We are working to make a cohesive scalable solution for the enterprise.

We do use the PMR mechanism to resolve all our issues. That's helping. Sometimes, there are some delays but I think overall, it's a good process.

Initial setup isn’t complex; it's pretty straightforward.

It's good. It takes time to mature. I think that it is only a matter of time to make it scalable or optimal; it takes time. That’s the only reason I have not rated it higher. Other than that, it's a good, robust solution.

We are not yet considering employing IBM cloud, hybrid or box solutions. That’s definitely a compliance issue. There are a lot of things that we are currently working on. Definitely, at some point, we might.

As far as any new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for your organization, there are a lot of different strings within the company that work on that. I’m unable to comment on that, but it's mostly on the ECM side. But there are ways we can look at synergies between ECM and analytics. That's where I think the focus of IBM World of Watson was. I think that was one takeaway for me for the future.

There are definitely existing services that we're now able to provide better than before. I think that's the purpose of having Advanced Case Management. We were using an old technology and with the move to FileNet, we now have new capabilities, new features, and a new roadmap. That's definitely an advantage for us.

We do not yet have plans to include mobile, but definitely sometime in the future. There are a variety of use cases which we might use more of in the future.

Content Manager OnDemand for z/OS ingests stuff from the JES spool automatically, quickly and easily. All you do is put the output where you want it and code what you need. We use the destination for our report name, and it goes in, stored automatically.

It's an archive for reports. We can access our reports immediately after they're run. We went paperless; you don't have to print then, but you can print a page or pages as needed.

We’d like for it to be able to ingest reports that were created on the distributed side and get them into the same repository, where you have one repository for all reports. We run CMOD on Z and that might already be there; it's just not a feature that we have used. We don't have that right now. One part of that is, these new distributed applications often come with their own archival type system. It would be nice to be consolidated.

We've used CMOD or its predecessor for 25 years. We've been a CMOD customer for a long time, 10 years or more, since CMOD became CMOD. We were an old RDARS customer before that. We've had it for a long time. We do provide our statements to customers by CMOD.

We've used CMOD or its predecessor for 25 years, so that's pretty stable. You can't get more stable than that. We do not experience down time or anything.

It’s on Z, so it's scalable by design.

Technical support is very good. It's not a widely used project, the CMOD on Z, so whenever we call, we usually get the same guy.

It a natural progression from RDARS to Content Manager OnDemand, which was running on Z on CICS. It was just a natural progression.

We ended up using IBM services to migrate from the old on-demand version two, which was strictly mainframe CICS based, to the Content Manager on Demand, which had the web front end interfaces. It took several months, but it went well.

Pricing is not a problem for CMOD; it's pretty reasonable.

We did not consider anyone else at that time; just an upgrade. We did not consider building a solution ourselves, in house.

Any advice I might give depends on where your reports come from.

I'm sure there's always room for improvement in things, but we've used it for so long and are so comfortable with it, we're happy. I would give it a perfect rating if it had a little more ease of use with getting the distributed combined into one repository.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are good support; a strong vendor that's been around a while, that's steady; and, in this world, cost has to be a factor.

As far as how our internal or external customer experiences have changed after implementing CMOD, in the beginning of our first instance of internet banking, we just had a text-based statement, the data that our service provider gave to the customer. We sent them a file and they provided it when the customer asked. Now, we send them a link, they pick the date, they come back and get the statement; it looks just like what would be mailed.

Usability is very good. We've been using it for a long time and it works.

We are not yet considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or Box solutions. We are still in the discovery phases. I attended a session at a recent conference about movement to the cloud. I said, with being a bank, we are not quite there. We do not have a good cloud strategy, yet. We are not looking to move anything to the cloud. That would be an advantage to have the same product on multiple platforms.

There aren’t any new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for your organization, yet, but we are looking at analytics on CMOD.
We do not have any plans to include mobile at this time.