IBM FileNet Reviews

Right now, we're trying to roll out our automation to our branches. It's very, very important for us to do the re-engineering our business process right now from manual to automation. That's pretty much the most important feature.

Automation is one of the best parts of FileNet; second, of course, is the repository being able to actually archive all our documents in there; and then, records management, which we implemented about a year ago.

There are some tangible and intangible benefits. The tangible part is the cost savings and all that; the intangible is making everything more efficient, and being able to access the documents across the board, anywhere in our bank.

I've been working with our business partner on what we can improve, more on the presentation layer, on our content, as well as being able to provide us with more recommendations when it comes to how we apply the technology such as DataCap or Case Manager into our business right now. We're not quite getting that on the presentation level, because we need someone who will be able to present to us the latest and the greatest when it comes to technology, when it comes to ECM, so that we could present it to our business and say, “Hey, we have this.”

We're in our baby steps on this. After we have implemented a solution, we do a review and see how we can make it efficient. In that respect, I’ve mentioned the presentation. We're in banking, so there's a huge need to be able to see our search results and images, rather than just a text result panel. We're implementing that right now. I know ICN just came out about a couple of years ago. I wish they were fast enough to develop APIs for that. The presentation site that we use through our business partner is not quite developed yet. I wish that was developed already. I think the responsibility for that falls on both IBM and our business partner, but more on our business partner.

There's always a need for improvement. As I’ve mentioned, I wish the ICN part that our business partner is actually developing right now was already complete because we ended up purchasing an application that sucks. We're looking to replace it with the ICN.

I might give it a perfect rating if I was able to use DataCap as promised, definitely.

It is actually very stable. As of right now, the only negative feedback I have is on the capture piece, the DataCap part. We have actually piloted that. It didn't quite work out. I’m kind of hesitant to use the DataCap technology because of the unreliability. However, I heard that the current version is actually more reliable.

It is definitely scalable. Right now, we're planning to move most of our departments over and I don't see any issues at all, infrastructure-wise, being able to accommodate most of our departments.

We have a business partner that we go through, and then to IBM. The technical support we receive through our business partner is excellent. We have very good relationship with them. They provide and recommend solutions to us and how to make our setup more efficient. If we have a business case, we're set up to go.

Do your research. Don't listen to the vendors all the time. Make sure you have a reference about using the technology and are able to get feedback from those customers.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are knowledge, being able to support us and availability.

As far as I know, we do not have any plans to consider IBM for cloud, hybrid or box solutions.

Regarding new analytics or content management services that we are now able to provide to my organization, we haven't really gotten that far. We're taking our steps slowly, right now, because we are just trying to convert all of our departments into ECM.

Automation and capture were existing services that we are now definitely able to provide better than before.

We have plans to include mobile. That was the reason I attended a session on it at a recent IBM World of Watson conference. We're not sure yet how we're going leverage the mobility part. I just wanted to see what technology we need. According to their content, it looks like we have it; I just wanted to see how they use it.
Usability is excellent. The API website that we're using right now has everything. It's really good because it presents all the functionalities that we need in order to search and retrieve documents, as well as in workflow.

The feedback has always been positive regarding changes to our internal and external customers’ experience since implementing FileNet. A lot of our businesses right now are going to the next level; meaning, automating their business process right now and being able to use e-signatures and all that; integrating with FileNet.

The Workflow feature is the most valuable feature of FileNet, and then the content management and storage. These give users the ability to quickly store items, retrieve items, and then run workflows on the items and the content in the storage.

It's made using the wealth of the content a lot better; a lot faster for users.

One of the things I'd like to get installed is the Content Navigator. That offers a little bit more scalability for the users. It's not as clunky. It's a little bit more user friendly, with anything that reduces the number of clicks the user needs to get to the content.

Right now, I'd like to get upgraded to the 5.2.1 environment. We're kind of behind the curve on that with the rest of the country. I know you don't need the 5.2.1 environment to employ the Content Navigator. You can deploy it with 5.1, but it is something that we're going to move forward with.

One thing I'd like to have is SQL 2014, but we really can't move to that until we're on 5.2.1. Our current version doesn’t integrate with it.

It's very good. It's very stable. It's just like anything else; it's built up on the foundations. As long as your foundations are strong and sturdy, the application's fine.

Scalability-wise, it's incredible, especially if you deploy it either on a WebSphere or application server. You can build it as big and as small as you need it to be.

Technical support is very good, as long as you're providing the information. If they slack a little bit, just make sure you give them a call and remind them that it's an important issue to you.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I was involved in subsequent upgrades, rollouts, improvements, moving to different configurations with fixed content devices and using Hitachi content platforms and SAN units. Those were a little complex; the more pieces you put into a puzzle. That was more on your end; making sure that the third-party apps work with the P8 system.

I have recommended FileNet to friends of mine at other companies.

Make sure you know what you want to do with it, how you're going to do it, and plan.
Nothing's perfect, but it's very good. It's above average.

I might give it a higher rating if it cost less; as with anything else, licensing is an issue. Anything with business boils down to money.

With anything, the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is cost, system stability, features, and different components and third-party apps that'll work with it, for any company that has existing storage and hardware.

It’s possible that we would consider using IBM in cloud, hybrid, or box solutions. We are looking at cheaper ways to store items; faster retrieval. Maybe in the future, making the items more cognitive; getting the wealth from the data, the value that we have in the data.

At this moment, I don't have any plans to include mobile.

I'm not sure if there any new analytics or content management services we're able to provide for our organization. I'm not in that position, so I really can't answer.

There are existing services we're now able to provide better than before: quicker response to customers in the data center, when they call in, to answer questions about forms and medical records that they've received from us.

The usability is great. It's not difficult at all.

The most valuable feature of FileNet is the storageand records management capability. It allows us to records manage our content properly.

It's allowed us to consolidate content all in one spot, to make it easier to pull out all of the customer-related content for a single customer. We provide better service to the customers. It can be more efficient, if they're not looking in various places.

We've talked a bit about Content Navigator on top of it; some improvements there right now. We use a customized viewer, because ICN doesn't have a couple of features we need around security, restricting content; who can see what content within the repository. We want to roll that out.

We’re also looking at other solutions that work with FileNet. It's a pretty bulletproof back-end solution, but we want to look at what else can we use, the cognitive and so on.

It’s lacking from our standpoint. We haven't done it. There have been different priorities. With things like box and so on, they're rising to the top because we need those types of solutions to go with the mobile or with the customer interactions.

It's been great; very stable; very few issues.

No scalability problems at all.

We have not used technical support, because we have an IBM service team that we use directly. They're not the actual tech support guys, but we do have an IBM team that does a great job.

I do not find it particularly expensive. We're having some discussions around licensing for external customers, and some of the licensing seems pretty expensive; the records management piece of it that's layered on top. You can get enterprise agreements on that sometimes. For smaller companies, it might be a pretty big ticket, though. If you're smaller, cost-wise, maybe it's not something you need.

If a colleague asked me for advice, from my standpoint, I'd certainly recommend FileNet as an option. I'd want to understand what else they're running, because it depends on what else is integrating with it; do they have workflow, do they have capture, what is it, how well does it play in the sandbox with FileNet? From what I understand, almost every vendor I talk to has out-of-the-box connectors for FileNet, which tells you it's a pretty big solution.

Relationship is the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with. How do they react to problems? You don't expect no problems; you know you're going to have problems. It's about the reaction to them; how fast are they, how quickly can they get it done, what do they do to address the root cause, and so on; being more of a partner than a vendor.

Also, with working on new solutions, helping me identify what's out there in the market, not just their solutions. I have a big Kofax deployment, and IBM supports us having that. They are not trying to sell us DataCap, because they know we have Kofax. It makes sense, so they support that decision. They integrate well. We have an internal layer that's in between; it's not a native integration. We built something in between, unfortunately; that just complicates integrations. It's another layer, something else that can break. It's customized for us. We're not quite sure why it does that. I think it's because, if we ever went away from FileNet, we wouldn't necessarily have to change the front-end applications, but we have no plans to do that.

We are considering employing IBM box solutions. Right now, IBM hosts our FileNet for us, but we're looking at box as a potential option, so that we can interact with external customers, without having them get into our firewalls, mainly.

Right now, there aren’t any new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for your organization. At a recent World of Watson conference, we were looking at some of the solutions. We have Cognos running, but we're now starting to look at the more advanced solutions.

It’s hard to say whether there are any existing services that we're able to provide better now than before because of the implementation of FileNet. I’m not sure.

As far as how the experiences of your internal or external customers changed since we implemented FileNet, we implemented it a long time ago, so that’s hard to answer. Nonetheless, as we've gone along, customers will see slower but steady progress in terms of knowing more about them and being able to retrieve the documents. We used to have a big problem with not finding a customer's document, often. FileNet makes it easier to find, so it gives the customer more confidence.

We've launched mobile applications. Most of the launches so far have not used FileNet, because the deployment of the app was the most important thing. They didn't do a proper back end solution, and now they're following up for the proper back end. They’re catching up, but we'd like to get to a point where we're deploying with them upfront.

I'm not that close to FileNet, but I haven't heard anything negative about its usability.
It's been a really solid product. I've only had this area for about a year, but it's been a really good product; very few problems. We’ve had some technical production issues, that might have to do less with the product, and more about how it's deployed, but nothing major; enough that I haven’t given it a perfect rating. I'm not sure I'd give anything a perfect rating.

The most valuable features of FileNet are the document management, records management, and integration with other solutions. We want a system of record and that's what it supplies us with, a system of record that's well supported.

It's given us the ability to organize and apply an actual system of record to it, so that we're tracking and making sure that things are disposed of when they need to be. We know where things are. We're applying a real taxonomy to our environment. We're taking many disparate systems and merging them all into one system, and it's now our system of record.

I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as SharePoint; that would be a key one. IBM knows that we want that. Integrations with that and other solutions, in general – other records management solutions, other document management solutions, including those from competitors; that is key for us. While we're trying to coalesce everybody into one system, for the most part, there are other systems that we still have. We still need the connectors to go out to them and connect up everything.

Also, their integration between their own products, such as Watson; things like the Content Collectors and so forth. It would be much better if they made all that work seamlessly together. We've had some troubles with FileNet working with Content Collector, working with Watson and working with Classification. You would think that these things would work seamlessly together but the bridges aren't there. All of the connections aren't in place. It's taking time for that to happen.

One of the key reasons why we went with FileNet is how stable it was. We're very happy with the stability of it.

Scalability-wise, we're really happy with that, as well. It's a system that we built with scalability in mind. We went highly available with it and we know exactly how to branch out for every single node that we want, every component that we've got.

We have used technical support quite a bit. We're heavily engaged with the Lab Services on a regular basis. We have a lot of enhancement requests that are going out and so forth, and IBM has been very responsive to us.

We had a lot of different systems. We wanted an industry leader. At that point in time, they were one of the top ones in the Magic Quadrant from Gartner or Forrester. We did look into this with Gartner and Forrester. We tried to stay as neutral as possible in this decision, and we were looking at several different companies. They just worked their way up to the top, eventually.

We were a very siloed organization. We had different systems in different regions and so forth. It was very difficult to find information, so we knew we needed one. We also knew that there were new government regulations on how we handled our records, and we needed to have something that we could really leverage to facilitate all of that.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with has to do with the size of the organization; what they're able to bring to the table, as far as the number of people and so on. We've dealt with small groups, where there's 1-2 people working for a company. That can make it difficult for us. It's the personnel, the power of the people that they can bring. That's really critical for us.

Also, experience, obviously; that they know what they're doing. I've also dealt with vendors where they come in and they learn with us. When we started with our implementation, ICM was brand new. When we were sitting down with our vendor, we realized quickly the vendor was learning it as we went. So, having some experience with the product is obviously key.

We're a pseudo-governmental organization and that means that we're a slow ship to turn. The decision-making progress takes a long time. There are a lot of different policies and procedures that are in place to gate us as we go through that process. It just naturally takes us a long time to get through it. From strategy, through an RFP, to getting to the point where we made a purchase, it probably took two years.

We did not really think about building an in-house solution. There are components of this that you could probably do on your own. We looked at things like platforms such as SharePoint and so on, and realized that there were limitations. That's why we wanted an enterprise leader; something that's already pre-built that we didn't have to build from the ground up and support. That's not to say that we won't build certain things going out. We've looked at connectors and what we want out of those connector products and we've toiled with the idea of actually building it from the ground up ourselves.

In addition to myself, we also brought in others who have consultant experience, so we knew how to do this from the ground up. If you threw someone new into it, it's very complex, very difficult to do, but since we had lots of experience, we knew what we were doing. It was still complex; not an easy thing to do. You have to have some people with some pretty decent experience to build it up; not only that, but also understand how your customers are actually going to use it. It's one thing to build up a foundation that they can use, it's another thing to make sure it actually does what their business needs.

Really listen to your customer, your users, and what they need. Understand what they need from a records management perspective and what they're going to be migrating from and coming into this with. With these solutions, there are a lot of dials to play with and some of them handle that better than others.

It's a very stable platform. It's obviously a leader. When used properly and the customers understand what it's to be used for, it's an excellent product. Whether or not it's as customizable and user friendly, that's where it starts to drop a little bit as far as I'm concerned. When you compare it to the flexibility and what users can do with SharePoint or some of the competing products like OpenText and so on, it seems like there's a little bit more flexibility on the user side for them to do more with those than what you can with FileNet when it comes out of the box. Now, I do understand, IBM is changing that. That's the reason behind my rating.

We are considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions; a little bit of everything. The box solution is a nice way for us to work with outside agencies such as banks and so on, when we do reviews of them and so forth. We would look at the cloud for development systems and things of that nature. I don't see us moving any of our production-level data out to the cloud at this point in time. An in-house cloud, that's different, perhaps.

We’re now able to provide analytics and content management services for my organization that we weren’t able to provide before, because we didn't really have a complete system before we had this system. We're now a records management system for a central bank.

Document management is probably the key existing service that we're now able to provide better than before. As I’ve mentioned, we had disparate systems, many different search engines to find all that data and now we're all kind of coalescing into one.

We have plans to include mobile. It's a little bit further out and, being a central bank, we have some restrictions as far as what we can do on mobile devices and what they can do to access their network. That makes mobile difficult.

The experiences of our internal customers have changed quite a bit since implementing FileNet. As I’ve mentioned, they've got one area to go to find all their data. For the customers that are using it, they like that quite a bit. Being able to leverage new workflows to improve their business processes is fantastic. As far as external customers, we haven't allowed anybody external. We have no external access to it. That's where we might use something like box down the road.

There's an ebb and flow to usability, as far as what you're willing to customize on the user front end. Coming out of the box, it's difficult to say that it's very usable for customers until you get in and really start customizing it for their needs and understanding how they're going to use it in their day-to-day practice. ICM out of the box is OK from a document management perspective, but it's very generic and it needs to be ironed out and customized. I'm not referring to custom coding, but really going in and tweaking the settings to facilitate what the customers want.

FileNet gives a lot of flexibility to the different problems we run into within our environment. It gives us flexibilities for ingest in multiple different ways of different products in order to store the content in FileNet P8, as well as flexibility of where we want to store it; the flexibility of creating metadata associated with your documents. It helps in the metadata, as well the security aspects as well. The flexibility is really the biggest advantage, I feel.

It helps put structure around unstructured content. Having the structure there makes it easier for people to find their content, in many different ways, whether it's in a mortgage space or some sort of other space. It gives us the ability to unify all the content and makes it easier to find.

Over the years, it's actually improved quite a bit. I do like what they are putting into the product itself. Previously, your process engines and all these different components were outside of the actual FileNet Content Manager product and now more of that is coming internal to it; that makes it easier to deploy. I like the fact that it's easier to deploy; upgrades are much easier.

From an improvement perspective, one of the things we often have challenges with is, within the FileNet product, changing properties or just general configurations within the product to support a business. That's been one of our biggest challenges, to automate that and make that an automated deployment, rather than somebody having to go in all of the time and click on the button to make that configuration. More automation in that area would probably be one area I would like to see.

I've worked with the FileNet product for over eight years.

I feel it's very stable. I've never had any real challenges with it.

It gives us flexibility to expand it and grow it and scale it really simply.

I've always had a great experience with technical support. I've used them enough that I know most of the tech support people by name. The good feeling is, yes, they recognize you as well and they understand your experience and where you are coming from. They are easy to work with, to get on the phone. Having that phone conversation usually speeds up the resolution time quite a bit.

We were previously using an earlier version of FileNet.

We were looking for the next generation, where we were. We had used FileNet Image Services, and we still use FileNet Image Services, but we were trying to move on, grow and get into newer technologies. That's part of the decision to do that as our strategy to move forward.

The product itself, I wouldn't say it was complex to set up. It was to integrate it within our environment’s current systems. Not every environment was ready to go or integrate into a FileNet product like that when we first implemented it. Eventually, we worked with IBM, we found the right solutions, had to make some product changes at the time and it worked out just fine.

We reviewed different vendors that we had worked with. Our organization is quite large, so we had multiple, different types of products where we are. Everything was analyzed, and we came to the decision to move on with FileNet. I think it has to do with the supportability. With our organization being large and IBM being large, they are able to support the types of volumes and types of challenges that we have. That played a lot into it, along with the fact that we do have some other IBM products already. That worked out well.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is having that ability to contact them easily and communicate our challenges because you always have to have that open dialogue and collaborate and understand our challenges so they can suggest improvements for us. There might be something we have to change as a client of IBM but we have to have that collaboration in there so that we can get that done.

It was probably a year-long decision-making process, to fully go through it, because of the size of our environment. One of the key factors to actually move forward was the fact that IBM was able to change some of their connectors that work with our environment. If that wouldn't have happened, it might have been a different decision. Knowing that they were able to make some adjustments to the product; that helped.

In the content management space, we probably did not think too much about building a solution in house. That’s not something that we would typically do in our environment. If there is a product that does it, we tend to lean towards the product.

You have to look at the requirements you have for your business. Then, based on those requirements, look at your options. Look at the different vendors and different products and make sure you are making the right decision for your requirements in your organization, because the skillset of your organization is key, too. You have to have the support within your organization to have support for the product, whether it's the FileNet solution or some other solution.

My rating reflects the fact that there is always room for improvement. The product is very good; its stable; its served us very well for 8+ years, but there is always room for improvement. The technologies and the industry changes; having that flexibility. As long as the product keeps improving, it will continue to be a great product. I’m not sure I would give anything a perfect rating because there is always room for improvement. As far as what might earn it a perfect rating, I would almost have to use Watson to think into the future to tell me what I don't already know.

We've been looking at ways to analyze content that’s at rest or been sitting on file shares, SharePoint sites and different areas within the bank that people might not be aware of or don't really know how to classify it, and using different IBM tools in order to do that.

As far as existing services that we are now able to provide better than before, in general, it’s the find-ability for our content; exposing more of our web services to different applications that we support with our environment; give them that flexibility so they can actually find the content.

Regarding usability, I hesitate to describe it as simplistic, but it is simplistic, yet it can be complex if you need it to be. You can keep it simple if you need to keep it simple but yet, if you need a little bit more complexity in your business requirements, it's there and it's available.

For internal customers, I think the experience has changed a lot. FileNet has made it much simpler for our clients to get to their content. They understand that it's one place, now they know how to find it and it's more repetitive, rather than trying to search this way here and another way somewhere else. It's improved from a time perspective for clients, with our basically internal associates, to find content. It’s a great time saver.

We are not considering using or employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions at this time.

We do not have any plans to include mobile at this time.

The most valuable feature of FileNet is the capability to manage a large number of various documents, dynamic documents. In our case, we are using mostly transactional documents. It provides the ability to attach all documents related to transactions that we want to manage and provides guaranteed support to the transactional aspect with unstructured content.

It supports and provides the capability to expose content to line-of-business applications.

FileNet is mostly internal for us. It is very interesting because it is providing capabilities that, in the past, we would have had to retrieve boxes of paper documents, and so on. It's easier. We are in the process of straight-through processing and the digitalization of processes. Of course, content is a major part of that. We definitely want to investigate that and leverage content into transactional and improvement of processes.

I would like to use the analytics features more. That's part of the solution; it's already there. However, for the ECM part, we don't have any experience with the analytics. That's something we can envision and would like to consider integrating into the solution. However, at this time, it's not part of it. It’s definitely something we're looking for to provide value and more intricate information that we cannot consider with the basic connection process.

When we compare it to other vendors, there are some capabilities that we might improve.

We have some applications that we can build on and an API is also available; that gives us some capabilities.

We don't have any stability concerns for FileNet. IBM manages it on our site. IBM is our outsourcer. Stability’s OK on the site. We don't have major failures, or anything like that. We are considering a different approach for DR. But otherwise, it's okay.

Scalability’s something that we want to consider. With the cloud offering, that's something that we can definitely leverage. In terms of scalability, cloud offers us something good and new. We discovered at a recent conference that IBM has an interesting cloud offering.

We have not used IBM technical support for FileNet.

Initial setup was done a long time ago. I was not at the company at that time.

The cloud could be really interesting, as soon as you don't have any constraints regarding the regulatory aspect, sovereignty, and so on. We have some IBMers in charge of operations, upgrades and reliability of the environment; I think that's very interesting.

A hybrid solution could be something that we can consider. We have some regulatory concerns. Because it's mostly sensitive information that we have on our repositories, we need to find ways to securely involve cloud capabilities. That's something we need to consider but, of course, we are interested.

There are no new analytics or content management services that we're able to provide for your organization, yet, but I'd like to have some more, mostly for the capture part of the process. I'd like to have some more analytics capabilities to classify or extract content, and to structure content from the unstructured content.

We have plans to include mobile as well; that is part of it. We have a few line-of-business applications, so we need to consider it as an integration. It's mostly for supporting documents that we want, too. The IBM Box offering could be something that we can leverage.

With all applications that we are using, we are going to leverage Content Navigator. That's one thing that's very interesting. Case Manager, Datacap, and all of those products are interesting.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are robustness, the fact that they understand our business, they are willing to accompany us with various strategies and various solutions we can implement; not only with IBM solution, but with third parties as well.

The most valuable feature of FileNet is its out-of-the-box functionality; not a lot of custom coding that has to happen for the solution to work.

We have access to all the documents that we need. We have all kinds of documents. We have access to all of those documents from anywhere within the organization. With Navigator, it is essentially browser-based access.

They are already working on the areas with room improvement. It's being accomplished now. There's FileNet Enterprise Manager, affectionately known as FEM, which has functionality that is not completely in ACE yet. I know they're working on getting all of the functionality from that tool into the ACE tool. There are certain functions that we still go back into FEM to accomplish. They've been working on it. Each one of the releases, they include more of the functionality. That's the roadmap: to get rid of the FEM and have all the functionality in ACE.

It is very stable. We have had no outages. We've had planned outages, as far as upgrading. That's another benefit; we've found upgrades to be quite simple, quite easy. Even now, with the latest versions, we can do that without taking the system completely down. That's partly because of WebSphere, which allows us to upgrade on the fly. That is important to us.

There are no scalability limits. The scalability is everything that we've needed.

We have used technical support. During the initial launch, there were a few issues, I guess, with the multi-value fields, but they were resolved fairly quickly.

Technical support was not excellent, but very good.

We were previously using other ECM systems in the corporation. There still are, but there's a standardization going on towards the FileNet, the P8.

Initial setup is somewhat complex, especially if you've had no exposure to it previously, but it wasn't a terrible task. It was doable.

There was Documentum, and we still have a limited Documentum installation. There really weren't many others in the running.

One of the reasons we eventually chose the IBM solution was the peer reviews, as well as from Gartner, industry reviews; peer reviews from other, not necessarily banking customers, but other customers in our area. They have FileNet P8 installations and have had good experience with that.

We encountered these reviews by word-of-mouth, associations, networking with these other companies; that proved very beneficial to us. A good recommendation from somebody that's already using the product is worth a lot.

The decision-making process lasted a number of months, not years. One of the factors that expedited that process were the good reviews or good experiences by others that proved to be helpful to us.

In general, the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are reliability and the customer service being able to respond to our requests. That's important. Then, we don't like to be on the leading edge of technology, but certainly have the capability to stay current with changes, the technology. We've seen that with the HTML5 viewer that was incorporated into Navigator. We went to that immediately, as soon as it was available.

Try it out. Test it out. Put it on the top of your list. It should be at the top of your consideration list.

The ease-of-use is important, and for us, we didn't have to customize a whole lot, or anything, really. We just had to configure, and that's always real important.
It is very intuitive. I don't find any of it hard to use. Our experience in rolling it out to our customers is that it's very intuitive. They didn't have a hard time finding what they needed to do their job, and finding it much quicker than previously, too.

Employing IBM on cloud is tough for us because of all of the security and regulatory requirements around the banking or financial industry. We're looking at it but we're not making the jump. We’re looking at it for various reasons. Part of it is not having to deal with the on-premise headaches, I'll call them.

We haven't deployed much of the analytics, but it does open the door for us to be able to provide new analytics services for my organization.

There are existing services we're able to provide better now than we were before, especially in the display of the documents. We're using the virtual viewer in Navigator, which was a big plus for us. No longer do we have to worry about which Java version is deployed here and there, and throughout the West. The HTML5 viewer has been a plus for us.

As far as how the experiences of our internal and/or external customers changed since implementing FileNet, there was somewhat of a learning curve from the old way that they displayed or got at their information, got at the documents, to the new way, but it was a short curve. It was pretty intuitive. Doing the search and then displaying the document is pretty simple.

At a recent conference, I sat through a session with mobile. We don't have the right use case yet, but there's interest in that.

We use FileNet as an unstructured content repository today. About six, seven years ago, we also used it as a case management solution but we don't use it as a case management solution anymore. We use it primarily as a content repository. We like the fact that it is a large vendor solution. It is robust and stable; hardly comes down. One of the challenges we face is finding qualified personnel to take care of the upkeep of the solution but, other than that, it's serviced very well.

It has actually simplified some of our business processes that rely on unstructured data. We are in the health care business, so centralized storing and management of unstructured data allows the different business processes to go to the same single source of truth for that information. For example, we process claims. We also have to answer questions at the contact center on the claims that we've processed. If there is a document that is associated with a claim, for both those business processes to have access to it from a single source of truth is valuable. There are multiple business processes that rely on that. Having a centralized repository has become very useful and valuable. And, naturally, the audit and compliance requirements have also been fairly well satisfied, thanks to the fact that we have that centralized repository.

I would like to see better integration with other tools. For example, we use IBM Security Suite. We also use IBM's Business Process Manager, Rules Engine, Cognos, and so on. I think IBM products can be better integrated across themselves. We find that, sometimes, we have to jump through hoops to get one product to work with another.

I would give it a perfect rating if all the upgrades had been smooth.

We've been using it for almost 10 years now.

It is very stable and it does scale well. It does require a certain amount of discipline in setting the infrastructure up right and keeping up with the patches and releases. But it has been very stable for us and it has scaled well.

I think technical support is pretty good. They've been very responsive and helpful, but we haven't really had to call them too many times in the last few months.

I was not involved in the initial setup but I was involved in an upgrade that was almost an overhaul, about four years ago. It was fairly complex because I think the model we used to lay down the unstructured data within FileNet originally was not really very extensible. We had to redo a little bit of that work, so there was some complexity in it. And, also, we were coming from a fairly older version of the software... Lack of upkeep, I guess. And that's why it was a fairly difficult exercise at that point.

First, know the problem that you are trying to solve. Different products have different sweet spots, different scales, for operation. Understand the business problem that you are trying to solve. Understand the ability of your organization to adapt to change, because these things require the entire organization to think a little differently about how they do what they do. And then, make sure you have the right technical strength to implement a large infrastructure solution like this.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are reliability, technical support, and, definitely, the cost.

We are able to provide a lot more content management solutions than before. We've been using it for almost 10 years now. There's really nothing dramatically different or new that we've done in the last 12 months.

It's very usable. I haven't seen it lately but I'm sure it has improved dramatically in the last 12 months, too. Compared to what I saw five, six, years ago, and what we actually upgraded to, it's come a long way.

We are not considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or Box solutions, nor for mobile, at the moment.