IBM FileNet Reviews

FileNet P8 Content Manager is the primary platform we use. We use it essentially just as a document repository. We don't currently do any business process with it. We use it purely for storing and retrieving documents. The most important features would be the flexibility in which it can store the metadata, the flexibility in which you can search on the metadata and the scalability.

We have millions and millions and millions of documents and we have to put them somewhere. That is where they get put. A user can go to the FileNet system and pull up a document within a matter of seconds. Rather than, if you had no ECM system, you would send a request somewhere, someone would walk through old paper files somewhere and you would get your file in a day. That was thirty years ago. I don't think anyone does that now.

The particular aspect that I would like for us to improve on is the ingestion of new documents to data capture. We're looking at ways to more automate our document capture, more automated categorization of documents.

We were looking at the Datacap product. We're currently using Kofax. We're looking at Datacap to see if that might do it better. We don't know the answer to that yet.

It does what it's supposed to do well: you start a document on it; it pulls the document back; it displays the document. For what we use it for, I can't think of features that it's lacking. Now, there are other aspects of it that we don't use. There's a whole BPM system that's tied into it that we've never used.

Going back to data capture, that is not part of the FileNet P8 system. You have to have something to pull the documents in. IBM’s solution is called Datacap. Cofax is another company who we've been using. I went to a recent IBM conference hoping that they had the Datacap products smarter; all the talk there was about Watson and how smart it is. They have a new version of Datacap called Datacap Insight Edition. I was hoping that it was actually really smart; you could give it a bunch of documents, it could understand what the documents are, sort them out for us and extract relevant information. It's not there yet. The hype exceeds the reality.

At first, the customer experience was pretty rocky. A lot of that is just because when you give them something new, they liked the old thing. You give them something new and there's some good features and some bad features, but they're only going to complain about the bad stuff.

From an internal point of view, we had some big improvements in maintenance. The access management – the customer account management – moved from being entirely separate management on the old system to something that was integrated with our Active Directory system. Requests for passive resets and so on went from 100 per day down to zero.

We've standardized on an HTML 5-based viewer. We’ve gotten over some of the problems with being reliant on Java installed in all the various browsers. Functionally, the end customer experience is about the same. It looks a little bit different but there have been a lot of improvements in reduced maintenance costs and trouble.

It's been rock solid. Once you get it going and you get over the initial hump of the initial installation, it's solid.

Scalability is good.

FileNet tech support is wonderful. Sometimes, they prioritize according to whether the issue is a casual question or an emergency? If it's an emergency, they're right there; they'll have somebody there. They will get it fixed. If you ask them a low-priority question, it might take a while, but it's a low-priority question.

Also, once you find a document on their website, it's generally very good. The problem I've always had is that their website is sometimes horrible to find things on.

Our FileNet P8 system is an upgrade from an older FileNet Image Services system, which we've had for 14 years, I think. We're trying to obsolete that. Everything we're doing on the P8 system is really a mirror of the old Image Services system. We really haven't got around to trying implementing anything new yet.

I was involved in the decision to upgrade to the FileNet P8 system; I've been pushing for ten years.

FileNet P8 system installation is complex. I don't know how complex it is to similar products but it is definitely complex. It's not something you want to do unless you're an expert in it. You want to make sure you have somebody that knows how to do it.

I was not involved in any comparison to any other system. I don't know exactly what was done. I'm a lowly developer. I can't really compare the FileNet P8 system against any of its competitors.

When I’m selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for me are: that they're going to exist in the future; their product is good; and their documentation is good. I like to be able to go out, find the documentation, and have it be nicely organized; I can find what I want; I can read about what I need to read about and do a deep dive into the nitty gritty details.

It is not my position to consider employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or Box solutions. There's been some conversation about what would be the economic benefit of having stuff moved to the cloud versus hosting it internally. The conversation has only been, “I wonder what the numbers are.” We don't know.

There are no plans of doing mobile in relation to the FileNet P8 system. The FileNet P8 system we use is entirely internal. There are no external, customer-facing applications. There are other departments that do mobile applications. We're a bank, so they have the bank mobile application. They do some FileNet documents but they call an ESB service, which then calls FileNet. We don't do anything directly with it.

I have no complaints regarding the usability of FileNet. I've seen other similar systems and it's comparable. It's kind of boring stuff: you pull up a screen; you put in some query conditions; you find some documents and you look at your documents. It's nothing exciting.

Very easily, the most valuable feature of FileNet is its reliability. We've been using FileNet Image Services since 1989. I average under one hour of unscheduled downtime per year. I have 800 million documents of patient records and patient financial information that reside on my box. It is sub-second response time and it just plain works.

It has done a significant number of changes. One, it has gotten us off of paper and it has also allowed us to streamline some of our work processes, so that we are electronically controlling those as opposed to doing them in the paper-pushing world.

The key to me is the ability for Watson and other analytic opportunities to be able to reach into the dark, unstructured narratives that are a key component of our medical record and read them, ingest them, and apply their analytic skills to them.

We will not have that until we complete the migration onto the FileNet P8 platform. Then, even then, we expect that there are going to be some significant challenges. I'm confident that IBM, which has very smart people, is going to be able to figure it out. That's absolutely something that I’m looking forward to them adding onto the solution; 100%.

The stability is second to none. We have consistently, year after year after year, been able to maintain an uptime of, I don't know how many nines it goes down to, but you can do the math; I have under one hour of unscheduled downtime per year.

The scalability is phenomenal. It just keeps growing. I've often likened FileNet to a teenager at an all-you-can-eat buffet, where you can just keep on feeding it and it'll keep eating and eating and eating. You'll run out of food long before the teenager stops eating.

We do use technical support. I'm a member of what IBM calls the AVP, Accelerated Value Program. They're phenomenal. These guys know their stuff. They are responsive. I have a wonderful and long term relationship with Peter Fagan, who is my AVP tech. I absolutely love the guys.

The initial setup was 1989. That perhaps predates many of us. I joined the firm in 1995, so I was not there for the initial set up. I've been there for, I believe, a representative period of time.

I’m involved in the decision process to continue making upgrades, absolutely. In fact, it's a very small team of very dedicated and focused folks who have all been with the firm for approximately 20 years like me. We don't have turnover and we don't want turnover in our product line.

From time to time, we do explore options. We looked at EMC's Documentum product, for example. We found that the migration to it was going to be as painful if not more painful as the migration onto FileNet P8, and was going to have the added detrimental aspect of bringing in an entirely new relationship. We were not confident, honestly, that the product line was going to survive for the long term.

When I’m selecting a vendor to work with, I need one with vision that is going to be able to stay with the course over the period as long as a decade. Things do not move necessarily at the speed of light. We need to know that a product line that we spend a year or two or three migrating onto, is going to be consistently available and enhanced over the next decade.

I'm not convinced that migrations can ever be made easy. I think migrations are a pill; you swallow it, it works its way through your plumbing and it comes out the other end. There are various times in the process when it hurts.

As far as building a solution in-house, I'm not sure that an enterprise content management solution is the kind of thing that is buildable in-house, though there are some who are perhaps arrogant enough to think that they can pull that off.

The key is to get involved in the user community, whether that means coming out and dedicating a week at a place like World of Watson or whether it means reaching out to a local user board if one exists local to you. The customers and the other users of the product line are sometimes more honest than one would expect a Salesforce representative to be. Get as much information as you can from people who are actually using the product.

We are not employing IBM on cloud, hybrid, or box solutions in the immediate short run.

We absolutely have plans to include mobile. We are hoping to allow our clinicians access to importing of documents or importing of photographs that are taken during the course of patient care and including them in the historical medical record.
As far as new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for our organization, we are in the process of migrating off of the Legacy Image Services product onto the new P8 product line. Once that is complete, we hope to be able to take advantage of some of the content search services and other bigger analytics that might become available at that point. Until we're there, I can't speak to that.

We've been on Image Services so long that I have to say no, there aren’t any existing services that we're now able to provide better than we were previously. Image Services is at the tail end of its life expectancy and all of our focus now is on moving onto the newer platform called FileNet P8.

Regarding how FileNet has changed the experience for our customers internal and external, there's no question that it has enhanced our ability to manage access to the medical record and to make it available both to our researchers and to the clinicians at the same time. Back when it was paper, it would be signed out of the library just like a book. With only one copy of it, if it was being used by a researcher, and Mrs. McGillicutty came in unexpectedly for an appointment, we had to track down where that record was and sometimes it led to delays. Now that it's all electronic, that's no longer a factor.

As far its usability, I have been using FileNet exclusively in my work environment since 1990. I'm very comfortable in it. I have found that it is a reliable, fairly simple, but somewhat niche product. We are confident that the P8 platform, while it is more open, is going to be as reliable, is ultimately going to be as usable when we move forward, and perhaps much more modern and able to take advantage of a lot of the newer tools, such as mobile, that really have not existed.

The older product line is phenomenal, but limited in what it can do. The newer product line is not sufficiently well known to us yet, but over the course of the migration, we will certainly learn a lot more about it.

The most valuable features of FileNet are business process automation, and providing our business users access to all of the documents they need and when they need it, and having that ready access to all of the documents that they need to reference to complete their job functions.

There are a lot of processes that our business users were handling either manually or in less-than-efficient ways. We were able to optimize those processes for them through FileNet P8 workflows. That's probably the best way IBM ECM platforms help them.

Our legacy platform wasn't necessarily sustainable. It wasn't designed to handle the volume of documents, hundreds of millions of documents, that need to be managed through our enterprise content management platform. One of the main services or benefits that we're providing is a stable enterprise tool that they can rely on to handle that sheer volume of documents.

The front ends and the intelligence that we can build into them are leaps and bounds better than the service that they were being provided previously.

It's a very good tool. The one feature or direction I would like to see IBM move the tools, is to make them more tolerant for or lend itself more to continuous integration, continuous delivery; the DevOps model that most organizations are adopting.

We're on a lower version and we need to upgrade our platform, but there is still a lot of configuration that somebody such as a system engineer has to do by hand that isn't easily scriptable. It's done through configuration consoles such as FEM. That might make it difficult to deploy, for example, once an hour, like Amazon does, or every five minutes, or whatever their continuous delivery model is. We're still only deploying the production once every 10 weeks. We could deliver a lot more features to the business if we had the capability to deliver new features to them on a daily basis. That's kind of the holy grail of continuous delivery and DevOps. As of today, I don't know that we could really accomplish that with P8.

Stability’s been pretty good. We're maturing in terms of our monitoring and automation of FileNet services. When there are crashes, we're still responding to those pretty manually. That’s on our end and on IBM's end, a little bit of both.

The one area where we've had stability issues is when we're doing large-volume document ingestion. Part of this is related to the fact that we have regulatory requirements that require us to store documents on a WORM device, which stands for Write Once Read Many. There's just more overhead in doing that. There are times where we have flooded the system with documents, which has affected end-user experience. Those are the most high-impact stability issues that we've experienced, when a flood of documents comes into the system and Content Engine threads get buried.

There is definitely the potential for some improvements there. Although, we're at a point now, in our life cycle, that we're beyond a lot of those large-scale document migrations. For any newer customers that have that WORM requirement, it's definitely something that they need to take into consideration and have some defensive guards against flooding the system in that way.

You could consider it a scalability issue, I suppose. It might be a limitation of the way Content Engine is designed. There could be some more automated guards that are just built into the tool to turn off that ingestion if the system is starting to get flooded. We've instrumented some monitors to do exactly that on our side with custom coding. If IBM had a feature to protect against that, that's something that should definitely be looked at.

My overall impression of scalability is great. The way IBM allows you to design object stores, and have cross-object store searches, and the quantity of documents that are supported per object store or within FileNet P8, far exceeds what we had with our previous vendor, with the legacy system.

The scalability is great, it's just there are a couple of places, and some of it is specific to features that aren't used by every customer, but there are certain features that, if it's not a scalability issue, it might be a monitoring issue, and taking action against a potential negative impact to the system.

We've been pretty successful with the PMR process. I don't have any real negative or positive feedback exactly; it serves its purpose.

I came in towards the end of our first phase. The initial install of the software I wasn't there for, but I was there for the initial migration of documents from the legacy system. It was fairly straightforward. We definitely leaned on consulting from some IBM partners such as Perficient, and from IBM themselves for a few different things. We set up Datacap five years ago, and there were some issues with performance across a wide geography; my organization has 500 branches across the country. There were some issues there that IBM was able to give us a patch to correct those problems. Overall, it's been pretty good.

If you have a very large-scale ECM system, then I think it's the best tool available, based on my limited exposure. I've been working in a P8 shop for the last four years. It’s my first ECM shop, so I don't necessarily have a lot of experience directly with some of the other tools. For a large-scale solution, like what we needed at my employer, it was great. To my knowledge, for a large-scale ECM system, it's one of the best tools available.

Employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions is definitely a consideration, although my company is only just starting to get into moving our on-prem solutions to cloud. We have to understand a little bit better what the broad-view cloud strategy is from the entire IT organization standpoint before we get to that point.

The experiences for our customers, both internal and external, have changed by implementing FileNet. They're using a different tool set, so that's changed. With our scanning solutions and indexing, and especially from a data perspective, we can better cater to their needs, because of those features that are available through P8.
I don't have a great use case for mobile at this time. Most of the end users that we are providing services to are either physically located inside of a branch or located in our home office, performing more operations functions. They are not necessarily out in the field capturing documents in real-time from customers. It's just not the business case that we're servicing.

The usability is pretty good. There are a lot of great features in the upgraded platform, 5.2 and above, that we're not yet taking advantage of; we're still in 5.1. The Content Navigator, front ends and consolidation of the administration to Content Navigator consoles definitely are benefits. End users definitely benefit from that tool. It's been pretty good for us, even in 5.1.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for me is having somebody that can really demonstrate the tool, has the technical knowledge and can speak to the capabilities; preparedness for the presentation. With the RFPI, I wasn't there, but when we were first looking at vendors for ECM, IBM was certainly the most prepared and had a demo-able platform, as opposed to just something like a PowerPoint presentation. Being able to really demonstrate in real-time what your tools can do is the number one thing that any vendor can do to win over a customer.

FileNet integrates other solutions with my business applications; the APIs, the web services, all of the frameworks that we have developed around the FileNet solution.

We have used FileNet for legal proposals, digital governance and storage; digital documents that we would otherwise have to store physically. We have reduced costs for storage, by using digital and electronic documents instead of physical. That also makes us faster. For example, with our storage policy built into the application for electronic documents, we can now easily print the document.

I would like to see analytics from the unstructured data. Our documents are not always prepared in a way that Datacap and other tools can recognize or extract text from them. I don't know; maybe analytics from two rows or from handwriting.

It is very, very stable, like 99.9%.

Scalability is great. We have increased our size in FileNet. We have doubled its size in the last year and it is working well.

We have not used technical support.

We were looking for a BPM solution, and we found the FileNet BPM solution. It was integrated with ECM. We decided that it was a great integration, the way FileNet was showing the way to solve the problem.

Initial setup was a little complex but that was before the FileNet was part of IBM. It was many years ago. It was complex, but we made it. We had to change our document process, and define the governance policy for the documents. It was kind of difficult to figure out the right way that FileNet could do that at the time. That was difficult, but we found the way to do it right.

We considered solutions other than FileNet, but I don't remember which ones. We had three proposals at the time. We chose FileNet because of the integration, the brand name and the way that the brand would support us in the future. Then, IBM made it better.

The decision-making process took 10 months. The price was higher than we thought they would be. We did not consider building a solution on our own.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is the brand support; the way that they can improve the product in the future and work with you with those solutions.

FileNet is a better way to solve the ECM problems and needs that you have in your company. I have seen different solutions, and I found FileNet to be the more complete solution.

As far as how the experiences of our internal or external customers have changed since implementing FileNet, projects are easy. They need to find some information, some data, and they have it right at the moment that they need it. That changes the way that they use the information.

We are considering employing IBM for a hybrid solution. Right now, we have FileNet in a private network. We want to see if we can transform that into a hybrid cloud.

We also have plans to include mobile. We are now researching the possibility to implement the Datacap mobile solution.

Usability is very good; very, very good. We have different kinds of people working in administration; using FileNet is easy for everybody. We have no problems; we don’t have to keep explaining the way to use it. It is easy.

I have found in FileNet almost everything that we wanted to find; we can search quickly. For example, if you need a text translated from electronic to text, to then go to analytics, you can do it, and IBM is looking at it the same way.

The most valuable feature of FileNet is that it's a secure location for us to store our documentation, where we can put some rigor around it so people can find it and use it for an archiving type system.

Before, we would have things on server stores, hard drives, SharePoint. It allows us to have a central place that everyone knows that it's the official copy of something that they can go and access. FileNet has given both internal and external customers a way to access central data that they might not have had access to before. It allows access out in the field to documents that, before, they would have to get a paper copy of, sometimes.

That makes us more efficient, and saves us time and space.

We have Content Navigator and it seems like we still need to do a level of our own coding for plug-ins and so on. I'd like to see something a little bit more out of box, where there are plug-ins that we can get to do some of what we need to do, instead of having to build it ourselves, to make it simpler. Faster time to market is important and we're not really there.

I still think it's kind of expensive. I didn't notice that the cloud offerings were going to be any cheaper. Expense is probably another area with room for improvement.

Also, when I attend conferences, activities are shown that sound very easy. "Oh, look at this bright, shiny thing." But then, when you really start digging, it takes a lot more work to implement the bright, shiny thing. It's a nicer on a PowerPoint.

We have a lot of content stored on server shared drives, and because there is often no naming or filing standards, or metadata, users find it difficult to locate documents. Also, users tend not to go back and delete items per our records retention policy (which can be decades depending on the document), and content can continue to clog up servers. It is helpful to setup automation of records retention.

Users also keep documents on their computer drives making it difficult to share. We also have a lot of legacy documentation in file drawers that could be digital for easier sharing.

We have an enterprise license. We've been able to scale it up to large groups, as well as very small independent areas.

I don't actually put in tickets; my dev team does. Sometimes they've been a little frustrated with response times, especially for production systems. It’s hit and miss.

I was consulted during the decision process as well to invest in FileNet.

We were starting to acquire a lot of little, home-built document management systems. It didn't make sense to build something when we could buy a package that already had a lot of capabilities. We had already built, I think, three or four little scanning applications. It just didn't make sense to keep building. We had a hodge podge of stuff.

We acquired FileNet back when it was owned by FileNet, and it was much more complex then. You had to hire them to come in and do all the installation. Now, we can do our own installation. That’s because of the steps IBM has taken. Before, you had to hire them, you had to hire FileNet to come do it; you couldn't do it yourself.

Usability all depends on how it is set-up. FileNet itself is good, but it relies on just how complex does the business want to get.

We had an external consultant group that was coming in to do a significant amount of work for us. They were bringing in new technologies and they were the deciders of bringing in FileNet.

Nonetheless, when I select a vendor to work with, cost is very important and a level of expertise in a similar type of industry is helpful, peer experiences. If they've worked with a company that is similar to ours, it seems like there is faster ramp-up time for them.

Really understand your use case and capabilities that you're going to need, especially because we start out thinking it's just document management or content management, but then there's always all this other stuff. Does the product or product line have the ability to expand to the other stuff that the business wants?

I think Box has potential for us because of our interaction with external consultants, but not at this time.

As far as any pre-existing services that we're now able to provide better than we did before, we’re now able to provide better centralized access by using FileNet; that's where we're at, at this point and time.

We have plans to include mobile. We have folks out in the field, so we want them to have access to electronic documentation via a tablet or other mobile device.

The primary use case for IBM FileNet involves document automation.

Using IBM FileNet allows for easy and fast access to documentation, which supports compliance and regulatory requirements.

The integration feature of IBM FileNet is most effective for document management.

The setup process is very complex, and I would prefer if it were easier. A modern interface would also be an enhancement.

I have been working with IBM FileNet for about ten years.

I would rate the stability of IBM FileNet as ten out of ten.

IBM FileNet is very scalable, deserving a ten out of ten rating.

The customer service and support from IBM are rated as six out of ten. They often lack the necessary knowledge to provide adequate support.

Neutral

Before using IBM FileNet, I used other IBM products. It seems some Robotic Process Automation products were used prior.

The initial setup of IBM FileNet is very hard. It took around five days to complete.

The deployment typically requires two people: one for installation and another for setup, particularly covering configuration.

IBM FileNet provides financial benefits through easy and fast access to documentation. However, the speaker did not mention a specific return on investment.

I recommend IBM FileNet due to its excellent integration capabilities.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.