IBM FileNet Reviews

All of our customers are using it to ingest, process, and retrieve their documents on a daily basis.

Automation is definitely the most important thing for large enterprises because they can't process many documents without it. Our clients are definitely planning to expand the use of automation. The more automation they get, the happier they are, because they don't want to spend too much time and have large overhead for processing their documents.

There are different stages of automation. For scanning, our clients use Datacap and, once everything is configured and fits their needs, they scan and process all their documents automatically. They don't need to do a lot of extra steps to get all their documents into the system.

After that, they need to search and retrieve those documents, which is also really nice in the way it is automated. There are different options. They can use Records Manager to create records automatically and keep them for, let's say, seven years or ten years and, after that, they can delete them, but not before that.

We have a customer that was using an obsolete system from 1990-something. They switched gradually, business-unit-by-business-unit, to FileNet P8 and that changed their way of handling everything. It changed the time it takes them to do their jobs and it also completely changed their end-user experience because of all the new technology and all of the automation. It completely changed their business process.

It definitely has reduced our clients' operating costs. It also saves our clients time.

FileNet has also definitely helped them with compliance and/or governance issues. That's another thing that is specific to IBM. They're the best in the business for compliance for all kinds of regulations, laws, state law, etc. They know how all that works. Out-of-the-box, it's really easy to configure according to whatever state they live in and the specific requirements they have. Everything is already in the product. They just need to select and configure it, but doing so is really easy and, once they set it up, they just use it. There are no issues there.

There are a lot of valuable features, but the biggest advantage is that this system is stable; it's always online, it always works. In addition, there are not too many changes or updates that cause issues. It's both the system and the environment around it that are stable. For large and enterprise customers, it's the best solution because, once it's configured and running, we don't need to touch it and constantly make changes to it. It's a low-maintenance platform.

While the system is stable, at the same time, the end-user interface, the Content Navigator, gets updated frequently so that it can match the requirements from the end-users. That way it provides new features and makes sure that everybody is happy.

To summarize, the back-end of the system always works and at the front-end you have an application that gives the best user experience. It's a great combination.

I would like to see support for different databases, like MySQL. I believe it's a good thing to have options. I don't think that there will be a lot of customers doing that, but nowadays people like to have options.

There is room for improvement in the scanning solution, Datacap. It's improving all the time. But since it's more an end-user software, the end-users are constantly improving their processes, and I believe that sometimes we're not catching up with their requirements.

The stability and usability go together. The backend and the front-end are separate but they work together. Still, we can handle them separately, from a technical point of view.

The whole solution is based on IBM WebSphere, which is basically a complicated website. So all the applications are running on that IBM software and you can create a cluster, more than one server which is handling all those requests. So you can scale it up to as many servers as you need, which increases the performance significantly. Also, you have redundancy in this case. If one of the servers doesn't work, the rest of the servers automatically handle the workloads.

I use IBM's technical support all the time. They're extremely responsive and very helpful. They always ask all the questions. They give us all the information upfront. If we need them to join in a call, they always do so really fast. That's been my experience for the last seven years. Every time I need help from IBM, I get it immediately.

If a customer is using legacy software that they want to move away from, the primary reasons in the decision-making process that they decide to go with FileNet are the stability and, at the same time, a really nice end-user experience. Also, out-of-the-box, they have all the government and state requirements. The whole solution gives them everything they need.

With a lot of other solutions, you get some of the features but not all of them. So you need to compromise and probably build your own end-user experience or add something on top of it. With FileNet, you get everything you need out-of-the-box.

The initial setup is really easy. If you're going to use all the features out-of-the-box, you just install it and it starts working. You don't need to do anything.

We have customers that have their own end-user solutions or very specific needs, and then we have to spend a little bit more time with them, but that's because they have their own software on top of it that they like to use it. That's more an issue of end-user software and not the actual FileNet system.

Our customers integrate it with other solutions. A lot of the time it's their own software that they have developed in-house. They use FileNet to connect to other platforms such as FileNet Image Services, which is the older product. But there are no issues because FileNet has an API and they just connect to the API and use it. It's well-documented, easy to use, and they don't have any issues.

I'm more of a systems engineer so I work on the technical side. I don't see the numbers.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is that every solution is unique. In general, out-of-the-box, it can meet up to 80 or 90 percent of the requirements, but you still need to gear it a little bit differently for different customers. Every business has its own requirements.

My advice would be to make the right choice, which is IBM. It means less trouble for the customer and less trouble for the engineer installing it.

In terms of the usability of the solution, once we configure and set up everything according to the requirements our customers have, they are really happy with what they get. That's why we spend a lot of time working with them every time there is an upgrade or whenever we implement it for the first time within an organization, to make sure that every single business unit gets all it needs. The solution is used by everybody in the company and they find the solution usable.

I would rate FileNet at ten out of ten because it's great for the customers and it's great for all the engineers involved in the process. It's great for everybody.

Our primary use case was to have our complete documentation digitized and provide secure access to it for all employees in our organization. Along with that, we were to develop a workflow for check-in and check-out of the documents.

We are currently using FileNet but for a limited purpose. We have just one workflow configured in it. It's only used for document scanning and retrieval.

FileNet has not improved any of our organization's processes or functions. Our aim in 2013/14 was the same. We wanted to have complete automation, a paperless-office scenario. But that aim has not been fulfilled. 

The basic and fundamental point about FileNet is that the interface is very bad. It's just not appealing so people are reluctant to use it. Nowadays, when you go to any web application or mobile application, the interface is very appealing and very intuitive. These aspects are not available in FileNet. People are very reluctant to use that kind of application, one which has a very plain UI.

It should also provide different APIs to interface with multiple applications. There are some connection services for SAP but we have found the extent of such connections is not usable for our needs. We want a side-by-side type of a scenario where we can open an SAP transaction on one half of a screen and on the other half we should get a document from FileNet. That functionality is not in the version we have right now.

In addition, it needs a very smooth storage and retrieval process. 

Along with that, the workflow should be very simple to configure. Currently, we are capturing most of the information in Excel and then interface Excel with FileNet. That should not be how IBM FileNet works. They should improve on how the workflows can be automated with minimum effort on the programming side.

The product is very stable. We don't have much of a problem as far as the stability of the technology and the product go.

We awarded the contract to another party and they outsourced it to somebody else. So it wasn't that easy for us to implement FileNet. It took a lot of time for us to implement and install. 

The plan was that once everything would be digitized and we had a paperless-office scenario implemented, we would have high-availability, to have complete redundancy of the applications. Whenever one application would fail, another would take care of it automatically without the end-users knowing about it. But that wasn't set up properly. We then managed with Microsoft Cluster between the two nodes. That also wasn't that successful. So there were issues.

We are now looking at another DMS which will have a better look and feel and be easier to operate.

We are an Indian company and the skillset available in India for FileNet is very small. We wanted to to resolve some technical issues and we faced a lot of problems from Indian tech people in supporting us. IBM needs to increase the expertise of FileNet in India wherever possible. They should open training centers or schools in India where people can get exposure to FileNet.

We have SAP ERP for our business applications. We have mail and messaging from Microsoft. We have different productivity applications developed for our own environment, for our own business and business cases. Specifically regarding RPA, we have not developed anything as of yet.

Predominantly, we use Case Manager in order to automate technical design review processes. We also use it in collaboration with multitenant. 

We are using FileNet to increase the efficiency of our collaboration and in our organization overall. It has improved the decision-making efficiency, as managers can have access and do approvals while traveling.

We use the of the lifecycle management of the document's automation features in conjunction with Content Navigator.

The solution has reduced our operating costs.

It does a 360 view of IBM and views the taxonomy on any documents. It flattens documents so you can see all the attributes of a document on one screen. The taxonomy feature helps with compliance and ISO.

The document collaboration is very good. There is something called Pink Note where departments can collaborate within the document. It has a built-in viewer to see any type of document.

The FileNet user interface is not cumbersome and pretty easy to use. It is easy to search for a document and get to the right place.

The Case Manager doesn't have a difficult process to follow.

I would like to have easier steps for setting up the application. They should have an easy one step process for the whole installation. Right now, you have to know the application well to set it up and have IT expertise. 

I would like them to have a document distribution feature, even if it is developed by a third-party, just as long as it has a seamless integration.

The performance is good.

We have one administrator for maintenance. It is relatively low maintenance.

The scalability is pretty good. We can scale horizontally at any one point of time, so we are able to scale pretty easily.

We have about 150 users on it. 

We have around six working machines. It has good capacity, so far.

Our design and technical departments use it for automation projects. The solution is being integrated and scaled into other departments. 

Business users are utilizing it day-to-day usage in the organization.

Our organization has administrators who are well trained, so we have experienced people on our team to manage the solution. However, if we have any production issues, we do contact their IT support.

We previously used OpenText ECM.

Previously, there was a lot of exchange of documents via email with outside parties and within the organization. This became cumbersome. We looked for a solution that to increase the efficiency of our collaboration, which is why we are using FileNet.

We also liked Case Manager and the overall architecture of FileNet. 

It took a while to get it up and running, but it is not very complicated. It took us about a week to have all the components setup.

There needs to be a coordination between the hardware and software teams.

Our leads completion process used to take two to three days. It now takes half a day.

Yearly, we pay for the maintenance, which is $20,000.

The overall package is a good product. It has good usability and scalability.

Using it has to be planned properly. It will take baby steps to roll this product out throughout your organization. Assess your users level of ability with training.

We have integrated the solution with BRP.

At the moment, we are also looking into IBM Business Automation Workflow.

I work in the account-opening process, and we have IBM BPM, Workflow, and FileNet document repository. We use different products to generate documents. Our solution uses IBM BPM Workflow in which people fill out a questionnaire. That gives us a document that we store in FileNet. We deliver those documents either physically or via DocuSign. We get them signed to open the account.

It has increased productivity. And while I don't know for sure, because I am not from that group, I believe the solution has reduced operating costs. It has saved time as well. I have heard that it has reduced the time needed to open an account from 20 to 25 days down to a day.

Because the account-opening process varies on a case-by-case basis, we may have several documents generated for a particular case. We would like to put them in one client section. API-wise, it gives us the ability to create an end-to-end transaction.

Before we ask for any documents from customers, we would like to automatically see if any of them are already in our system. Are the documents signed already? We need to know before we have them sign a document that the document has already been signed. That is done manually, it's not automated.

Also, I have heard that there is already an integration with DocuSign. That was one of our needs. We brought DocuSign into our company's solution three years before. At that time there was no direct integration. We wanted to pull documents out from FileNet, push them to DocuSign and, when done, retrieve them and store them back in FileNet. We wrote our own custom solution for that. It would be nice if there was some tool we could have used to do that.

It would be helpful if I could submit a question and get a bunch of documents back. I would like to be able to query the documents that are already in the system and then we wouldn't have to worry about some of them because they're only year-old documents. If there is a document that is three years old we may have to re-ask for it from the customer. Such a rules-engine is not available.

Moreover, the questionnaire we use to generate documents is in XML and then it's coded in a scripting language. If there were rules it would be easy to configure them to pull out a specific document. The business cannot find what documents are in a given area right now.

Stability-wise, the solution is good. There is not much downtime. I don't see any issues with it.

In terms of scalability, we started with about 100 relationship partners and now we have around close to 1,000 partners, so it's quite good.

Technical support is going well. There are a few issues, but we have set up several monitors for our technical modules.

The initial setup is a bit complex unless you know some scripting languages. It's pretty complex.

Within the solution we have several products like BPM, Oracle Service Bus, as well as a lot of custom applications. The bank has its own deployment procedure that we follow for the specific products. IBM BPM is separate and we have laid out our own process. There are a couple of automated ways of doing it, but we follow the bank procedures.

The products we are using from the IBM portfolio include FileNet, IBM Case Manager, Content Navigator is there, and Datacap. We have integrated FileNet with different bank solutions. The integration process was good.

My advice is to set up rules in an outside programming tool. Put them in a separate configuration tool and make an API call to find a list of the documents which match. It would then show the list of the documents to the partner who is trying to open the account. Currently, sometimes they send a request and they get a bunch of documents and they say, "This isn't what I want, I want something else." Then they change the question and the region of the documents. To preview a list of the documents we have to generate the documents. The reason we cannot preview is because the rules are coded in our system instead of being externalized in a separate configuration.

We are not doing anything around automation at this time. We are just capturing the documents but we are not analyzing them. My team is looking into expanding into automation, as is the architecture team. There have been meetings with IBM recently on that.

The use of the solution within our organization is growing. A lot of business units are onboarding the solution now. We started with one and now we've got four or five business units we are supporting.

We have business users using the solution. For them, the usability is not 100 percent but it gives them some flexibility. They still have a problem: they may open an account for a customer but there are five different types of accounts. They have to ask for specific documents each time but they don't want to send the same document to the customer for five different accounts. There is some intelligence we cannot apply at the moment, such as finding which documents are already in the system and that we don't want to send to the client to fill out again. It is manual work as of now. The relationship manager will look into all the documents and say, "Okay, I already have this document from the client in the past couple of months so I won't send it again." Primarily, when we generate documents we don't apply intelligence to validate which documents we have. We don't analyze the data in the system; we keep generating documents.

I would rate FileNet at nine out of ten. All the capabilities I needed in setting up documents or applying security, using content and filters, met the requirements that we had for the solution.

As a developer, I am usually supporting this solution. I do things to automate it and make it work for our clients.

We are using automation with cell towers. They are putting all the different information about different cell towers into FileNet, so they can search to know where the different cell towers are. Cell towers are still always evolving, even with 5G. This project has paid for itself, as it would take a lot of manpower in order to find out this information and search for it quickly.

We have increased the productivity of accounts payable. Instead of processing invoices manually, which are coming from vendors, we can now process them digitally. We can index and organize them, then refer to them later, paying things on time.

It does help with compliance and governance issues. We are able to look for things quickly to get back to court cases.

We can often refer to the system to help us to make decisions. We are also able to get the information quickly.

The solution helps improve business process and case management in our organization.

We can move things from paper to digital, making things searchable and easy to access.

The usability is really good. Our business users are pleased with it. They seem to get what they are looking for, and it's very efficient.

We have had different problems and IBM has resolved those different problems.

The stability is getting better. It had a few issues for a while. Our old solution had problems at the beginning and those issues got better, then we move to a new solution. While the new one still has problems, they are getting better.

It's absolutely scalable. It is scalability as far as the servers and systems. The physical systems can scale by being able to attach and hook into different automation that we create and when we link things together.

The technical support is very good. IBM has support which goes around the world, which is pretty good. They have a ticketing system that we are able to use to get support from when we need it.

IBM Services is where we get help. We have a good connection with IBM.

We switched from FileNet IS to FileNet P8.

We are always continuing to move forward. IBM continually offers new products on their roadmap, then we follow along with that roadmap, what is supported and what won't be supported. 

The initial setup was straightforward as to what we were trying to do. However, all the details and different technical things that we were trying to figure out became complex. 

We deployed it in-house.

The solution saves time and money. It helps us to be able to accomplish the goals of our business, as opposed to being tangled in the weeds of what we could do. This solution takes cares of for us.

It reduces operating costs, probably in the millions of dollars.

Try it because it works. There are many alternative solutions, but this one has worked well for us. It has been scalable, and there have been different automation that we have been able to surround it with that have helped us to make it even closer knit to the clients' business needs.

It is very integratable, which is good. We have a lot of different integrations that goes on with it. It allows for a lot of hooks into it, so we can use code. There are also different components which are available with it, even out-of-the-box.

It is advanced and further along than other products.

There are always different ways to do something. Sometimes automation and technology will help resolve these more than we think.

Primary usage is storing content for content management.

We are the consultants, who provide the solution to our clients.

We mostly use ECM solutions from IBM, not database.

While business users are happy with the solution, trends are changing. We need to catch up to them.

The solution helps with governance, especially with PII or PHI, and then with some redaction capabilities.

It has had a positive effect on the decision-making for the business users in our organization.

The solution has improved business process management and case management in our organization.

It provides better content management for security content: both storage and archival.

It is pretty robust and user-friendly. 

We have integrated this solution with other solutions, and the integration process is seamless.

The new software and trends with the cloud solution is a little slow. I would like them to move toward more cloud-based and microservices rather than a SaaS model. This is where the industry is going and what customers are asking for.

The usability is a lot better than it used to be.

It is pretty stable.

It is scalable.

The technical support is pretty knowledgeable and good.

The industry is changing. Competitors for the clients are growing faster, so they need to catch up with them. We need to deploy processes to make them more efficient, interactive, and faster.

The initial setup is complex in the sense that there are server dependencies, installation issues, and compatibility issues with the existing environment and software. Then, the hardware and software have to be managed.

We are the consultants for the deployment.

The solution increases productivity and reduces operating costs. With a few customers, it has reduced costs by 30 percent from the legacy systems to the new system.

It saves our customers time by 30 to 40 percent by eliminating the time to process paper.

We work with the competitors, as well. While the solution is good, it needs to catch up to the average.

Depending on the customer's needs (requirement) and how they have they have laid out their environment, I would recommend the product.

The product has improved over time through automation.

We plan to expand automation into machine learning, artificial intelligence, and analytics.

We store policies, documents, and customer data in the FileNet repository.

The solution has increased productivity. We're a life insurance company. We get claims. It becomes much easier to view documents on the screen and process the work immediately so that the next person can review it and the next business user can view it. It makes the process very easy.

It has also reduced operating costs and saved us time, on the order of days. It used to be that processing applications would take weeks. Because we have different departments, physically moving documents would take a lot of time. Now where everything is online, they can just read the document and pass it to the next person. Things get done within days now, not weeks.

The solution has helped us with compliance. The documents are highly sensitive, they contain PI, so we had to make sure that only authorized people can access them. We have defined the security structure within FileNet. Only the people who have access can read the documents. That's how we ensure compliance and security on them.

In addition, decision-making goes faster. We don't have to wait for physical documents. Users can log in to the application, look up the information, and take the decisions quickly now.

The document storage is the most valuable feature. And then, searching those documents by users is helpful.

The usability is very good. We like the Content Navigator. It's very easy to use the search and retrieve for documents and has a lot of options for the user to download documents or send an email.

In Content Navigator we want to see the ability to view different types of video. They have come up with video support. We are using HTML 5 but it's very limited. They don't have a lot support for a lot of video formats. We definitely want to see support for most types of video formats in the market. That's the main feature we are looking for.

There is room for improvement when we need a fix to a bug in the application. That has to be a little bit quicker as compared to other solutions. It takes time for them to release any interim fixes. That impacts business on our side. We have had to wait for the solution, and sometimes it takes three weeks, sometimes it takes more than a month.

It's very stable. We haven't had any issues as far as stability is concerned. It's highly-available, so it's definitely stable as compared to other products.

It's easily scalable. We have multiple environments for FileNet, millions of documents. It's easy to scale and we don't have to worry about downtime.

Technical support is good. When we have any issues, we open a PMR with IBM and we do get the response on time. The only thing is that if there are any bugs, it takes time for them to come up with the fixes. But other than that, the technical support is good from IBM.

We did work with Documentum and Alfresco, but we went with FileNet because we had been using it for a long time and we are happy with it. It's more reliable. And support is also very good when compared to others.

If you ask a "fresher," the setup would be a little bit complex for him. But if you ask an experienced person who knows FileNet, it's easy for him. He knows exactly what to do.

In terms of integrating it with other solutions, we use Content Navigator within our in-house applications, and for the document viewing and searching. So we have created plugins and they use those plugins to access those features within Content Navigator.

Everything was done in-house.

The biggest lesson we have learned in using this solution is that nowadays everything is digitized so people want to take decisions faster. If you want to make your business processes faster, you have to think about a product like FileNet, which helps you take the steps.

Go for FileNet. It's good as a document repository. It has a lot of features and supports a lot of document formats. Content Navigator is a very good application. You don't have to write any custom code; you can just install it and start using it. Everything is out-of-the-box. You don't have to worry about writing custom code.

We don't use IBM Case Manager, but we have an in-house case management tool where we hooked up Content Navigator to view documents, so that really helped us.

I would rate the product at eight out of ten. It's very good. It does have a few limitations in the media formats and all but, overall, it's fine.

We are using this product in Beijing. It is a good product to use.

Our team programmed an automation workflow to use with it.

Our upper management encourages us to use this solution with automation.

It has increased our productivity.

It is easy to use. You can put everything in it, such as, documents. It is really easy to access and pretty easy to set up.

My colleague and I have a lot questions about the Datacap related stuff.

While the stability is pretty good, there sometimes can be issues with the database connections. FileNet has too many outages because things are broken in the database.

There are some issues when contacting technical support. It is not a very satisfying experience.

The company had a training session and decided based on that to implement the solution.

It has saved time for us.

I attended the tech track at the IBM conference.

We have not integrated this solution with other solutions.