IBM FileNet Reviews

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.

We are a ratings company. We store all of our ratings documents in a FileNet Content Manager. We also use the Datacap scanning solution to extract the data, then index it into FileNet. That is our main usage of the FileNet platform.

We store documents on-premise. As a ratings company, we are not storing anything on the cloud at this time.

The usability is very good. Our customers are happy. The stakeholders allow the interface and platform, which comes with a CMIS. This allows our external applications to talk to FileNet using the CMIS platform. It is a win-win for everybody.

• Stability 
• Scalability
• IBM support

The most valuable for us is the ease of operations in Datacap, especially to extract data, along with the robust platform of FileNet, as a content management system. 

It is very user-friendly for business users. They can create their own searches. They are not dependent on administrators to create searches for them. It is self-service for them.

I would like to have an offline DR deployment. If that is doable, then it would be a big win.

The installation needs improvement.

A lot of the solution is GUI-based. If that could be automated, that would make the solution better.

It is very stable. We hardly have any downtime or any major issues.

The scalability is very nice. It is very scalable. We are in a high availability mode.

The technical support is very good. We are very well partnered with IBM support. We have AVP Support, which is very valuable.

We did not have a different solution prior to FileNet.

The documentation was very well done. The initial setup was straightforward with our experience and in-house knowledge. We also had the IBM engineers available, as needed.

We deployed it in-house.

It has reduced operating costs by reducing the amount of manual work needed.

Datacap has helped to increase our productivity.

We use extraction. Therefore, we can see 80 to 85 percent accuracy on data extraction. This reduces the manual indexing part, which is definitely a gain on performance efficiency.

If we can achieve 80 percent automation with it, then it will save us 80 percent time.

I have used other products as well. However, stability-wise, I am more comfortable using this product.

I would definitely recommend the FileNet solution.

The integration process is very smooth because we use CMIS. The other application uses CMIS to talk to FileNet, and this is very smooth.

We are not using the solution for case management nor automation.

Digital business automation is the primary use case.

This solution is not used by business users in our organization.

One of our clients, a customer of IBM, rolled out and replaced their existing ECM system with FileNet. Their productivity has increased pretty dramatically. 

The Enterprise Records plugin helps with compliance and issues around that. Thus, we have clients who are using it specifically for that reason.

• Extensibility
• Customizability
• The API
• It has a very broad market share and a lot of people know about it.

The usability is fair. It could be a bit better. It could be better designed. They could put more effort into the user experience and do a better job of integrating other components, like Datacap, to be a bit more seamless.

I would like to see more integrated support for records management functions. I would like to see ICN be more integrated from a desktop standpoint with records management. Especially since, compliance and issues like privacy, which IER is uniquely capable and designed to handle, are becoming more important for users, things like advanced search and the ability to find data with privacy issues. Some work on that type of interface would serve everybody well.

It is very stable. The maintenance process has been greatly improved over the past few years. It seems like there is maturity now to the product which didn't exist even four or five years ago.

It is very scalable. You can deploy multiple WebSphere nodes and use clusters to do all sorts of things. It is enhanced now with the support for containerization, like Kubernetes and Docker. It is highly scalable, which is great.

The technical support is pretty strong. However, I still have cases of APARs which have been left open from many years. Therefore, the technical support is not excellent, but it's good.

The initial setup is complex. There are many different components to it. There are a lot of decisions which have to be made: architectural decisions, platform decisions, and team personnel decisions. These have to be made before you go ahead and implement something like this. It is a huge undertaking.

It takes a lot of time to roll out.

I am the consultant for deployments.

My customers have seen ROI. There have been productivity gains, time savings gains, and things that they have been doing much more efficiently in a more modern way than they were before.

The solution has reduced operating costs for our clients.

The product is worth considering. It has a lot of support with a lot of pedigree. Make sure your ducks are in a row, as far as understanding what your user requirements are and what your processes are around your content management needs. Then, once you have that done, definitely consider this as a very viable option.

Take your time and be careful with your planning phases.

We have integrated the solution with Enterprise Records. We have written our own custom interface that sits on top of Content Navigator. We have also written integrations to databases for lookups.

We are not using the solution for automation projects yet.

I would rate it a seven out of ten for its stability and maturity as a product. However, because it is so big, it is sort of slow to catch up to trends and things like privacy by design.

It is our unstructured record archive solution.

It is mainly for internal users. We don't have end users for it, since it is only used internally. It has captures a maximum part of our organization to help with the efficiency in our records.

It has a process interface for a lot of different aspects of our business, which makes record archiving very efficient.

With our organization being in the financial sector, it has a lot of records: millions to billions. These were very tough to manage overall. A solution like FileNet has definitely improved our business. It keeps legal focused on what is required, and what is not. It has also helped the overall organization to focus on what is really needed, and what is not.

The product has helped with compliance and governance issues. There are some archiving policies which a financial organization has to keep. Our organization can keep up with them because of the IBM product.

It does help the legal team with their decision-making. They can hold and sweep the records based on legal actions required on any particular record. Therefore, it does help on the compliance.

It is very user-friendly.

In the next release, I would like to see automation and simplicity in the installation.

I feel that there is not enough ease on the initial front part. The ease and flexibility could be improved.

The technical support is good and efficient. I would rate it an eight out of ten.

In the past, we did have some other custom solutions. We have also tried some other vendors and they did not covering the platform 360 degrees. When we opted for this particular product from IBM, we saw that it has the overall coverage which is not being provided by any other vendor. This has improved our productivity.

The initial setup was pretty complex. There are too many options, and it can get a bit confusing.

We implemented it in-house.

It has not done much for operations costs because there are still operations involved in it. However, I still see a percent or two difference.

We did a PoC. We tried multiple vendors and compared them on different aspects. Based on the simplicity, ease, convenience, and many aspects of this solution, we made the decision in the past to work with it. We plan on continuing doing so in future.

Do a study and learn about the solution instead of jumping in and finding out about stuff later on. Attend conferences before making decisions and doing things. Then, you can make a smart call.

We haven't used any automation so far. I would like to explore the business partners on automation and find out much more about it.

While it does have business and case management in the tool, we are not really using it.

We use FileNet to store all the medical records and information for a patient. 

We have business users utilizing it in the whole organization for medical records.

I work in information systems now. However, regarding the emergency medical records, research, and other parts of the organization, FileNet lets us have all these records maintained smartly and securely. Mostly, we can use this information in the future for research, if we ever want into AI solution or if we wanted to look for new ways to look at cancer, then it is all there.

The solution provides ease of access. It has affected the decision-making in our organization.

FileNet lets us store everything there for compliance. There is something legally about us not being able to delete stuff. 

The taxonomy is its most valuable feature. Everything is hierarchical and has properties.

I am doing practical coding. Therefore, I am very happy that they have extensive Redbooks and demos with the FileNet API.

It is really usable. There is a lot of support for it. You have the online components to trawl through the storage. I have a lot of fun with it.

I did hear that maybe there are some errors in relationship to another product that they offer, like SmartLock. There is something going on there which is not good.

It is stable.

It is scalale.

There are a lot of Redbooks, and there is the IBM knowledge that is sent there. There are some more obscure errors that get thrown when I'm coding, because I'm bad. 

All in all, the tech support is really good. They have a lot of support.

We were using image services. Now, we are migrating to FileNet. Therefore, we are storing patient records, so they can be used in research.

I know it took them seven months to convert, so the initial setup was, probably to some degree, complex.

We used enChoice for the deployment. Our experience with them was good.

It has reduced operating costs. We went from paper to image services to FileNet. We did that because it was cheaper and better.

The solution has saved us time.

I would recommend choosing IBM. Go for it. It is not like there is a better alternative.

The automation that we are doing right now is to check that all our systems are up and working. I wrote a program in C# which touches a whole bunch of boxes and services. It does a whole bunch of actions against FileNet that checks everything is going correctly. It saves us time and effort, and it works.

I know that they're releasing FileNet 5.5.3 at the end of the month, but I don't know what is in it.

We're an IBM business partner. We work with customers who purchase IBM and we help them implement business solutions. Often times, we just influence their decisions. Most of the time FileNet is being used for automation projects.

An example is one of our customers, an insurance company. They didn't have process-automation before. We helped them implement an IBM product suite with FileNet content management with workflow and analytics. It helped that company reduce processing costs. It helped them unify processes in 21 countries where they have a presence, and they use it as an IT framework that helps them integrate other companies which they acquire. They're big on acquiring smaller organizations to help them grow.

Productivity gains come where workers can focus on more important tasks, higher-value tasks, and where the repetitive tasks are delegated to software.

In the end, almost every solution that we create for our customers helps reduce costs. In most instances the solution has saved time as well. Where we do get statistics from our clients, on average we see 20, 30, or 40 percent gains in terms of turnaround time. You can see that, for example, processing a complicated claim would have taken weeks and with the software solutions built on top of IBM software, sometimes it gets down to days or even hours.

It has improved business processes or case management for our customers. That's the primary purpose, that's the reason why they're investing in the software.

The most valuable features of FileNet are its comprehensive ability to store content, to get insights from the content, and to use that content for making decisions routed through workflow.

Nowadays, with the new capabilities, the unattended task processing - so-called robotics or digital employees, digital agents - is where this industry is heading.

I think it's to the point where there are probably too many features. Every software, as it matures and graduates, grows the list of features. What many of our customers express is that it's just too complicated. They're using maybe five or ten percent of the features but they're having to pay for 100 percent. There is room for improvement in terms of simplifying it. This is a case where sometimes less is more.

Making it easier to deploy, easier to use, easy to integrate are the biggest areas for improvement.

Every new software has bugs, but the FileNet software suite has been around for ages, so it's stable, it works.

The scalability is infinite if you know how to use it in your software products.

Technical support is very decent. We've never had issues with it.

The integration of this solution with other products is where we come in as consultants. IBM software works great in the silo, the silo being that you have an IBM software suite and everything is working together great. But when you have a customer that has IBM and three or four or five other repositories, a line of business systems that need to be integrated, that's where typically consultants, systems integrators like our company, come in.

But IBM provides a great API and ways to integrate the software.

ROI is hard to tell, it varies. Sometimes it's tangible where it can be measured in percentages from 10 to 15 to 20 or even 40 percent. Sometimes it's intangible, where companies can get ahead of the game, get ahead of the competition, and get their products to market faster.

I would advise a typical due-diligence process. Get hands-on with it, try it out. Do the same with competing products and decide what works the best.

Usability of the product is a complicated question. Anyway it is created, software cannot serve everybody's needs. Most of the time we'll work with very large companies and all of them have their unique needs. We oftentimes start with a base and customize it for each customer and their specific use case. You'll find a number of users that can use software out-of-the-box. But we often have to change it, tweak it, tune it, to tailor it to their specific environment.

FileNet is a nine out of ten. It's been around forever, it's stable, it's mature, it works. We know how to use it. We can confidently recommend it to customers without impacting our reputation.

As a systems integrator, for us, every customer is unique. In every environment there are very distinct challenges, so it's hard to take the knowledge from one client and apply it to another. Every time it's a journey. Sometimes there are technical issues we have to overcome. Oftentimes there are challenges, the business challenges that we help our customers overcome. The exciting part is that it's challenging. Challenges are always exciting, and that's what the software helps us with, overcoming challenges.