IBM FileNet Reviews

The primary use case is for collaboration of data files through CCM with IBM Connections. It provides an information sharing space and ability to create folders, thus managing the data. We are a worldwide company with offices all over, and there is a community room setup leveraging CCM with FileNet as the back-end. Therefore, all these users upload their files and collaborate on them in this space.

Now, it is performing pretty well, since I have upgraded to the 5.5 version. Historically, we have had a lot of problems with it. 

IBM FileNet has improved our organization with its single collaboration space.

• The ability to manage the content well. 
• To create folders (unknown: how much is on the FileNet back-end versus CCM front-end).
• The ability to tag data, as it seems to be indexed well. It is a good space to manage data, keep track of it, and organize it.

• A little better control into the ACLs of FileNet and databases. 
• A better administration tool. At the moment, we are using the ACE tool, which is a web-based administration tool whenever we have to deal with the FileNet back-end directly. It is kludgy and slow. They used to have a rich client tool that performed much better, but they discontinued it. I would love to see that tool come back in order be able to do more effective, efficient administration of FileNet on the back-end.  
• It needs better collaboration between the IBM teams on the FileNet and CCM sides.

Now, they are pretty good.

In previous versions of Connections 3.0, 4.5, and 5.0, I had a lot of stability issues. It gets a little muddy, because when I would open PMRs, sometimes they would be on the connections interface on front and sometimes they would be on the back. One of my challenges seemed to be that there seemed to be a lot of disconnect between the two teams. It is empirical evidence, but it seems to me  that the Connections developers leveraged the FileNet capabilities and the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing. There seemed to be a lot of disconnect between the two teams. I would bounce back and forth between the two teams for weeks or months just trying to get support on performance and stability issues. With the most recent upgrade that we did a year ago, these issues pretty much stopped. 

Scalability is so far good. We have great adoption with the tool. For the users that we are supporting to date, it seems to be handling the load and performing well. 

My experience with the technical support is mediocre. Often times, I would open a ticket and the technical support would label it as a FileNet issue, then send it to the FileNet team. The FileNet team would receive it and declare it a Connections issues, thus creating a back-and-forth between teams until I insist on getting both teams on the phone and fight it out. I am the customer in this situation. I just want the issues fixed and resolved.

It has gotten better. However, I do not have many issues with the system now.

I do not know about previous solutions, but the business decided that it wanted CCM, which leverages FileNet. Therefore, I installed, configured, and built the infrastructure.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The Connections teams, as far as the FileNet tool, were able to integrate it with CCM. They made it easy to set up. At the time you install Connections, you point to the FileNet installers and it does all the work for you. There are a few manual steps, but all of that is pretty well documented. It is a lengthy process and straightforward, but it will take a lot longer than five minutes. 

None that I am aware of.

Do your homework. Test it thoroughly (all the standard stuff). Do load testing to make sure it is a stable platform. Look at the life-cycle of the product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support. Not just technical support when you have a problem, but how long before you are discontinuing a product. Right now, I am dealing with Connections over an issue with Java going out of date and they are not supporting it very well. Their solution is to force us to upgrade. 

Look at the support aspects of the product from life-cycle of the product to technical support. Obviously, stability of the product as a whole is important. I do not want to be opening a lot of tickets.

We use FileNet to store all our content. We have a quarter of a billion documents stored and it works great for us.

It has taken the manual work out of our billing process, and automated it.

We actually use it in conjunction with BPM to auto-bill our customers, based on when the bill gets checked into FileNet.

I would love it if single sign-on was a lot easier to set up. That's the most difficult part of it.

We have it load-balanced, so we don't really have outages. With HA it's very stable.

It could be easier to scale, but in our implementation we can build up a new server and a whole new environment in about a day and a half.

It would be nice if they could make it like containers are working in Kubernetes to auto-scale based on demand.

I've used it quite often. Technical support could be better, more responsive in a timely manner. I've learned to actually open up tickets earlier in the morning because you seem to get better help than if you wait until the afternoon.

We didn't have a previous solution. We went with FileNet as our content repository from the beginning.

When selecting a vendor we like to have somebody that can provide good support and a good business relationship; we like to build relationships with our vendors.

It's very complex. We have a lot of pieces that tie together with our FileNet, like  domains. So it's complex.

I would give it an eight out of 10. What it needs to be a 10 is easier to configure single sign-on.

I would recommend that when you are doing the initial setup that you use fewer metadata fields. The fewer you use the better off you're going to be in the long run, for performance.

We had several use cases. We used it for all of our loan processing and we took a 21-day manual process down to three. We also used it for all of our credit applications, and that took a 45-day process down to two. It housed about 4TB of data.

Performance was great. It was our system of record.

No one was wondering where a document was. They could all go and find out exactly what they needed, when they needed. It wasn't, "Who's got this and who's got that?"

The most valuable features are the interconnectivity and the collaboration. No longer do I have to wonder what system I need to go to for the data I need. I know it's in FileNet.

We wrote several custom applications for the users to dive in and be able to find the data they need. 

If there was more AI capability, into Watson, that would be a benefit.

Also, where are the users going to find the documents? Because that's a path we don't see. We know that they're looking at documents, but we don't know what documents they're actually going and finding the most, or where the bottlenecks might be. It would be nice if there was some interconnectivity back into Bluemix to say, "Ok, you've got a workflow problem here." That would be a neat feature moving forward because we've got a lot of users that would just say, "The system is not working." We had a few threads would get hung up because they were just constantly banging on these few documents. If that were the case, if we knew that ahead of time, then we could fix that, change the search sequences to make it more efficient. But we were blind to that until the users said it's not working.

It's extremely stable. The only time it ever had a problem was if we lost power to the servers. It never really went down.

It was very scalable. If we needed to add more processing power we could just add another server, turn it on, and then we had more power. We didn't have any scalability problems.

We did use technical support for a while. enChoice was one of the partners we used with IBM. They're a great partner. Eventually, I was able to hire enough of our own staff that we did much of our own support.

My experience with technical support was good. Any time we needed them they were right there for us.

We were all manual before and we knew we needed something.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• commitment
• partnership - we're in this together.

IBM doesn't succeed if I don't succeed, and I can't succeed if the product doesn't work well. If there isn't that mutual give and take, then no one succeeds. It's more about: Any solution can be thought of and fixed and made to work, but you have to be able to work together. If I just sign up and give you a check and then you walk away, that doesn't help me. I need to sign up and then you be there with me, through the process.

I was not involved in the initial setup. From what I understand, when they first set it up it was rather complex. They had some hurdles to jump through. It took about two years to really iron out all the kinks. We had a vendor prior to enChoice that we weren't successful with. When we found enChoice, things started to turn around. So it's important to pick the right partner.

They evaluated Documentum, they evaluated FileNet, they evaluated a few other tools. The company actually bought FileNet before IBM bought FileNet, so we had a contract with FileNet and then IBM came in and bought it. That was a good thing because of the innovation that IBM did bring to the platform. We were also a heavy C|MAN user and the content management on-demand system integrates well with FileNet too. With the new Content Navigator, it allowed for one pane of glass. So what IBM is doing in that area is just going to keep getting better.

I would give the solution a nine out of 10. If it were free I would give it a 10.

Go find an industry that is the same as yours, that is using the tools you want to buy, and find out if they're successful. If they're not, don't go with those tools. For example, I'm in energy now and I'm looking for people who are using Maximo, who are using the other tools from IBM, and I want to talk to them: Are you successful using these tools?

Don't do it in a vacuum, you've got to talk to people.

It's an image repository for our medical documents, our claims, etc. They do all kinds of stuff. They put checks there. It's an indexing software.

It has added more indexing capability on images and enabled us to search them. 

Stores a lot of documents. It's a good repository for that.

What I would want to see is heavier analytical ability within it, but we've purchased the cognitive piece of it. I haven't seen that implemented yet, but that would be the future; I think it may already be there but I just haven't seen it yet. Something like indexing for unstructured text.

At this time, it has improved, but it wasn't that stable not that long ago. 

It seems fine, it's dynamic. It works with all the different business needs that we have for it.

I have not used tech support for this solution.

When selecting a vendor the important criteria are 

• cost
• ease in getting something accomplished
• not over-promising 
• trustworthy.

I would rate it a seven out of 10. That rating is because of stability problems when I first had it - and then, I'm not entirely sure our company has set it up right. Sometimes things are only as good as the people who run it. It's like going to a restaurant. It's only as good as the chef. So you can go to Burger King and have a pretty good burger or you can go down the road, it just depends on how good the chef is. So I think there's some of that dynamic. I don't know that much because I didn't mess with it like at that level. But it's a fine product. We've used it for a very long time.

The advice I would to a colleague at another company who's researching this or another similar solution would be to check how data index with one another, and the communication back and forth in being able to find your files, if you have a large data set like we do. 

We use it to manage all the documents, for all the working groups we have, for management meetings, and for all the projects we run. The advantage is to have a unique place where you can store everything and then we connected it with the another IBM product, IBM Connections. So it's a new way to work, to collaborate, and to exchange documents; even on mobile, especially for people traveling a lot, like me.

It's performing quite well, there is a high level of acceptance by the end-users. Obviously it's all part of the change management that we are running in parallel, and that's so the people can get used to it and discover new features every day. We're quite satisfied, it has performed quite well. 

We have reduced paper, because people, especially at the management level, but not only, use tablets and electronic documents more and more, because they know where things are stored.

And they can access the documents in different ways, like from IBM Connection, from Lotus notes, and all the documents are in FileNet. That's a big advantage because you can save time and you can easily distribute documents to all the people, for example in a project or after a meeting.

For me it's the possibility to share and to collaborate, the possibility to connect FileNet with many other IBM products as well. It helps avoid the possibility of creating "island applications." We have an ecosystem where everything can be interconnected. The people are getting used to it.

In any product, what I would like to see is integration. Because for me, what is important is to be able to give stability in what we provide to the final users. So integration is the keyword for future releases and maybe even new products.

I think it's quite stable, it's a very robust product and we haven't found any major problems or issues, so far.

It seems to be very scalable. We don't have millions and millions of documents, but it seems to be quite scalable and the performance is also quite good.

We are working with a business partner in Switzerland. We work with them for every new release and for configuration. Our experience with them is quite good. We have been partners for quite a while on many different projects with many IBM products, and we are quite satisfied.

Previously we were using, as in many other companies, Windows Network Drive. Then, some years ago, before I came to the company, they decided to invest in IBM FileNet because, in our company, we have used IBM for many years and many purposes, and we were quite satisfied. The consultant proposed this solution and we started with FileNet. Later on, we installed IBM Connections and many other products. We are satisfied, as a long-time IBM user.

For me, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor include that they have to be close to the customer and they need to understand not only the technical point of view, but the business point of view. That is very important. The risk in many projects is well-known, you build a perfect technical solution but maybe it's not covering the requirements, or it's not close enough to business needs, so people don't use it. So the returns are only on paper.

I rate FileNet a nine out of 10. It would be a 10 with closer integration.

In terms of advice, I would say look for something that covers your requirements. From my point of view, FileNet can for sure cover the requirements of a medium and  a big company, because of the scalability and the possibility to connect with many other IBM products.

First we used it as a document management system only, now we have some workflows too. It's one of the biggest applications in the government of Switzerland. We are using FileNet to build up these workflows.

It's a single a solution. Before, we had several products but now it's all in one hand.

Resiliency.

We'd like to use the docker, to have it containerized, that would be great for us.

It's very good.

We did have some issues with Web services. It was a version conflict, because two Web services were deployed, an old version and a new version, and both were accessible. So we had some problems with that but it wasn't a product failure.

It's very good. We have millions of documents. We have no problems with scalability. It runs fine.

We didn't buy the product from IBM itself, it was from a business partner. So, issues first go to the business partner, before they go to the IBM. As soon as it's at IBM, it's very good. Before that, it depends on which person is available.

When selecting a vendor we have to do put out tenders which have our criteria. A big issue is the price for licenses.

Regarding advice, I would say if you're going for FileNet, get FileNet P8 and not FileNet IS. The two products are doing similar things, but in my personal opinion, P8 is more the future.

I would rate FileNet a nine out of 10, because it's a good product, stable, no worries.

We use it to store and transfer large amounts of files between several various locations that we serve. It is an excellent document storage facility. 

The excellent document storage repository: It is good at what it does. 

The technical support that we get from IBM. 

I would like to see the dashboard be a little bit more robust and a little more user-friendly. Right now, unless you truly know FileNet, you do not know what you are looking at in the dashboard. From what I understand with the latest release, which is what we are getting ready to go to, a lot of that has already been solved, but I have not seen what it really looks like yet. 

It is an extremely stable platform, if it is built right. 

We are looking to expand and scale up quite a bit right now, because our current system is completely overloaded. We are looking at doing an upgrade and an in-place expansion. However, I do not know how the scalability is performing.

If we run into problems, which is inevitable (and we run into problems all the time), we get quick responses and good solutions back from the technical support. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Due to the way it is designed, we worked with IBM quite extensively to do our original architecture. Going that route, it has been immensely stable. However, we have now gotten to the point where we have outgrown what we originally designed. 

Look at what you are looking to get from it. If you are looking for just a small open source, understand that you will get what you pay for. FileNet is not cheap, but you absolutely get what you pay for. 

It really has improved our organization, because it's the repository of all our documents, PDF, etc. That's where we are archiving and storing all those documents, so it's critical.

The natural interoperability with IBM Datacap, that is a key component of our solution, as well as with BPM, and WebSphere Portal. That's why we prefer FileNet instead of some other, less world-class solution.

Support is good. When they have to escalate internally, in order to get some more expert advice internally, they do so and it's okay.

No problem. We've were helped by IBM. That is, you always have problems on a project, but what I ask is whether the solutions have been solid. Yes, they have.