IBM Enterprise Content Manager and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) applications enable organizations to manage all forms of content and secure secure data with respect to compliance needs. The platform enables capture, activation, sharing, analysis and governance of unstructured data to lower costs and risk while improving efficiency.
N/A
Square 9 Softworks
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
For document-intensive companies looking to improve business efficiency, Square 9 Softworks develops solutions for process automation that aim to drive increased productivity across all business applications.
$50
per month per user (5 User Minimum)
Pricing
IBM Enterprise Content Manager
Square 9 Softworks
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Square 9 Process Automation Essentials
$50
per month per user (5 User Minimum)
Square 9 Digital Transformation Essentials
$68
per month per user (5 User Minimum)
Square 9 Enterprise Essentials
$75
per month per user (10 User Minimum)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM ECM
Square 9 Softworks
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
Offered via a three-tier pricing model that allows customers to scale their solution up or down based on the changing needs of their organization.
Pricing excludes professional services and implementation fees
Self-hosted IBM ECM Solutions are appropriate for any large organization with substantial internal infrastructure management teams and a commitment to training their staff. Other organizations should consider the Cloud based offerings.
Square 9 Softworks is well suited for unique needs within companies. We have built, renovated, and optimized custom workflows within our archives, designed highly specific interfaces with our ERP platform, and Square 9 Softworks has answered the bell through it all.
Speaking of IBM Case Manager in particular, we believe that just about every business process involving the effort of knowledge workers can be enhanced and automated using IBM Case Manager. If a process or set of tasks requires the judgment, decision-making skills, and experience of a knowledge worker, then the process can be configured for IBM Case Manager. If the process is dynamic and requires flexibility such that the business outcome depends upon the choices and decisions made during the process, then IBM Case Manager is the ideal solution for automation, tracking, and collaboration of such work.
With regards to Content Management, we are particularly fond of and adept at utilizing both IBM Content Collector, IBM Classification Manager, and IBM Enterprise Records. As business communications have changed over the last 20 years, the growth of digital content housed within the burgeoning storage silos located throughout a company's infrastructure has swelled to nearly unmanageable levels. This impacts them in numerous ways; from the direct costs associated with ever increasing storage, to the unknowable costs associated with the legal liability of content residing on their systems, to the lost opportunity of un-mined customer data residing on their systems. All of these impacts can be mitigated by the application of IBM Content Management and Content Analytics.
To me personally, I believe the greatest strength of products like these are their immense configurability. Depending upon the business requirements of the customer, systems such as those mentioned above can be configured in almost inexhaustible arrangements to accomplish just about any task that can be imagined - all to satisfy the needs and requirements of the demands of the business. From collecting email from mail servers and evaluating it for its context, not just it's content, in order to determine its worth to the organization, to creating File Plans for storing content in a smart repository which makes possible content lifecycle management and defensible disposal, IBM just does this better than any other products I am familiar with.
The software is very flexible, and the technicians were great at implementing our customizations for the PO project.
While indexing fields in Global Search, the Key Free tool works great.
Global Search is well-organized. It's easy to navigate and find your documents.
The process for completing your project was well done. Communicating with individuals at Square 9 who were responsible for different aspects of the project was easy.
As enterprise and mid-market systems go, the price is highly competitive (especially when you consider what's included in the license). That said, this product is not accessible for small businesses as a self hosted solution. The "Navigator on Cloud" solution is much more accessible, but gives less control over data.
To get all the features, there are many moving parts. For large enterprises, this is no problem, and the cloud solution obviates most of these concerns.
Overall, it is not as stable as other software. Some errors could not be fixed, such as a form going forward without approval because a user pressed "enter" twice in a row.
I probably only use 20% of the functionality. Beyond that, I'd have to pay for development. We did that once, and the project that we paid for never was implemented. They allowed us to request a design before my time that was so complicated that they never got it to work. Once I came on board, I implemented a much simpler solution.
Our upgrade took much, much longer than expected, and was disrupted by so many software issues.
We are definitely renewing our SmartSearch. This is the only place all of our companies contracts and regulatory filings are kept. Our company would lose track of all expiring contracts if we did not renew. We would also need to spend many hours figuring out a new organizational system for all of our files, as well as savings the documents from SmartSearch onto the computer.
The items I am searching for are easily found. They are found in at least 95% of the searches. The failure rate generally is related to another employees user error or a template error set up by our Square 9 team in house.
With the PDF projected viewer, the document retrieval-to-display can drag for a second more than some systems, and the capture workflow if you overload a server array can also drag, but those are the only two issues we've ever seen with this product, and they are not serious issues at all.
Support is always extremely helpful and responsive. Whenever we have a question, it is simple contacting them and also setting-up an appointment, if necessary. Scheduling the appointment is easy and they are willing to talk on the phone, which is not always true with software companies. Their report support tools are also really east to use.
It would have been higher, but the training is a bit muted for the lesser qualified office equipment vendors who signed up as partners to sell and support it. The more experienced ECM vendors and customer end-users will find the training very good, but a bit slow.
I think the implementation could have gone a little smoother than it did. Now that I know how to use the software, I could do it myself. I feel that as an organization, we could have been a little better prepared. If the consultant was more aware of what we were looking for, they could have assisted in setting up some workflows for us as per the contract. But because we were not prepared, the initial implementation process was a little painful. That said, adding a document management system to ANY business kinda means everyone has to re-think the way they do their work which can be difficult for some staff.
Our relationship with IBM is long standing. We have been Gold Partners for some time and are viewed by many internal groups as their Go To partner for large ECM deployments. Most of our systems engineers hold multiple certifications as solutions developers. Our clients are national and international. The support we receive from IBM has been excellent and our partnership with them on numerous projects has been excellent.
SharePoint and Square 9 Softworks are similar in some ways and totally different in others. They both do workflow, although Square 9 Workflow gives administrators more options. They both have a repository, although Square 9 GlobalSearch is more structured in terms of customization. Using field values allows for more exact search capabilites. Square 9 AI tools allows administrators to get the correct data off the page more precisely with less effort.
The scale-ability is quite good actually, but you need competent sales/support folks providing it to you, so the scale is set right for the demands of your system use. Some resellers are not good at doing this, some are fantastic. If you are scaled correctly at first implementation, you'll be very happy with this system.
Reduction in human error through manual data entry process now being automated
Reduction in cost due to automation allowing the function to not require a full time employee
Reduction in time spent performing the previous manual tasks. Example: on our consolidated shipment days, it could take doc clerk 2-3 hours to prepare master document package. This has been reduced to 30 minutes or less (depending on size of shipment and time needed for OCR to complete)
