Oracle WebCenter Content vs. Square 9 Softworks

If your company is large and uses other Oracle products, Oracle WebCenter Content is probably a worthwhile investment. It integrates well with other Oracle applications and has the potential to help automate some of your existing processes. If you do not use other Oracle products, I would say there are better alternatives out there that are probably more user-friendly and cost effective.

Incentivized

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.

• It provided one single repository with a URL link to access each AP invoice.
• It gives a life cycle to each invoice where a business user can perform some additional indexing as per their needs.
• It also provides a reporting feature and a front-end for users to view invoices with ease and very helpful for auditing purpose.
• It uses the BPEL engine to customize the life cycle and also it can automate the auto entry of supplier invoices in your EBS system.
• Reduce a lot of manual efforts, manual errors and workforce.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Any images in the emails sent by suppliers (supplier logos in the signature) are treated as invoices by WebCenter Content software.
• We have an invoice with 4 lines and each line has its own project manager. Ideally, each invoice line should be sent for approval to respective project managers. However, WebCenter Business Process management was sending all the lines to all project managers.
• The user experience of Oracle WebCenter Content can be drastically improved. It is not up to the mark.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

The challenges with converting to a completely new system create quite a barrier to switching to anything else. If we find another system that offers guaranteed improvements to the user interface -- as well as as a more coherent set of options for data interchanges with current and future enterprise data sources -- we would be more interested in swithing to that new product. Of course, the expense in purchasing competitor system, along with the costs of migrating all current content, along with retooling all existing workflows in place, would be carefully weighed against the benefits incurred from a switch-over.

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.

It meets all required functionality requirements -- but handles none of them in an exceptional manner

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.

Incentivized

Square-9 can get this product out to you in almost the same hour your order it. We got ours very fast.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We were looking for an automated invoice processing solution. As we are already on Oracle ERP, it made sense for us to go for Oracle Fusion payables with Oracle WebCenter Content. We have a good relationship with Oracle and Oracle promised us priority support during the time of implementation.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

• When integrated with a system like Biscom, WebCenter Content makes document capture, retention, and archiving much more efficient and cost-effective.
• When integrated with a system like Siebel CRM, WebCenter Content makes communications with customers/leads more efficient.
• Leveraging the robust content authoring capabilities has helped our web clients reduce the amount of involvement required of IT services during the normal course of web content authoring and management.

• 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)

Incentivized