Content management tools: Features users love and hate

When enterprise tech managers consider a content management system, they want it to be easy to administer, easy to customize for their organization, and capable of keeping the content secure.

Four of the top enterprise content management products are IBM Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Box, Alfresco and Microsoft’s SharePoint, according to reviews at IT Central Station. But what do enterprise users really think about some of these tools? Here, users give a shout-out for some of their favorite features, but also give the vendors a little tough love.

Editor’s note: These reviews of select enterprise content management products come from the IT Central Station community. They are the opinions of the users and are based on their own experiences.

IBM ECM

Valuable Features

“I like the granularity that Datacap offers. I’ve worked with other capture solutions before, including FileNet Capture, Kofax and Captiva, to some extent. I haven’t seen such a granular capture product. Because of that, we can achieve any level of customization.” — Manesh Gurav, senior enterprise content management developer at DaVita Kidney Care

“The most valuable feature of Content Manager is its flexibility in handling a lot of documents and document images; being an IBM product, I like that. It’s not designed to just use DB2, which is another IBM product. It’s flexible enough that you have the choice to choose a different back end. We use Oracle, which is a different database back end.” — Joseph Lee, application systems engineer at a financial services firm

“We receive anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 documents a day. It’s helped us standardize that [content ingestion] process across six different business units. We’ve seen a reduction of error rates. We’ve seen much easier training on the new platform.” — AVP8ce4, assistant vice president at a financial services firm

Room for Improvement

“I would probably like simpler admin screens. The administrative console and some of the other UI is not very intuitive for new users.” — SeniorDi5f2b, senior director at a financial services firm

“We’d like for it to be able to ingest reports that were created on the distributed side and get them into the same repository, where you have one repository for all reports.” — SystemSu4907, system support manager at a financial services firm

You can read more IBM ECM reviews on IT Central Station.

Box

Valuable Features

“Collaboration … is easy and user-friendly. Security [has] encryption and enterprise-grade management.” — Lucas Bruch, network manager at a nonprofit organization

“Sharing and collaborating across files and folders has been a massive game-changer. Also, the ability to set metadata around our content is amazing!” — Andrew Wilson, enterprise content management administrator at a media company

Room for Improvement

“The security settings are such that if I have a folder with subfolders several levels deep, whatever security setting I have for the parent folder gets inherited at all the subfolders. This has been limiting.” — Tim Bohn, worldwide practice leader in systems engineering at a technology vendor

“Box Sync is still a bit buggy, and it is difficult to get used to not being able to organize your view of folders as it is determined by the owner of the folder.” — Reviewer472392, help desk specialist at a university

“I would love to see the ability to invite collaborators extended to a file level, not just the folder level.” — Andrew Wilson, enterprise content management administrator at a media company

You can read more Box reviews on IT Central Station.

Alfresco

Valuable Features

“It is customizable and we can customize this product the way we want. With its content model feature, we can create our own content model with our own metadata.” — SeniorJa0d85, senior Java developer at a technology vendor

“The most valuable features of this product are that it is easy to install and configure. The Community version of this product is also easy to use.” — Solution970e, solution architect at a technology services company

Room for Improvement

“We would like to see improvement in the number of documents that can be managed by the repository. We would like them to introduce NoSQL DBMS for modeling metadata and document types.” — ProjectM6f92, project manager at a technology services company

“They should provide some features so non-technical people can also do some level of customization easily.” — SeniorJa0d85, senior Java developer at a technology vendor

You can read more Alfresco reviews on IT Central Station.

SharePoint

Valuable Features

“SharePoint provides out-of-the-box data indexing and caching.” — Igor Chernov, escalation engineer at a technology company

“The most valuable features are the high number of ready-made snippets, easy basic process automation, the security model, and good integration with other Microsoft products.” — Alexey Bugaev, head of business intelligence at an engineering company

“I have found SharePoint team sites to produce much more value to our organization. As a consulting company, it allows multiple consultants to collaborate on a team project for a customer.” — Aaron Krytus, senior network engineer at Warnock, Tanner & Associates, an IT consulting firm

Room for Improvement

“Some conditional shading cannot be readily performed with out-of-the-box functionality. Creating calculated fields with dynamic dropdown values are also not easily created with out-of-the-box” functionality.” — Ron Fowler, ITIL process manager at a healthcare company

“Cloud and Office 365 integration with Outlook could be more stable, and an external company collaborator’s connections can be iffy. Migration from on-premise to the cloud has no automation tools to help in migrating the enterprise content, and so this requires throttling the bandwidth to guard against attack.” — Jim U Wilson, president of a technology vendor

“SharePoint Designer enables creating workflows easily. However, they produce errors at times.There seem to be glitches which require workarounds to sort out.” — Caressa Naidoo, technical writer at a tech services company

You can read more SharePoint reviews on IT Central Station.