You probably already knew that the FileNet content services platform is incredibly powerful and flexible - but there's a lot that it can do that you may not be aware of.  We've collected a list of ten key capabilities below in order to ensure that you're utilizing the platform to the fullest extent possible to reduce your operational costs, infuse AI, unlock hidden insights and more.

1.  Reduce operational costs and gain agility using Content Services on a lightweight, modern architecture
Did you know that you can dramatically reduce your operational costs by using FileNet containers to quickly and easily deploy and update FileNet's intelligent content services platform in a fraction of the time - on the public cloud of your choice?  FileNet containers, orchestrated by Kubernetes, provide elastic scalability and zero downtime updates that will dramatically reduce your total cost of ownership and allow you to exploit new capabilities much faster to meet demand.  And that's not all - you can run these containers in the cloud of your choice!  Want to run in AWS?  No problem - use our AWS Quickstart to get up and running within 2-3 hours.  Prefer to deploy in Microsoft Azure?  Google Cloud Platform?  No problem!  Purchasing FileNet Content Manager entitles you to these containers, so get started today!

2.  Intelligent Content Services are here - infuse AI into your content
Infuse intelligence into your content by automating the enrichment of your document metadata.  IBM's Content Analyzer can automatically classify your content and update your FileNet metadata accordingly, resulting in deeper insights and greater control of your content.  Once your metadata is enriched, you can unleash the full power of our content services platform - everything from discovering new patterns and business insights to automating your document retention schedules - it's now easily managed as a result of your newly enriched metadata.  This powerful capability can be used as your content is ingested, and can also be configured to enrich your existing content.  Unlock new insights into your content today!

3.  Simplify your application development with the Content Services GraphQL API
Heads up to all IBM FileNet Content Manager and IBM Content Foundation application developers:  the new GraphQL API for FileNet Content Manager is now available as a technology preview and will be Generally Available in December 2019!  GraphQL is a rich, modern API that allows the caller to retrieve exactly the resources needed in a single call – nothing more, nothing less.  Why not try it for your next web or mobile application development project?  

• Technology preview means application development for internal use, for evaluation purposes only - not for use in a production environment. See the IBM FileNet Content Manager License Information document for more information about Technology Preview Code. 
• The new GraphQL API requires using Docker containers for deployment.  We'll be delivering new features for the GraphQL API on a quarterly cadence.  Learn more about our new GraphQL API service here.
• Interested in giving us feedback on this feature? Sign up for the DBA Early Access Program and check "next-gen architecture" to get connected with our product managers.  You'll have the opportunity to give us your unique feedback on current features in addition to upcoming enhancements.

4.  Collaborative Content Services
Did you know that you can seamlessly collaborate with users that are external to your organization using FileNet Content Manager?  Using the external share feature, you can share folders and documents while maintaining a high degree of control over security.  You can decide whether you want external users to be limited to view/download only, or collaborate with them on new or existing content.  You can even set an expiration date on the share, or allow external users to create folders.  Pro tip:  when sharing a folder, associate an entry template with the folder to automatically set the metadata and security settings that you want - for every document added to the folder - and it's fully automated and worry free!

5. Integration with native applications
Did you know that you can integrate your Mac or Windows desktop applications with IBM FileNet P8 repositories, allowing users to easily add or edit files in the native apps installed on their computer?   You can even associate a custom template with your applications, allowing users to easily create a new document using the template of your choice!  It's never been easier for users to get their work done quickly while still ensuring that their content is managed appropriately.  When the Edit Service is enabled, a user can click 'New' and select the type of file that they want to create.  The file is automatically added to the repository, checked out, and opened in the appropriate application on the user's workstation.  When the user saves their changes, the changes are automatically saved to the repository.  When the user closes the application, the document is checked into the repository automatically.  No extra clicks needed!  By default, the Edit Service client includes support for Microsoft Office documents, and you can configure the Edit Service client to support other document types, such as PDF or HTML files.  For more information, see here.

6.  Crush your content silos with Content Federation Services
IBM FileNet Content Manager has an entire framework developed to assist our clients with federating and/or migrating content and metadata from legacy repositories into FileNet.  On top of that framework, we provide a number of connectors for specific repositories - including some of our own such as Image Services - and we also have a custom connector which can be customized to support federation from repositories for which we do not have a direct connector.  This federation framework supports "federating" documents - which essentially means creating a document object in the FileNet repository, copying the associated metadata, and creating a reference to the content which remains in the source repository.  That operation, which effectively entails copying just the metadata for the set of documents being federated, can happen relatively quickly and, once complete, those documents are available to all FileNet services just as though they are native FileNet documents:  they can be viewed, annotated, indexed, declared as records, etc.  During that federation step or at any point following that federation step, customers can choose to "migrate" that content at which point we'll copy the actual document content and store it in one of the configured FileNet storage areas.  All of these operations can be configured and scheduled to run at the time and rate desired by the customer.  This robust set of federation capabilities provides an excellent way to centrally manage disparate, legacy repositories and manage their transition at the rate and pace that matches the client's business needs.  Having the ability to manage those documents within FileNet while maintaining them in their original repository is a key element in facilitating what can be a lengthy process of migrating legacy applications from older repositories to FileNet.

7.  Next-level web viewing
Did you know that the IBM Daeja ViewONE Virtual Viewer can be used to edit documents in a variety of ways?  You can split or merge documents, redact sensitive information, and annotate the content - all within the Virtual Viewer!  Beyond that, a variety of enhancements have been made for PDF documents, including support for password-protected PDFs, displaying native PDF annotations, electronic signatures, and displaying search results directly within the Viewer.  To find out more, check out the Knowledge Center here.

8.  Heavy lifting made easy with background operations
Another compelling capability that resides within IBM FileNet Content Manager - yet is often overlooked - is our framework for processing background operations.  This capability is multi-faceted in the sense that we use it internally for a number of our system operations, we expose it externally through some of those features (e.g. Move Content), and we expose it externally for clients to perform custom, bulk, background operations (e.g. for every document that matches a particular criteria, execute custom code and perform a set of operations on those documents).  As mentioned earlier, we use this same framework for our move content feature which enables bulk movement of content from one storage area to another.  We also use elements of this same framework for our full-text indexing operations, our publishing framework, our disposition function, and others.  For custom background operations, customers can define:

• the query / filter criteria for selecting items to process
• the custom code module with the operation to be executed for each item returned by that background sweep
• the schedule by which that sweep framework should run
• various runtime aspects such as the number of background threads to use when processing these operations

These can be a one-time operation or repeating, scheduled operations.  These background operations can often take an extended period of time to complete - particularly if they're operating against a large set of documents.  The system manages the continuation of those operations until all documents are processed, including resuming from the last element processed in the event of a system restart.  The status of the operations that are in flight is provided so that administrators can track them.  It is often difficult and technically complicated to manage bulk operations over large systems of data - this feature helps to simplify that process for our clients by providing an out-of-the-box framework to facilitate bulk operations against the content system.  Note that these operations can be performed against both native as well as federated documents.  For more information, see here.

9.  Drive down costs by using modern, low-cost, cloud-based storage
IBM FileNet Content Manager offers a rich set of content and storage-related management facilities to assist our clients with managing very large repositories of content and doing so in an efficient and cost effective manner.  One significant capability is the ability to manage different storage areas which can be individually configured with different types of storage and/or storage characteristics.  We can support capabilities such as encryption, de-duplication, retention management, disposition, and content migration at either the storage level (i.e. the storage device manages it) or at the repository level (i.e. FileNet manages it). In some cases (e.g. retention), it may make sense to leverage both options.  One very important aspect of our ability to support multiple storage areas is to enable a primary tier of storage for active content - often provisioned on higher end, faster, lower-latency, higher cost storage, and a second (or even third) tier of storage to enable storage for less active / archived content - often provisioned on lower end, slower, higher-latency, cheaper storage.  We have broad support for both direct attached physical storage as well as for emerging object storage services - either on premise or cloud-hosted.  The FileNet repository also has a content caching capability which provides the ability to define a caching service for content accessed by the system.  This cache can be provisioned against fast, physical storage or even very fast, memory-based storage.  This is often an excellent way to still achieve fast, low-latency content delivery to end users even when the content is provisioned against slower, back-end storage services.  Those caches are both read-through and write-through caches and follow a Least Recently Used (LRU) algorithm for managing content in the cache.  The repository also provides basic retention management and disposition services, along with a much more advanced set of records and retention management services with our IBM Enterprise Records add-on.  Together, these services provide our clients with a rich set of capabilities for managing very large repositories of content in an efficient, performant, yet low-cost fashion with a wide variety of options for how, when, and where to store that content.

10.  Unlock hidden insights with background searches
Are you looking for a simple way to gain more insight into who is creating content within your organization, what kind of content is being created, and more?  The Reporting Enablement Extensions add-on defines classes and properties for generating sample reports on document usage. The reports are generated in the background, allowing you to continue to do other work while the reports are being generated.  You can use the out-of-the-box reports, or create your own!  Reports are generated as comma-separated values (CSV) files.  For more information, see here.



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