There a probably more than a few organisations around that have their FileNet systems still attached to a ‘Jukebox’. A machine with dozens of oversized optical discs that was best practice for enterprise-grade storage back in the 90s. In the last decade, however, magnetic storage has proven itself to be able to do everything optical storage could, at a fraction of the cost and orders of magnitude faster. A lot of companies are wondering whether they can move their data off of their old ‘Jukeboxes’ in order to save money in maintenance and increase system performance. If you are using FileNet P8, then the answer is ‘Yes!’

One of the nice things about good practices is that they’re typically things that you’ve done before and you’ve learnt some lessons to support them. Best practice sounds like it’s the only way to do something, and that’s simply not true when you work with a platform that has so many features and options for you to use. When the platform also contains a large number of different add-ons and supports hundreds of partner delivered solutions, you really can only talk about good practice and then apply some discussion, intelligence and effort to implement them in a way that works, for you.

Again, let’s consider a content-centric business process within a business area that wants real-time business analytics. This means that the data in the business process has to be published to the analytics engine.

Hopefully, you know how the process engine implements it’s analytics and you’ll know that for process data to be published, it must firstly be within the instance data of each process and it must be recorded in a process eventlog. The data in the eventlog is processed by the analytics engine and published as OLAP cubes, ready for querying. Assuming we thought about this at the beginning of our design, either our forms or somewhere in the process we’re gathering the pieces of data that are needed for the analytics. If we haven’t gathered the data somewhere, there’s no magic that will get it into the analytics engine, and we’ll have to change our design.

One of the selection criteria for using a software platform like IBM FileNet, rather than completely bespoke software, is that you get a core set of integrated, reliable, scalable, flexible (et al “-ables”) software that makes it easier for you to get a solution delivered. It’s already integrated and either makes the solution quicker to deliver, or provides features that you’d have to build otherwise. Both are true for IBM FileNet, but sometimes you have to make sure you’re using the right platform tool and approach for the right reason. There are thousands of features in the platform and it’s easy to pick the wrong one for the right problem.

Let’s consider a content-centric business process within a business area that wants real-time business analytics. The IBM Business Process Manager is a great choice to implement this process. It includes the content management functions for dealing with the content, the process design and delivery functions for managing the work, and the content and process analytics tools for understanding what’s happening within the business. We’ve also got a forms tool available in the platform and we’re going to use it for all of the user interfaces, other than work delivery, which will come from the native user interfaces of WorkplaceXT. You’ll already have noticed we’re using IBM FileNet specific terms and we’re assuming you have at least a basic knowledge of the IBM FileNet systems and components, so hopefully you do and can read on.

It’s difficult to get good design advice for IBM FileNet systems without engaging an experienced consultant; after all, that’s the ‘secret sauce’ that makes a consulting business profitable. At Kabeus, we’re going to publish our ‘good practices’ for IBM FileNet design with the hope that the customer and partner community will grow through making it simpler and more accessible to get information on what works and what doesn’t.