When to CMOD and When to FileNet - Documentation Request

[tjspencer2]

So we have a lot of different use cases in our organization where we need to determine whether we use CMOD or FileNet to store our ECM content.

1. Have you all seen and can you point me to documents that provide some good guidance on determining when to use CMOD and when to use FileNet - especially if you have a use case where you're doing store and search only and where both solutions could be viable.  Ex. We use Datacap to scan and store single mortgage documents that are NOT part of a workflow and release those to FileNet.  Theoretically, I could use Datacap to scan those and release them to CMOD.

2. Also, can you store any document type in CMOD (Excel, Word, etc.) or is there a specific document types that can be stored (AFP, PDF, TIFF, etc.)?

Thanks a bunch!

[Justin Derrick]

CMOD is a high volume archive for identical documents that you print.  I call it "the place documents go to die". 

When to use CMOD:

• Documents that used to go to high volume printers.
• Documents that have identical indexing & retention requirements.
• Documents that are the same format, day after day, month after month, year after year.
• Documents that need to be kept securely -- no changes, no modifications, no alterations.
• Anything that has a legal retention requirement, but no real business purpose.
• Documents that your customers could request, and want to view on a moment's notice for several years.

I'm not super familiar with FileNet, so someone else will have to talk about its strengths.

[tjspencer2]

Thanks for the reply Justin.

So where you're capturing a lot of documents with different index values and not "lots of the same" isn't necessarily a good use case is it? 

[Justin Derrick]

I believe FileNet allows records to have empty fields, but CMOD doesn't -- the idea being "How are you supposed to find something if the fields are empty?".

[tjspencer2]

We'll use Datacap to scan them and ensure that all index values are captured.