M-Files

M-files is a must for any company seeking to implement digital transformation initiatives in their company.

I love best is its extensive feature set and seamless integration with Microsoft products (e.g., office, IIS server, MS SQL, Windows, etc.)

The workflow feature is easy to customize, setup, and implement. It will change the way you deal with paper documents once you experience how easy it is to digitize, and manage your documents.

The OCR functionality is a beast! Just like having Google on your local repository, reading through the very contents of your digital documents.

Vorteile

The thing I like the most is the seamless integration with Microsoft products. This made it easy for implementing the use of M-files into our office workflow (it works well from within Outlook, Microsoft Office, even Windows Explorer).

The creation of a Workflow is made very easy via a graphical workflow editor. Just a little learning curve and we are able to setup the different manual processes into a solid digital workflow for the office (e.g., filing for leave, routing of papers for approval, storing scanned copies of contracts and any kind of document in the office).

Nachteile

When implementing on a large scale (e.g., company-wide) we really had to sit down and plan out our licensing arrangement. Note that M-Files comes in a variety of licensing options (e.g., read-only, named user, concurrent user). Some offices can possibly share licenses (but number of active sessions will be limited). Planning out the best license option is quite a task since we were woking on a limited buget and we had to optimize the value-for-money setup we can have.

It can also be a bit overwhelming for new users. We had a bit of difficulty in the deployment since we had to train all the users (who found it not so intuitive at first). But then, after the training, it has then been integrated well for our daily use.

We are a german company that uses M-Files for some years. I'm the poor guy that has to configure the backend/server side.
The basic functions are easy to setup, once installed, the server and client side runs well. The basic idea is easy to understand, documents belongs to classes ans has class-specific metadata attributes like "telephone number". Attributes can be linked to other objects... fine!
What makes me sleepless nights is, that if the implementation of a little bit more complex things like right structures, workflows with many steps e.g., you're totally lost with M-Files.
There are some different documentation pdfs, describing just the basic functionality - WITHOUT CLEAR EXAMPLES.
There's the possibility to submit tickets (if you have a support contract). This tickets are answered after some days by (asian?) supporters. There's a lot of mail-overhead just to desribe the problem. In most cases the supporters does not respond to the concrete problem. The do'n offer, for example, a short teamviewer session to solve the problem on the customers system. That's can not be calles good support!
M-Files provides the possibility to write own (visual basic) code, triggered by event handlers. This code can be written to a empty white editor (without any debug possibilities, or any kind of help to the programmer) on the server side. Notepad.exe provides more features! No Breapoints, no debug log output, the only way to debug own code is to rise exceptions that blows the script. That is 1983, not 2017! The API functions are not nice encapsulated, it's a nightmare to wirte own code...but required often - to customize and build workarounds for missing functionality.
Logging in general...not nice. There's a "event log" on the server side. Some basic events are logged here, for example login, logout, document checkout... But it's not very detailed! If somethin went wrong, it's not written there. Maaan!
The user frontend (windows client) looks nice and works well. The server side looks also nice on the first view, but many "nice" features are not implemented. Lists of 300+ Users... no search field, no possibility to select 5 people and delete them, you have to do tis one by one...

I hope this (view from the administration part) gives you a small impression of the daily work.

M-Files seems to spend a lot of money in marketing an nice small videos to bring the CEO to buy the product, but where are the videos describing the rights structure from the technical side? Nope!

Vorteile

- Usefull user interface on the client side
- Good basic structure

Nachteile

- Expensive
- Very bad support
- Bad documentation
- No usefull examples
- Not self-explaining to the adminsitrator

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Don't trust the nice small videos that shows the "easy tu use" magic M-Files DMS. What counts in the daily use is a good support! Competent supporters that understands the problem and helps to solve it. If you are loking for that, you're lost with M-Files. The nice support ends after buying the product.