Astera ReportMiner vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI)

Astera ReportMiner is well suited for those who work with EMR Data or business operations data where different platforms may report on similar data but not everything is the same between the different systems and how they export their data. It works especially well when systems can't edit their exports so you need to clean up data a lot before they are combined into a single file. It is less appropriate a solution when you are trying to combine large data, let's say thousands of files and need some sort of platform to deduce analytic patterns out of it. This is more used for data preparedness rather than big data analysis. This may have changed with recent updates, however they do not do a good job of updating customers on new releases so keeping track of their developments is something worth doing if data management is an important part of your/your company's role.

Microsoft BI has a lot of features and is a very powerful tool, especially if you have folks on your team that know how to utilize all of its capabilities. To truly unlock all that it can do, it does require people to have a deep understanding of its capabilities. That's where the software really shines. If you are looking for a simpler, more basic reporting tool, there are other programs available that do not require such a steep learning curve.

Incentivized

• ReportMiner's OCR accuracy is flawless to my experience. I use the program to pull values from check details, and have yet to find an error.
• ReportMiner's interface is easy to learn. I never even got formal training on the program. I watched some YouTube videos and learned as I went.
• ReportMiner training personnel is very knowledgeable and quick to respond. Anytime I ran into a problem I could not figure out on my own, they would get back with me within a half a day.

• Comparatively easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, collaborating with other colleagues on data work is simple.
• Using Visual Studio for database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development save time and money.
• Transfer of data from one application to another via Excel and comparison of data attributes between applications
• Dashboard functionality, as well as Python support, are available, allowing you to add additional charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Could provide some features to help with advanced analytics for big data. (i.e. larger data sets)
• Too much clutter on their Youtube page, they should highlight the tutorials so they are easier to find for new users. Get rid of old tutorial video playlists so the organization is clean and up to date.
• Have sales rep follow up with customers to offer product updates, new product releases, and do check ins to see if customers have suggestions for feature improvement.

• MSBI designs can work on increasing data processing capabilities enough to handle the huge datasets etc.
• It would be a lot better if it is a little low on cost.
• it needs to create opportunities little more than they do regarding customization of some very unique visualization effects

It is the best way to get a multi line record from pdf to Excel in one row.

Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.

The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.

Incentivized

The product has been reliable.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.

MSBI natively has a site that allows you to vote on user enhancements and bug fixes. This allows the largest nagging issues to float to the top and the development team can prioritize accordingly. As mentioned earlier, the large community base of MSBI developers assist technical resources in handling technical questions.

Incentivized

This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.

We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.

I have never actually used another program like ReportMiner. Before I was just using PDF viewers such as Adobe that had OCR capabilities. I would have to select a range of numbers and copy and paste to Excel. It was tedious, slow, and sometimes error prone. I chose to learn ReportMiner because it saves me at least 4 times the amount of time I would have to use by copy and pasting.

We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.

Incentivized

• Efficient and automated data extraction. Saves time and resources.
• User-friendly interface and good documentation. It is therefore easiest to learn and apply in a short time.
• Documents, which have various formats of data tables or arrangement, needed a lot of manual fixing. So it required a lot of time for validation and quality control.

• As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
• However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.

Incentivized