Ayasdi Core is a business intelligence software offering from Ayasdi.
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MS SharePoint / SQL
Score 8.1 out of 10
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MS SharePoint / SQL refers to Microsoft Sharepoint, a web-based collaborative platform, being used in tandem with Microsoft SQL Server to provide business intelligence analytics and reporting. They can provide BI content such as data connections, reports, scorecards, dashboards, and more.
Well suited: 1. If data set is not yet well organized. 2. Hypothesis is not yet established. 3. Need to visually explore to find patterns of data (often when analysts have no good understanding of data) 4. When [you need] to analyze events with a timeframe (specifically a sequence of events as a transaction) Less appropriate 1. If a data set is very large, such as Hadoop data, it becomes hard to manage data pipeline and process to feed the data into Ayasdi. To be feed into Ayasdi, data should be aggregated or organized to some level.
A simple and important scenario well suited is that you can configure alerts to notify you when the production server fails. another best feature is the report server is the central component of reporting services. For me something less appropriate is that the admin must ensure optimal performance for farm operations, they recommend that you install SQL Server on a dedicated server that does not run other farm roles and does not host databases for other applications.
Ayasdi Core provides an easy way to get some insight on data. Typically analytics may require having a model or hypothesis before starting to look into the data, but Ayasdi lets you just feed the data first then start seeing what the data looks like.
Ayasdi Core's topological network visualization is quite unique. It allows you to explore patterns and potential relations between multiple data elements. A user can also dynamically navigate data with different aspects on the web.
The Web version of Ayasdi is easy to use, stable, and fast. It hasn't crashed even when we feed it a lot of data sets, although it took time.
Use of Python SDK is required to feed data into Ayasdi, but it lacks training materials or sample codes for a novice to get started.
Although Web UI of Ayasdi is looking good, often it freezes when the user runs an analysis. It doesn't crash but the web page needs to be refreshed to see the progress of analysis.
Algorithms provided by Ayasdi, such as metrics types, lens types need to be explained (what they are and what their strengths and weaknesses are). We had to Google or do research on our own to understand what they are.
This was a long-term buy-in from a corporate perspective, to remain in the SharePoint space. Migration is certainly possible, which is good for planning and having options further out. At this point, the only planned migration is to eventually move the architecture up to SharePoint/SQL 2013. At that point, we will be able to leverage some greater efficiencies, some enhanced content design and management features, and some more current social features. It is well worth a full consideration in any shop looking at a new implementation of or migration to SharePoint (although you will probably be considering 2013 versions or beyond in those discussions), but the platform should be a strong competitor to any alternatives. Realizing the capability of a fully-branded and customized website was not part of the original choice for the architecture at Lincoln, but seeing it implemented and functioning now with this capacity far beyond original expectations has certainly cemented plans to continue using it.
SharePoint is very complex. This makes usability somewhat difficult from an IT perspective. An IT generalist will be able to pick it up and run with basic tasks. More customized functions would require significant specialized training and therefore limit what a standard user would be able to achieve. From an end user perspective, it's pretty straightforward to use.
It's been fantastic in terms of Premier Support so far. If there is an issue and if you report if the product has an issue, they will act upon it immediately. In some cases, if you design/develop something using the platform, Microsoft appreciates it and... publishes it on their public website. But you have to wait for some time if it is a non-Premier Support issue as you may experience delays.
We had a working group that has been using R studio for the general purpose of statistical analysis in our organization. Although it is a great tool that provides enriched function sets, it is time-consuming for our clinical analysts to learn the tool to see the first result. R is somewhat of a developer-oriented/friendly tool. Ayasdi is friendly to a domain analyst or end users. Plus, support and consulting from Ayasdi were excellent so that we could get knowledge from them immediately whenever we needed.
At the time of the two large projects, SharePoint was the enterprise solution so we were required to use that. We have since lobbied the enterprise teams to review and consider Atlassian Confluence and were successful. Confluence is cheaper than Sharepoint which is why we wanted to bring that in. The enterprise has now made Confluence an enterprise solution as an alternative to SharePoint. After using both I think SharePoint has many more add-ins than Confluence. It has much more customization ability than Confluence. SharePoint is not good for mobile readiness. Confluence is so there is a difference that might lead you to Confluence over SharePoint. I would also say that SharePoint is very document-centric and that Confluence has better KM than SharePoint does. even with the use of SQL Server. We were told that we could not use Google Drive even though it had features we liked.
I've installed SharePoint in many different industries and each industry has seen greater collaboration among their teams both locally and nationally. The ability to collaborate more efficiently has reduced the need to have employees centrally located.
Companies which have used SharePoint in a end user training portal have had great ROI, since they can create the content once and share with all their users who subscribe to their training service. The web content management aspect of SharePoint is a very helpful feature.
