Likelihood to Recommend Does great at open canvas editing and letting you fully customize without the need for a grid. It is democratizing self-service no-code analytics. You do not need to be a data or analytics engineer to get started, and you can go very far based on how intuitive and straightforward the UI is. Some of the biggest challenges with
Looker Studio relate to user management/security, embedding options, and issue support. For a long time, every user needed to have a Gmail to invite them to view a dashboard via login, not sure if that has been improved yet. You can let any user view without logging in, but that is not always recommended due to security reasons. In terms of embedding, you can only iframe dashboards. More sophisticated BI tools let you embed elements via API or Javascript. Iframing dashboards also make drill downs and dashboard to dashboard navigation tricky/near impossible. There is also no ability to contact Google for support when bugs or outages happen. They point everyone to the Data Studio community. There is some ability to get in contact with Google if you have an enterprise-level contract with Google Cloud, but the path for support is very ad hoc and not always fruitful.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Self-service Easy to use, point and click Little to no training required Easy to share internally and externally Rich visualizations Canned reports Easy to copy/paste/dupe existing reports Ability to join data sets Easy integration with various data sources Flexible data integrations, including lowest common denominator (CSV, XLS, G-Sheets) Wide range of APIs Secure / authentication via Google SSO Easy to share / re-assign ownership of reports and data sources Read full review Flexible - able to make any changes we would like vs traditional service desk system. ROI - We were already using SharePoint for internal intranet, so we are simply getting more use out of licensing we had already committed to. Easy to use for end users. Read full review Cons Few functionalities are very exclusive only for data studio. It's time taking to load data and at the same time only single Data source can be connected. When editing the reports you have to switch between Edit and View mode to see how does the change looks like. Read full review It is hard to setup and nightmare It requires a of infrastructure, thus it could be costly because of requirement and licensing required for everything to run smoothly If it is not setup and organized properly from the beginning it could be maintenance nightmare It is hard to have "test" environment to do patches or similar Read full review Likelihood to Renew It is the simplest and least expensive way for us to automate our reporting at this time. I like the ability to customize literally everything about each report, and the ability to send out reports automatically in emails. The only issue we have been having recently is a technical glitch in the automatic email report. Sadly, there is almost no support for this tool from Google, but is also free, so that is important to take into consideration
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability Google Data Studio has a clean interface that follows a lot of UX best practices. It is fairly easy to pick up the first time you use it, and there is a lot of documentation on line to help troubleshoot, if needed
Read full review 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.
Read full review Support Rating I give it a lower support rating because it seems like our Dev team hasn't gotten the support they need to set up our database to connect. Seems like we hit a roadblock and the project got put on pause for dev. That sucks for me because it is harder to get the dev team to focus on it if they don't get the help they need to set it up.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating Not implemented in best practice way, there are many customizations
Read full review Alternatives Considered Google Data Studio provides a great feature set considering its price point, especially when compared to commercial options from Microsoft and
Tableau . While it may not be as versatile when it comes to working with and developing complex datasets, there is enough charm in its simple, easy-to-use UI to allow not-so-complex analytics to be conducted without having to hire a data analyst.
Read full review 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.
Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review Return on Investment Free, so the only investment is time Because it doesn't have native support of non-Google sources, it can cost more money than Tableau The time spent formatting the templates or building connectors can have a negative impact on ROI As a agency, charging for the reporting service is profitable after the first month or two after building the dashboard. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots