HaloPSA vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI)

Having been in IT for 10+ years and used so many different PSA platforms, I must say working with HaloPSA has been simply amazing. Straight out of the box, it's fast. It's feature-rich. It's easy to set up the basics, and the onboarding team was amazing. The onboarding team actually spends time with you, human on human, walking you through the setup and getting it working how you want. No one else does that included. Yeah, sure, you can pay CW and the other huge amounts of money, and they sort of help you, but HaloPSA helps you from the start; it seems they realise if they help set it up correctly in the first place, it reduces support calls. We can run our business from day one - very customer-centric. We have been using HaloPSA for a year now, and there is still plenty to learn and develop on the platform, but every week we are learning new things that we can do. The support team is great; they are humans who understand the issues we face, so they get things working fast. We have suggested some missing features to the dev team, and so far, they have implemented all of them - WOW. Don't get me wrong, as with all platforms, HaloPSA is not perfect. It's young, but it's maturing fast, very fast, and they are getting integrations built with the major players in the IT industry, which is fantastic. Yes, a few times, the link to Xero broke, which was annoying, but unlike the platforms we used in the past, the support team spoke to us and told us what the problem was and got it fixed, so you can't ask for more than that. Their growth has been fantastic to see, but again this has meant a bit of change around with account managers, support personnel, etc., but everyone they bring on is just as good as the last. All in all, migrating to HaloPSA was the best software/platform decision I have made in our business since I began the business. I would recommend HaloPSA to any IT business. Well done, Team HALO. Keep up the awesome work.

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.

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• Workflows
• Stock Control
• Quoting

• 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.

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• Stock control
• There are 3-4 different ways to do that same thing
• Documentation

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• 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

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.

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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.

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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.

We have used and tried several other PSA vendors and HaloPSA was our favorite by far. Many others were either much too overly complicated, clunky, slow to respond to issues, incomplete, or they simply failed to deliver on promises made, especially in terms of integrations.

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.

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• Improve our technicians efficiency
• Helped improve asset recording
• Knowledge base

• 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.

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Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info