IBM Bob is an AI-assisted development tool designed to support developers across the software development lifecycle. It helps interpret developer intent and provides assistance when working with real-world codebases by using contextual awareness of the surrounding project.
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Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
The first time using it feels like magic. Its ability to analyze an existing codebase and adapt accordingly to questions, feature requests, issues, etc. is remarkable. However, it is not limited to an existing codebase - I've had it create new applications based on styling from another application from scratch. It has quickly gone from an amazing novelty to something that is relied upon daily.
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.
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.
It works well, for the most part, but asking for authorization for multiple steps or tool installation and use sometimes becomes bothersome. You can grant blanket authorizations but I do prefer to have a tradeoff there so not all is bad, but sometimes I get the impression that we get asked the same question several times during the same workflow.
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.
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.
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.
ChatGPT just did not have the breadth and depth of insight for my coding needs. To get an approximation of what I wanted I had to restate my prompt multiple times, and it looked almost like it did not learn from one time to the other.
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.
We've been able to grow our own development team from within as a result of using this technology. Team members who may not have been confident enough to meaningfully contribute to the existing codebase have now become high-output developers.
We've been able to grow an automated test suite to more thoroughly test our mobile application. What once took two weeks of manual regression testing can now be done in an afternoon.
Our documentation has improved considerably, giving the product a more polished feel. Product documentation had previously consistently lagged behind new feature development.
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.
