Jaspersoft Community Edition is a free product that offers embeddable pixel-perfect reports for Java apps and small workgroups.
$0
per month
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
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.
Any scenario where you need to reach back into TIBCO support is something I would highly avoid. Most responses at the second round get you pointed to engaging their professional services. The general mentality seems to be "since our product acquisition cost is low, why don't you engage PS to get the value you need" If you are looking at enterprise scenarios, I would highly recommend looking at other more established products.
Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones) Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.
Very intuitive tool - An Advanced reporting user can figure out in a day on the end to end operations.
Easy customization - Simple changes in UI makes it less headache for the end user who maintains the tool. Being an open source product (offers Jasper web services) makes a lot developer friendly compared to SSRS, Cognos etc.
Easy Connectivity - Can connect to any data source (can connect to multiple data sources) for a single report - can be customized.
Community - A very strong community available online, videos - on basic how to questions, also provides assistance to use case specific scenarios.
Ease of Reporting - Can create a reports with in few clicks with out struggle.
Domain Designer - A very powerful tool you can create a dataset using clicks with out writing SQL code.
OnDemand Scheduling - A very good scheduling feature and a has got lot more simplistic compared to other popular tools like Cognos.
Jasper Studio - Very good programmatic tool (desktop tool) lets you customize the reports more company specific, can embed complex coding with 3rd party languages like Java, Groovy (scripting language).
Easier to customize the Jasper Server GUI. More flexibility with the input controls look and feel and maybe more input control types to select from.
Have browser event functionality in the reporting itself.
An easier way to iterate through an object. Maybe an option that tells the report Java run-time to stop following the report sequential flow and first integrate through this stated object many times.
An easier way to create a list and add values to this list.
Maybe one could stipulate the process flow of what needs to be computed first in a given field.
The crosstab is a bit buggy on the Jasper studio side, so if that could be improved.
Better and more examples of custom components
The jive functionality on the tables needs an update. It looks so old and outdated.
The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.
Even though there are challenges with Architecture, sizing and other areas with Jaspersoft provided that Jaspersoft comes up with the right set of innovation, performance, scalability, and documentation in future it will be great expansion (win-win) situation for the clients and as well as Jaspersoft.
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 overall performance of this platform has been excellent. It is easy to work with the user interface. Creation of digital content and publishing on our social media platforms during marketing has been easy. Running our applications and upgrading our system to meet international standards has been successful. The user dashboard displays reports and performance of all departments effectively.
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.
We have only had a couple of tickets to be open while using Jaspersoft. Each time we have a very prompte responses that would meet our expectations. We always felt that our issues were being address in a timely manner
While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.
While the training was somewhat beneficial, a lot of what was taught to us was what we managed to figure out in the weeks prior. It did provide some useful tips and reference material, but overall something more tailored to our requirements would've been better.
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.
New releases can be very buggy, also lacking when it comes to standard time zones and formats that are outside the US. As a company we never feel comfortable implementing a new release for at least 3-6 months due to errors that are found
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.
Crystal reports is very expensive and does not integrate well with java based servers. Jasper also provides community edition, if we every want to downgrade the use, we always have the option of eliminating the server and using the reports as they are. Jasper also give you the opportunity to build BI on case by base basis including Dashboards.
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.
Jaspersoft Community Edition has not had any significant impact on our ROI as we have purchased the commercial edition of the product.
The only impact on ROI is that when we bring on new developers, he or she can begin work using the community edition while awaiting the installation of the commercial edition.
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.
