Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Lime Light CRM was built specifically for online marketers, helping them to manage their online sales, contacts, orders, and payments. The software combines a number of features and 3rd party provider integrations to offer the ability to store customer data, build online eCommerce campaigns, create sales reports, and automate order management activities, as well as track, store and report on affiliate data.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review For an easy to learn CRM this would be it, you can fully train someone on Limelight in less than a few days It allows for various wildcard searches to be performed in different fields, which speeds up productivity and requires less request to repeat information to locate accounts while speaking to clients. The CRM holds multiple user accounts and products, and shows failed attempts to purchase and gives reason codes for why the purchase was not successful. Allows for different views to review client accounts. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Note taking can be a hassle, when writing notes there is not a separate tab, or dedicated area which allows for multiple users to leave notes for future users, or administrators to reference regarding actions made to the account, users must search per line item to view notes, or go to a different view to see all notes which is still per line item as you toggle through the notes If the client has been with the product for several months or years it is a lot of notes you have to reference through which hurts productivity and creates longer calls. A huge con is when you are canceling out a user account, or if you are changing a recurring date if the user clicks the back button after the tasks completes refreshing the webpage to reflect the new dates, the new changes will go undone and revert back to the original data as if no changes were made resulting in user error. The client continues to be billed and discounts continue to apply. The CRM needs to fix this to prompt "Do you want to undo discount/date change/cancellation?" if the back button is clicked to eliminate user error based on the software limitations. Features which can be customized to automatically perform after actions are done on an account need a function to allow for agents to resend emails if the user did not get them. If automatic emails go to users canceling and they did not get it you have to restart the product then cancel it again to have another automatic email sent to the client/customer or manually send an email. For refunds, if the automatic email did not go out you have to manually send out the email which is time-consuming allocating to another agent or for the current agent. There is a need for an upgrade which allows that after an automatic email has been sent a button will appear which says "resend cancellation" "resend refund" this should also be true if the user inputted the email wrong and it was only noticed by agent after the automatic email was sent and the agent needs to update the email for the client/customer to be able to receive the email at the correct address. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability The product has been reliable.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review In-Person Training This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Customizable Reporting Automatic Reminders Read full review ScreenShots