Magento BI (formerly RJMetrics) is an ecommerce analytics solution that provides data pipeline, warehouse and visualization capabilities. It was acquired by Magento, and is now owned and supported by Adobe.
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Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Score 8.4 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.
A company or organization that is in contact with the customer and wants to examine customer behavior in the purchase and selection of products and services should use this platform. It does not matter how many advertising tools and referral links or social media campaigns you use to attract customers. In any case, Magento BI integrates all the information and DB as a single platform and provides you with the best reports. Potential customers can be positioned according to location, city, country. Now we know exactly which product is most popular and where to put our advertising costs on which site or social network has the most audience.
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.
It is relatively easy to manipulate the time period in which you want to see your report. This is important for our business because we are constantly analyzing sales month over month, quarter over quarter, and year over year. RJ makes it easy to toggle between these time ranges on the same report.
The visualizers available for reports are what you would expect out of a product like this. You have the ability to view your results in tables and a multitude of charts.
The ability to customize dashboards and rearrange reports quickly is great and intuitive!
Educational videos and tutorials must be more simpler and more understandable language with subtitles
There should be the ability to select graphic diagrams with different shapes and graphs
The basic features of the Essential Paln can be increased with the current price so that startup companies can better use the features of this platform.
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.
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.
In addition to its features, it has made the Magento Commerce platform much better, more functional, and smarter, and through Magento BI dashboard they know very well what reports have been sent and all our business tools are summarized in one business platform. The ability to share report results is very popular and useful, and you can share content with anyone anywhere in the world.
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.
The very strong and knowledgeable support team and great help forums and documents, any questions and cases will be answered immediately or checked through tickets and resolved quickly. It is also possible to send comments and changes. Or our team , fast response and after-sales cooperation of the service company is always more than the product itself and its quality, and we want the service and support to support our interests.
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.
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.
The advantage of Magento BI is easier compatibility and adaptation with Adobe platforms and easier installation, configuration and customization with Mojto Store Builder and its various caskets, and I am very satisfied with it now and in every way I think it is a very good platform for integration in reporting.
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.
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.
