Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. Microsoft SharePoint vs. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

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.

SharePoint Document Management excels as a central repository for storing, organising, and retrieving documents. It supports version control, metadata tagging, secure access, and integration with tools like Power Automate. At our organisation, it's used for managing contracts, policies, and supplier documents. SharePoint Workflow Automation integrates with Power Automate to streamline approvals, gather feedback, and automate recurring tasks. This reduces reliance on email chains and manual trackers.

Incentivized

Ideal for daily standard ETL use cases whether the data is sourced from / transferred to the native connectors (like SQL Server) or FTP. Best if the company uses MS suite of tools. There are better options in the market for chaining tasks where you want a custom flow of executions depending on the outcome of each process or if you want advanced functionality like API connections, etc.

Incentivized

• The layout of Power BI is very intuitive. Someone that is familiar with Excel and working with Charts and Graphs in that environment will find the learning curve a rather short one to start using Power BI.
• I like the way Power BI fits an assortment of users and how the functionality that you engage is replicated in Excel, that being Power Query and Power Pivot. So what you learn in one tool can be readily applied towards the other which allows you to more effectively apply your training.
• I appreciate how Microsoft is working to develop tools that go a long ways to empowering the end user. Prior to Power BI I would have had to consult with a "BI" professional to develop a dashboard. With Power BI I don't have to consult with anyone, I can work to put together the dash board I want and using a tool set that is really robust and allows me to engage an enormous amount of data. It's provides a great deal of flexibility and the types of data I can connect to.
• Updates...Microsoft is working diligently to keep Power BI current with monthly updates. They do a really good job of listening to the end user, if there is functionality not currently present just give them a month or so.
• Just to be clear, even though it's easy to get going right out of the gate with Power BI it provides plenty of opportunities to create some really sophisticated reporting solutions. With DAX in Power Pivot and M language in Power Query, you are provided with plenty of head room to do some really amazing things in Power BI.
• Training...there are resources across the web for learning and growing your skills and Power BI. And what's even better is the majority of those resources are free.
• Data engagement, when presenting the data to the end user Power BI goes a long way to allowing that end user to engage the data and begin to identify root cause by simply interacting with the graph/chart/data set. It allows for really fluid engagement. Prior to Power BI so many times during the presentation of data we often times ended the engagement with that data with more questions than what were answered. With Power BI, more often than not, the end user is able to get answers to the questions by simply clicking on the data in the graph/chart/dataset to see the details. This tool really does have the capacity to make you look like a rock star.

Incentivized

• We track employees' performance sheets, which are accessible to the employee, his manager, and HR, and this helps with transparency.
• We maintain technical process documents and SOPs, which help us quickly provide relevant documents during audits.
• We maintain incident documents change request forms in SharePoint, which helps us in tracking the changes.

Incentivized

• SSIS works very well pulling well-defined data into SQL Server from a wide variety of data sources.
• It comes free with the SQL Server so it is hard not to consider using it providing you have a team who is trained and experienced using SSIS.
• When SSIS doesn't have exactly what you need you can use C# or VBA to extend its functionality.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It still needs to jam some services together like Planner and lists so that teams can interact from a single place[.]
• Sites need to be more intuitive and rather building from scratch should come up with some suggestion[.]
• The tool tips for new users are not adequate[.]

Incentivized

• SSIS memory usage can be quite high particularly when SSI and SQL server are on the same machine
• SSIS is not available on any environment other than Microsoft Windows
• SSIS does not function with any database engine back-end other than Microsoft SQL Server

Incentivized

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.

We have too much invested at this point to do anything different and there are too many reasons as a company our size to keep it. We are heavily licensed out for Microsoft and have 12 years of SharePoint development baked into who we are. Extracting that as a tool at this point would be dumb and devastating. There are no like-kind competitors to it at an enterprise level that scale and integrate as well.

Incentivized

SSIS is responsible for running core business processed managing core business data. It can be managed, improved and expanded using minimal internal resources. It is also able to support all of our current data infrastructure. Replacing SSIS would be time consuming and costly with no apparent ROI.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

No usability issues reported. Individual teams also have allocated areas which replace legacy shared drives on local LANs. Access to Sharepoint resources is fully integrated with corporate Active Directory with additional two-factor authentication required for administrative users. Users have access to Microsoft Services Hub which allows you to create, manage, and track support requests while staying current on Microsoft technologies with access to select self-paced learning paths

Incentivized

It is easy to learn, works great on many features, but needs improvement on ETL troubleshooting and performance monitoring functionality. Great tool on Microsoft stack. it is great with simple, structured datasets. Once logic gets fancy like nested conditionals
complex joins,
reusable transformations, versioned logic …SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages become hard to read and harder to maintain. Source control is painful. Errors can be cryptic
Logging takes effort to set up well
Debugging in production is limited.

Incentivized

Reports are stable and always avaiable when needed.

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.

Raw performance is great. At times, depending on the machine you are using for development, the IDE can have issues. Deploying projects is very easy and the tool set they give you to monitor jobs out of the box is decent. If you do very much with it you will have to write into your projects performance tracking though.

Incentivized

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.

Support for SharePoint is quite good. Microsoft provides good support. Microsoft offers

• Quick turnaround time for issues
• A range of support services
• Access to a network of resources
• Escalation of issues
• Ongoing development and commitment to produce enhancement

The majority of support is required for initial installation. Once complete and the system is operating we have had very few support issues.

Incentivized

The support, when necessary, is excellent. But beyond that, it is very rarely necessary because the user community is so large, vibrant and knowledgable, a simple Google query or forum question can answer almost everything you want to know. You can also get prewritten script tasks with a variety of functionality that saves a lot of time.

Incentivized

This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

The face to face training I received was on SharePoint Administration. It was rushed as there was a lot of information to cover and the application of the labs weren't that great either. I like to be able to relate what I am learning to what I am currently doing.

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.

I like to learn at my own pace and online training allows for that. Additionally, you can skip through pieces of content that you already know or are already comfortable with. Microsoft actually offers great videos on their website for basic fundamental SharePoint Training. I have used these training videos in some of my own training sessions with end users.

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.

Planning to the last detail would be advised. SharePoint is a very large application that takes a lot of finesse to get operational

The implementation may be different in each case, it is important to properly analyze all the existing infrastructure to understand the kind of work needed, the type of software used and the compatibility between these, the features that you want to exploit, to understand what is possible and which ones require integration with third-party tools

Incentivized

We use Microsoft BI because our organization has all of its software in the Microsoft ecosystem. It just made sense to utilize Microsoft BI because it can so seamlessly connect to all of the other Microsoft tools and data sources that we were using before. We often find that more people have experience with Microsoft BI than other tools that we looked at due to its popularity and widespread use within other organizations.

Incentivized

The reasons for selecting MS SharePoint are: SharePoint provides ease of use and web design assistance and support SharePoint helps you schedule your content for publishing. enables users to share documents with external parties and offers a better internal structure of the content and better indexing and searching capabilities.

Incentivized

Both are very similar. Azure is cloud based. It is easier for the organization who uses cloud based application. The SQL Server Integration Services is cost effective. Azure was more on the expensive side for our organization. Azure was a little complex, it needed special training to use it. Azure was not accurate with complex data.

Incentivized

• Profit increase due to MSBI output and a better understanding of multiple functions other than cost.
• Data compatibility will be improved, and MSBI will have the opportunity to handle the API more effectively. The MSBI ETL stack works well with relational databases, but with cloud-based data sources emerging, non-relational data sources should be supported.
• Save time interpreting data. Our analytics capabilities have helped our clients understand complex data with simple reports. Thus, it facilitated decision-making.

Incentivized

• We've recently implemented Microsoft SharePoint access via iPads for our Template teams out on job sites. They can easily upload CAD / Laser files into Microsoft SharePoint for our production team to review in real time. Serious ROI when we don't have to wait for our Template team to get back to the shop!
• We have multiple physical locations. Microsoft SharePoint allows users at each location to collaborate by working on documents simultaneously. Allowing us to solve multi-site problems & strategize on multi-site initiatives much faster!
• We can also share key information with external partners. As long as they have a registered MS account (not necessarily an O365 account) we can share our information with them in a variety of ways. This allows consistent & concise communication with our partners.

Incentivized

• Without this, we would have to manually update a spreadsheet of our SQL Server inventory
• We would also have poor alerting; if an instance was down we wouldn't know until it was reported by a user
• We only have one other person who uses SQL Server Integration Services , he's the expert. It would fall to me without him and I would not enjoy being responsible for it.

Incentivized