Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. Rencore Code (SPCAF)

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.

Incentivized

For Microsoft shops that are doing custom development on the Microsoft cloud platform in Office 365 and Azure, the Rencore toolset is an absolute must, especially if you are involved in converting farm solutions to cloud, or just moving into cloud development for the first time.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Unique expert knowledge of their target platforms. Not many companies have such a unique position in their target market. Their employees have a deep understanding of SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure and also regularly advise Microsoft on these matters.
• Community involvement and contribution to open source projects. Key employees at Rencore are considered thought leaders in their area of expertise and contribute to high profile Microsoft open source initiatives.
• Rencore's unique position when it comes to code quality analysis in the SharePoint space sets it apart. There's really no alternative.
• Platform governance is another Rencore strength. No other product provides the insights into your SharePoint Online environment with full auditing of not only configuration changes but also who changed which code where and when. Again no alternatives exist.

• MSBI designs can work on increasing data processing capabilities enough to handle the huge datasets etc.
• It would be a lot better if it is a little low on cost.
• it needs to create opportunities little more than they do regarding customization of some very unique visualization effects

• Rencore's product line is of course still a bit of a niche: SharePoint code quality is not something every organization on the planet is concerned with - although Rencore does much more than that.
• We feel Rencore's marketing efforts are mainly targeted at technologists. There's a lot of other potential, especially for their platform governance product.

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 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

The product has been reliable.

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.

Incentivized

Rencore support is unbeatable

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

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.

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.

Incentivized

I don't know of any products that compete in the space and if there were any, they would not stand a chance against Rencore. Behind any good product is a team of highly skilled individuals, who all have the same goal, who are passionate what they do and lastly, are in it for the betterment of where they started; As Developers themselves. You can't buy that

• 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.

Incentivized

• The clear impact was the amount of time saved code reviewing or going through lines of code marked off by other tools that are not relevant. We cannot put a number on it since the project started off with the tool in place but based on the rules applied it could be as high as 20% of the project time.