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.
$14
per month per user
sticky.io
Score9 out of 10
N/A
sticky.io (formerly LimeLight), headquartered in San Francisco, offers their subscription business management platform supporting ecommerce transactions and recurring billing along with customer management, payment gateway, and fraud protected transacting.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
