MicroStrategy Mobile vs. OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting

One of best business intelligence enterprise reporting tools, it has loads of rich features available to the business user with ease of use and advanced analysis in a single end-to-end solution. I like MicroStrategy's simplicity in creating complex multi-pass SQL reports, visualizations over varied data sets, and the breath of areas in which the product can be used. I like mostly everything. I think there are some remaining improvements that could be done in the area of data visualization.

Incentivized

iHub is a decent enough environment that it serves our needs. We can have unlimited users and it can tie into AD although we do not use that feature currently. It is a decent place to store all of the reports in one location, even though for us it is not visually appealing to the end users. iHub is not a place where you want to create robust/interactive dashboards for end users to drill through and follow a "story".

Incentivized

• MicroStrategy has widgets that allow you to display data using elaborate and complex graphs such as maps, microcharts, thermometers, etc.
• The same dashboards can also be viewed on the web by users who don't have mobile devices.
• For mobile, MicroStrategy has created unique selectors that are more suited for smartphones and tablets.
• MicroStrategy uses the features of mobile devices such as accelerometers to select different views and change the display when the device is tilted or rotated. In addition you can use inputs such as the camera to read barcode data and enter inventory data into the database.

Incentivized

• It is fairly easy to set the sharing rules for a report/dashboard.
• They have a decent amount of time frame options for setting a schedule to generate a report.
• The support is mostly helpful and timely if you have an issue.

Incentivized

• Pop-ups.
• Refresh rate.

Incentivized

• Setting up a "dashboard" is extremely lacking in functionality. The different chart widgets you place on the page do not interact with each other. When you select an item from one do not expect it to highlight or filter another.
• The speed and stability are not great, but maybe that is just our environment not being up to snuff...even though we are above the "recommended" settings.
• The main GUI for a user is TERRIBLE. You log into a File Tree format where you have to navigate folders to reach the correct dashboard. There are ways around this, but it would either require an expensive payment to the Professional Services team to revamp to UI or another option they gave us was to create the "Default Dashboard" and provide that link to users and in that Dashboard, you use a new tab to include the navigation back to the main screen so that at least on the initial load the user is taken to a friendly looking dashboard instead of a file tree.

Incentivized

MicroStrategy is much better.

Incentivized

Our instance of iHub does not stack up against the other larger BI tools out today. It is a good place to store reports in a central location that allows users to run very specific reports on demand, but it is not a place I would want to store all of my "dashboards". As far as holding individual reports that are specific to an individual need, it is a great tool. If you want to create a report that will be used as a Template for a Form or a Label, iHub is a good choice to store and schedule the report or call it via API to generate it and return it to your calling app.

Incentivized