MS SharePoint / SQL refers to Microsoft Sharepoint, a web-based collaborative platform, being used in tandem with Microsoft SQL Server to provide business intelligence analytics and reporting. They can provide BI content such as data connections, reports, scorecards, dashboards, and more.
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Power BI For Office 365 (discontinued)
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Power BI for Office 365 allowed users to model and analyze data, and query large datasets with complex natural language queries. It has been discontinued in favor of other editions of Power BI going forward.
The MS Sharepoint offers a more robust toolset for document storing and searching, using the file metadata. Also, it provides a support for workflow process, it can trigger action when a documents is added, changed etc. Sharepoint seems also better in versioning the documents. …
A simple and important scenario well suited is that you can configure alerts to notify you when the production server fails. another best feature is the report server is the central component of reporting services. For me something less appropriate is that the admin must ensure optimal performance for farm operations, they recommend that you install SQL Server on a dedicated server that does not run other farm roles and does not host databases for other applications.
If you're already using Office 365, Power BI for O365 is an easy choice. Start playing around with the free version and then easily add individual Pro licenses with little risk. However, if you anticipate using this with many users, it can get expensive quickly.
Easy to make visual dashboards from SQL queries. Previously we had to use a third party application that had to run on a web server that was so complex to setup and run. PowerBI removes all that.
Ability to control who/which group has access to each dashboard or report. Ties in well with the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem.
Has many connectors to allow pulling data from various systems, both onsite (via gateway) or external (via APIs), and join the data to create a report/dashboard.
Ability to show data but also export the data, if permitted.
Easy to show PowerBI dashboards on SharePoint or on other websites via embedded code.
Licensing: Currently, Microsoft has a fixed pricing model for Office 365 users, regardless of role/function of the user. Most organizations have a small number of "power users" that create usable content and many more "consumers" that simply view/run reports created by power users. Microsoft does not differentiate between these users, and thus the pricing limits organizations from large deployments of the software.
Version incompatibility: Excel 2010 and 2013 workbooks are compatible with each other. However, workbooks created in 2010 that include PowerPivot databases must be upgraded to 2013 format to run in 2013. Subsequently, you cannot open these upgraded PowerPivot workbooks in 2010. This requires ALL users to be on the same version.
Visualization: Excel charting with PowerPivot workbooks is adequate for many users. Power View also contains a number of GREAT visualizations, including animated bubble charts and a very flexible dashboard/report design canvas. However, compared to some of the other self-service BI solutions, it is still limited in its visualization capabilities.
This was a long-term buy-in from a corporate perspective, to remain in the SharePoint space. Migration is certainly possible, which is good for planning and having options further out. At this point, the only planned migration is to eventually move the architecture up to SharePoint/SQL 2013. At that point, we will be able to leverage some greater efficiencies, some enhanced content design and management features, and some more current social features. It is well worth a full consideration in any shop looking at a new implementation of or migration to SharePoint (although you will probably be considering 2013 versions or beyond in those discussions), but the platform should be a strong competitor to any alternatives. Realizing the capability of a fully-branded and customized website was not part of the original choice for the architecture at Lincoln, but seeing it implemented and functioning now with this capacity far beyond original expectations has certainly cemented plans to continue using it.
I will continue to recommend this suite to folks looking for a reporting and analytics solution, as I find in MOST cases, it's great at meeting almost every requirement I've been given by a multitude of clients across a range of industries. I've built Capacity Planning solutions that allowed end user input which was then submitted to SharePoint, Executive Dashboards, custom applications, simple analytical tools for teams to easily slice and dice data, and super simple reports as well as some very complicated ones. If you haven't seen the demos online, do a search, and see for yourself - this is a great BI suite! (I do not work for Microsoft, although I do consult out there from time to time. I do occasionally make a recommendation for a different BI reporting tool, but in general, find Excel can accomplish quite a bit for less money and in less time.)
SharePoint is very complex. This makes usability somewhat difficult from an IT perspective. An IT generalist will be able to pick it up and run with basic tasks. More customized functions would require significant specialized training and therefore limit what a standard user would be able to achieve. From an end user perspective, it's pretty straightforward to use.
We are satisfied with the functionality and capabilities of Power BI. Product is cost effective and full-fill the reporting requirements of the organization. You can perform most of the report level complex analysis with the help of DAX which makes Power BI very powerful analytic tool. Power BI for Office 365 has gone away and Power BI is the next evolution of it. Power BI comes with your Office 365 E5 subscription or you can purchase licensing for it separately.
It's been fantastic in terms of Premier Support so far. If there is an issue and if you report if the product has an issue, they will act upon it immediately. In some cases, if you design/develop something using the platform, Microsoft appreciates it and... publishes it on their public website. But you have to wait for some time if it is a non-Premier Support issue as you may experience delays.
as of now there is strong community for Power BI, you can get solution for most of your problems from there. Also you can send your error to Microsoft as well. After every 15 days they release updates to overcome all the issues of defects.
At the time of the two large projects, SharePoint was the enterprise solution so we were required to use that. We have since lobbied the enterprise teams to review and consider Atlassian Confluence and were successful. Confluence is cheaper than Sharepoint which is why we wanted to bring that in. The enterprise has now made Confluence an enterprise solution as an alternative to SharePoint. After using both I think SharePoint has many more add-ins than Confluence. It has much more customization ability than Confluence. SharePoint is not good for mobile readiness. Confluence is so there is a difference that might lead you to Confluence over SharePoint. I would also say that SharePoint is very document-centric and that Confluence has better KM than SharePoint does. even with the use of SQL Server. We were told that we could not use Google Drive even though it had features we liked.
Oracle was nice, super expensive to implement if it's not in use already. JobDiva is choppy and heavy on the system while does not give great reports. Salesforce is good; remote access is good however their support is terrible
I've installed SharePoint in many different industries and each industry has seen greater collaboration among their teams both locally and nationally. The ability to collaborate more efficiently has reduced the need to have employees centrally located.
Companies which have used SharePoint in a end user training portal have had great ROI, since they can create the content once and share with all their users who subscribe to their training service. The web content management aspect of SharePoint is a very helpful feature.
As a Microsoft Partner implementing Business Intelligence solutions, Power BI has removed the barrier for our clients to begin the "BI journey". So often, projects get hung up in that early phase of procuring and installing/configuring expensive hardware and software. Just simply getting started and designing a beginning solution has allowed our clients to see results in 1-2 weeks using their data that might have taken months to achieve otherwise.
One significant ROI example is process improvement. In many cases, individuals or teams are spending days each month gathering data from multiple sources for reporting to their constituents. We are reducing these times to minutes by automating many of the data collection and integration processes that were previously manual.
