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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Roambi (discontinued)
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Roambi was a cloud-based solution designed specifically for mobile data consumers, used to create touch-based data visualizations. It was acquired by SAP in 2016 for the SAP Analytics portfolio, and has since been discontinued as a standalone product.
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.
Getting Roambi up to speed in your company certainly is a quick win. After just a few days, several of our reports were mobilized, interactive and automatically updated. Building Roambi reports is not hard to do; the intuitive interface allows virtually any type of user to create his or her own reports.
Report templates that are easy to learn, use, update and maintain.
Great looking reports that stay up-to-date with what Apple is producing. When Apple rolled out the new look and feel to their iOS7 release, Roambi created a brand new set of reports within two weeks to go along with the iOS7 changes.
Seamless integration with our existing BI environment, SAP Business Objects XI, 3.1. This drastically reduced the time from purchase to client-ready roll out from months to weeks.
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 would definitely use Roambi again because of its ease-of-use, but its lack of customization ability makes it difficult to recommend to businesses as business needs are always changing. People are picky, and on the Roambi project, we were not able to fully live up to the customer's expectations, limited by Roambi's preset limitations.
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.
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.
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.
We have compared Roambi against Business Objects, Reporting Services (on tablet) and Cubeware Cockpit. All those solutions lack in support of touch capabilities and responsiveness. Roambi "feels" just right. There is no training required and users love to explore the application. Compared to Roambi all other solutions feel very technical and hard to understand.
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.
Increased insights on customer success metrics (using a Layers report).
Higher motivation of employees, better communication towards employees, tighter bonds with the company - because of Roambi Flow. Periodic Flow magazines with analytic capabilities are sent out to the employees, as we value frequent and meaningful contact - both ways.
