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.
$9.99
per user/per month
Visier
Score 6.1 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
An aspirant leader in Workforce Planning and Analytics, Visier offers technology built to deliver fast, clear people insight, starting with the right questions. With best-practice expertise built-in, users can take action and understand gaps in the data. By connecting all the right people and business data to reveal correlations, connections, and root causes, Visier aims to bring clarity to business leaders. Visier invites users to gain insight between employee experience and organizational…
Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones) Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.
Visier People is well-suited for organizations that require the ability to record thorough information on analytics of the company, and to have the change of measuring training's productivity impact. The software isn't well-suited for those who tend to feature a lot of models into the software as the platform doesn't record/support most models, so some data isn't able to be recorded.
The database is very complete and detailed, thus being able to enhance a deep analysis of each user.
The Visier dashboard is extremely attractive and friendly, helping staff understand every detail of the analyzes conducted on the company's workforce.
Despite not being a great and complete solution to work with HR within this platform, however, data can be shared to exchange information between the head of each department of the company and HR staff and to speed up the analysis process and determine what to do with a low-performing employee.
It excellently determines the productivity of each employee and also determines risk by monitoring patterns and behavior.
The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.
Visier is a people analytics tool, so all data points are tied to employees. It can be difficult to analyze data points that aren't tied to employees (e.g., certain job data) since the data is driven by people metrics.
Visier releases updates quarterly. While this cadence does provide room for updates and enhances to be implemented in the tool throughout the year, other software providers operate on a more continuous update schedule.
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.
It is a software with great resources, it increases the possibility that the entire workforce is productive, it gives us quick answers, it is the most powerful workforce analysis software that exists so far.
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.
It is a high quality software to use, it is easy to use, it drives our needs to improve our workforce, the analyzes are in real time and directly benefit us when we require specific personnel for our labor departments. It has an intuitive interface that is also very simple for new users.
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.
While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.
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.
Visier can move as quickly or as slowly as the client needs. The topic-by-topic approach separates the project in clear phases and allows for focus on specific data. Depending on the size of the implementation team, implementation could move more rapidly if the subject matter experts are responsible for the individual topic data sets.
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.
Visier People has a user-friendly interface and easy-to-use virtualization as compared to other similar tools available in the market. It also provides multiple prebuild templates for HR and workforce analytics which reduces the time and effort required for manual implementation. It can seamlessly be integrated with other ranges of HR and business systems to make it easier for organizations to centralize the workforce and HR data for analysis.
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.
In one case, we were able to realize a 25% reduction in turnover in a key job group by leveraging the insights we derived from Visier workforce analytics.
In one case, we were able to identify key turnover trends that would place a business' strategy at risk (due to the fact that turnover was in revenue-generating roles).
In both businesses I've used Visier, we were able to significantly reduce manual reporting (by more than 80%), enabling our data analysts to do more consultative work (vs. query generating work) with HR business partners.
