MSBI : a new boom in the digital world!
I use MSBI specifically for data generation and data analytics. It has helped me to create a data way more simpler and easy to understand. …
Starting at $9.99 per user/per month
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What is Microsoft BI (MSBI)?
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.
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Popular Features
- Report sharing and collaboration (49)8.989%
- Report Formatting Templates (47)8.989%
- Formatting capabilities (49)8.080%
- Customizable dashboards (49)8.080%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Power BI Pro
$9.99
Cloud
per user/per month
Power BI Premium
4,995
Cloud
per month
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://powerbi.microsoft.com/pricing
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Features
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Product Details
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- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Microsoft BI (MSBI)?
Microsoft BI (MSBI) benefits from the ubiquity of SQL server and the set of tools built around the database, including an ETL layer, master data management, data cleansing, report and reporting.
The reporting engine is SQL Server Reporting Services which does not have the visualization capabilities of visualization tools like Tableau or Qlik. Excel has historically been the platform visualization tool. Power BI for Office 365 has done much to improve the discovery and visualization capabilities of Excel.
Microsoft now offers Power BI cloud as the visualization platform with geospatial 3D, natural-language query generation, and self-service ETL along with charting and other data visualizations that can be uploaded and shared through the Power BI service.
The Power BI platform also provides live access to on-premises Microsoft SQL Server instances, and self-service access to third-party cloud sources including Salesforce, Marketo, Zendesk, and GitHub. Mobility is supported through a native iPad app, an iPhone app.
This new platform is viewed by Microsoft as a visualization layer sitting on top of their earlier generation of installed SQL-based technology.
The reporting engine is SQL Server Reporting Services which does not have the visualization capabilities of visualization tools like Tableau or Qlik. Excel has historically been the platform visualization tool. Power BI for Office 365 has done much to improve the discovery and visualization capabilities of Excel.
Microsoft now offers Power BI cloud as the visualization platform with geospatial 3D, natural-language query generation, and self-service ETL along with charting and other data visualizations that can be uploaded and shared through the Power BI service.
The Power BI platform also provides live access to on-premises Microsoft SQL Server instances, and self-service access to third-party cloud sources including Salesforce, Marketo, Zendesk, and GitHub. Mobility is supported through a native iPad app, an iPhone app.
This new platform is viewed by Microsoft as a visualization layer sitting on top of their earlier generation of installed SQL-based technology.
Microsoft BI (MSBI) Competitors
Microsoft BI (MSBI) Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Oracle Analytics Server and Spoom are common alternatives for Microsoft BI (MSBI).
Reviewers rate Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile highest, with a score of 9.9.
The most common users of Microsoft BI (MSBI) are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Reviews and Ratings
(937)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 05, 2021
Powerful tool for data visualization
We are using Microsoft BI (MSBI) to visualize our data better and provide detailed insights on KPI. It also helps in building dashboards, which help key stakeholders analyze and make decisions on a regular basis. We have been able to use the tool as a starting step for our customers to provide them with useful insights and data. Data is the key thing that everyone wants. Some of our customers are even ready to pay more if we are able to provide them with detailed information.
- Dashbaords
- Data collaberation
- Multiple connectors
- GIS data
- Easy formula writing
- Needs to be easier to share and collaborate
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86.66666666666666%
8.7
82.5%
8.3
82%
8.2
70%
7.0
87.5%
8.8
93.33333333333334%
9.3
N/A
N/A
- Better presentation of data
- Cool visualization
- Easy to present data
The biggest player against Microsoft BI (MSBI) was Tableau, which was acquired by Salesforce. Recently there have been other standalone software/applications that provide similar functionality to Microsoft BI (MSBI). Because my company is a Microsoft shop, we have not explored other options. But I believe you can easily find other solutions. Google also has its own stack of applications that provide similar features to Microsoft BI (MSBI). Although I think Microsoft BI (MSBI) might be more powerful and resourceful than its competitors.
20
The majority of people who use this are the in the analytics department or are database managers. The other part of the team members who use it are the stakeholders, who use these charts to analyze the data and make important decisions on a daily basis. This type of information helps drive the business better.
We do not have any people that support Microsoft BI (MSBI). It is mainly done through online resources.
- Information sharing
- Data visualization
- Predictive analytics
- Data visualization
- Ease of sharing data
- Consistent reporting
- Predictive analystics
- GIS mapping
- Central hub for reporting
August 07, 2016
It's Excel for Big Data. So easy, so cheap, so fast, and powerful enough most everything.
Microsoft BI is, and seemingly shall be, the "BI Tool Of Tomorrow" forever. There are few people using it at my organization. In general, whenever I tell technically savvy people in the analytics/consulting space that there's a free visualization tool in Microsoft Excel that's 90-95% as good as Tableau, they are like "What?!" Then, they forget all about it in favor of expensive clunky tools and straight up coding.
Microsoft BI is a many-times-relabelled tool for visualization and lite analytics. It's like super duper Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts that let you work with big data. As an analytics tool per se, it's as good as Excel since it is Excel. I wouldn't do any analytics heavy lifting with it personally, but you can easily do algebra stuff and make derived variables. The real business benefit is visualization. It's just very easy and powerful.
Microsoft BI is a many-times-relabelled tool for visualization and lite analytics. It's like super duper Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts that let you work with big data. As an analytics tool per se, it's as good as Excel since it is Excel. I wouldn't do any analytics heavy lifting with it personally, but you can easily do algebra stuff and make derived variables. The real business benefit is visualization. It's just very easy and powerful.
- EASY visualization of business data. Excel is the killer app so anybody remotely good at basic office tools knows how to make PivotTables and PivotCharts. If you don't, it's really easy to learn; give it a try... People think big data visualization is hard but it's not for most business use cases.
- FAST visualization of business data. There are BI/Analytics tools out there, some of them beginning with the letter S, that are slooow. I do my taxes waiting for them to run basic queries/filters/charts. Microsoft BI (and Tableau, etc.) create compact data models to allow for pretty fast data loading and slicery.
- FREE or at least REALLY CHEAP visualization of business data. Who has MS Office on their business computer? Oh, everybody. If you don't have Office Pro, pony up for that or get the monthly license. The bigness of data you can run on your own machine is fairly big; don't use cloud if you don't need it. By comparison, who enjoys throwing thousands of dollars away on bloated legacy BI software? Well, too many companies, apparently.
- More than two dimensions. Yes, I know that 2D is the core of Excel's DNA. However, we're starting to deal with higher-dimensional arrays here in analytics land so better visualization support would be cool.
- UI weirdness. By default, you are flipping back between regular Excel tabs and super-top-secret BI tabs. You create charts in one place, but look at them in the other. That kind of stuff. I know there are a couple of other ways to interact with Microsoft BI, but please figure out the main way.
- Better hookups to other analytics tools including Microsoft's. Microsoft BI has a good variety of data connections, and I don't expect it to bloom into a full-fledged analytics tool, but it may be a good idea to keep hammering at connectivity with "hardcore" analytics. In my case, Python stuff.
- Tableau Desktop, Google Analytics, Google Charts, SAP Crystal Reports, SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Analytics, QlikView and D3.js
Looking at the visualization portion of BI, there are three types of tools.
- Programming packages. Free and powerful, they let you make any diagram, at the cost of difficulty of use.
- Specialist software like Tableau and Microsoft BI. This is the best choice in most cases due to ease of use and quality of output.
- More generic software offered by the big IT companies, often part of a BI suite. There's really a lot of variety here. Use this when it fits the workflow and you are already using the relevant software. But, personally, I'd still use the specialist software.
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100%
10.0
72.5%
7.3
60%
6.0
56.66666666666667%
5.7
50%
5.0
N/A
N/A
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20
That "20" is my best guess. We have over 100 people doing analytics here and I'm not exactly going to do a census. Some of us use Excel in its fancy capacity, but most just use Excel as Excel.
Again, if you don't count IT support for the database side of things, I am having difficulty imagining why one would need support for Power BI any more than one would need support for chewing one's food.
- Familiarity. It's Excel. It's a spreadsheet. Come on.
- Thinking in matrices (PivotTables) takes a little getting used to, but it's not hard. For people without a good high school math background, it may seem unintuitive.
- Charts and PivotCharts are fairly easy, but Microsoft has a ways to go to make them less ugly.
- Data source connections. It's sometimes difficult to replace and update connections.
- Dropping certain types of fields into the Pivot Table (example: default aggregation type for values).
- The weird interface. Microsoft tried to have it both ways by using the standard Excel interface for some tasks, and the "Power" interface for others. It's just awkward, cumbersome, and confusing.
January 15, 2016
Great value for money with Microsoft's BI
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- SQL Server Management Studio provides a nice interface to view, query, and modify the database tables. The interface is user friendly and logical.
- Microsoft, in general, has fantastic educational pricing. This allowed the TCO to be much lower for our university.
- Microsoft tools integrate nicely with one another. We are also in the process of implementing SharePoint. We plan to use SSRS (.rdl) reports which will integrate with SharePoint - and also will have the ability to experiment with PowerView (.rdlx) dashboards and PowerPivot (Microsoft's in-memory BI tool).
- The end-user reporting tool, Report Builder, is not that flexible. We feel that the Cognos Report Studio tool is more robust in this area.
IBM Cognos, Informatica,and MicroStrategy. We picked the Microsoft solution primarily due to the best TCO and match for our requirements.
- Firstly, reduction in cost from the three previous vendors which we were supporting. Just by replacing these legacy pieces of software, we have saved money.
- We are working to quantify the cost savings achieved in business improvement from the reporting that we have provided. We don't have a specific figure as of yet, but the reports that are now available 'on-the-fly' have saved many man hours. Previously, data needed to be consolidated across multiple systems which could have taken weeks of manual manipulation. Now, this data is available in one platform and we have cross-functional reporting capability.
3000
Finance, Human Resources, Admissions, Student Services, and Advancement
8
We have 4 BI developers, 2 report writers, 1 hardware infrastucture, and 1 database adminstrator supporting the project.
- We use the database platform to warehouse the data from our disparate admissions, student information, human resources, finance, and advancement systems.
- SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is used to move the data from these ERPs into staging - then onto our dimension model and SSAS cubes.
- SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is used to report on this dimensional data and provide parameterized, drill-through reporting.
- SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is used to build cubes for specific functional areas. These cubes can then connect back to the dimensional data as required for drill-through analysis.
- Using the enterprise version, we leveraged data-driven subscriptions. This feature allows you to publish reports to specific individuals or groups based upon data events. This has become useful for a wide variety of things. In a previous company, I used this feature to drive process improvements by notifying teams of early task completion. In some cases, we were able to drive a process that typically took 4 weeks down to a process that only took 2.5 weeks. That led to revenue gains.
- Since Microsoft BI contains an out-of-the-box ETL tool (SSIS), we've been able to leverage this functionality to help support other projects. Recently, we created a SalesForce integration to Workday.
- We have been able to setup nightly data feeds using SSIS which extract known sets of data for our statisticians. While the data isn't formatted in SAS dataset, it outputs the data in a common format that is easy for the statisticians to consume and transform into a useful SAS dataset.
Prior to running Microsoft Business Intelligence, Georgetown was running multiple products to support our BI efforts. We had Informatica in place to handle ETL, Oracle 11g as a database platform, and Cognos 10.2 as our reporting engine.
- Implemented in-house
- Professional services company
We utilized a combination of our in-house staff and a professional services company named Entigence.
- Self-taught
We had Microsoft SQL BI specialists on staff. We would advise to have training on the platform otherwise.
No
We have in house resources that can support the platform.
- Ellucian Banner.
- Workday HCM.
- Workday Financials.
- PeopleSoft Admissions.
- Apply Yourself.
- Sage Millennium.
Each system had to be analyzed separately. ETL routines were written separately for each system. It was tedious and complex.
- We will continue to support systems that are key pillars to our business units.
Yes, Microsoft BI will support these future integrations.
Utilize Microsoft's Higher Education EES (Enrollment for Education Soulutions) licensing. This is a great value.
March 10, 2015
Microsoft BI platform review
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Easy development tools with ability to support large data.
- Features of the predictive analytics are not the best in the industry yet.
Oracle
- Rapid report development, simple web-based reporting tools, easy support, common development techniques.
60
Line managers, internal auditors, department managers, senior staff and executives.
5
Application support, reporting developers and business analysts.
- SQL Server Data Warehouse and Microsoft BI platform allow us to collect data from transactional sources, transform to reportable format, and aggregate to a level that can be used to measure business operational metrics.
Consolidated SQL Server 2005, QlikView and Beacon reporting tools on SQL Server 2012 platform.
- Implemented in-house
- Self-taught
Yes, it was a simple deployment due to ease of the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) UI.
No
No need to. Have not had any issues that would warrant premium support needs.
- Microsoft SharePoint
Yes
Defined price versus value, and finalized support terms.
February 04, 2015
Why is Microsoft BI Right for Me?
Microsoft BI that is part of SQL Server 2014 is very easy to install and configure in either a department or enterprise setting. I have experience in both scenarios with multiple different clients in various industries. There is also a lot flexibility in how you install/configure the Microsoft BI tools, depending on what type of solutions you are looking to implement. If you need just an ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) solution to get a data mart up and running using data from multiple sources or if you need a quick web based reporting solution. You have the options to put each of the Microsoft BI tools on separate servers (virtual or physical) or one server and you can then scale out or up on each of these options as needed over time. All of the tools use a standard set of development tools provided either with SQL Server or available for free from Microsoft's website. These tools are all using the Visual Studio engine and provide a very easy to learn environment, especially for those that have done any development in Visual Studio in the past. The end users will be able to easily interact with the solutions you build either through the web or in tools they are most familiar with like Excel.
- SSIS is by far the easiest and most efficient ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) tool available, after trying many different tools over the years there is no tool that is more flexible and easier to develop solutions with. What takes days/weeks or longer to setup in other tools can be done in at least half the time and perform better.
- SSRS is one of the best web reporting tools available for companies of any size that doesn't require you to re-architect your entire existing database structure. SSRS can connect to all of the major databases and work with data from multiple of them all in the same report. For web reporting that needs to be up and running fast, but be secure and easy to develop on there is no better tool available today.
- SSAS is for more in depth analysis of your data and it has the same capabilities as all other Microsoft tools to connect to multiple data sources and present the data to the user in standardized format. Most users will love that they can access so much of the companies data in Excel using the PivotTables that they probably already use today, but now you are controlling the data and know that it is the correct data. With the new Tabular capabilities in SQL Server 2012 and up it allows end users to help build the initial version of these complex data structures which can then be migrated over to IT to add security, automation and quality control to the final solution.
- The development tools for Microsoft BI in SQL Server 2012 and up are in a bit of flux at the moment. Initially with SQL Server 2012 they were all fully integrated and available with the installer, but now they have moved to it being a separate web download that you have know which version you need to get it working correctly with the version of SQL Server you are working on. Thankfully all of these tools still use Visual Studio as the starting point, but it would be nice to see the tools better integrated going forward and still able to be updated on a regular basis.
- SSRS has not seen any major updates in the last couple of versions of SQL Server and it could really benefit from some of the new advancements that Microsoft has made with the Power BI line of products that are only available if you use the cloud based Office 365 service. It would be really nice to see some of the features that are available in Power BI added to SSRS to make it a more complete web based reporting tool and more accessible to end users as well as IT.
Microsoft BI provides the most flexibility and best integration across of the products in the SQL Server Microsoft BI Suite (and with other Microsoft tools). The tools are flexible enough to work just as well in a small group as they are in a large enterprise and without having to re-learn the products to fit those different scenarios. All of the tools in the SQL Server Microsoft BI stack are provided with one licenses (assuming you install everything on one server) and all of the development tools required are available for free if they they aren't included with the main installer. The Microsoft BI tools will work with most of the major database systems out of the box and if it doesn't, there is a very active 3rd party software environment that develops free or paid add-ons that will cover the options that Microsoft doesn't out of the box. The tools are easy to learn and use and updated on a very regular basis. There is always the flexibility to add or take away from the products installed as part of a Microsoft BI solution, so you never have to be locked into using only the tools provided by Microsoft.
70
Consultants, Business Analysts, Project Managers, Directors and C Level, it is being used at all levels for all functions of our business and it keeps getting used more and more with the new Power BI functionality that has made it available for mobile as well as laptops/desktops. We use it to drive our business and keep us up-to-date on our bottom line and make sure all of our projects/clients working well.