January 15, 2016
Microsoft BI Review: "Great value for money with Microsoft's BI"
Likelihood to Renew
10
TrustRadius
MicrosoftGreat value for money with Microsoft's BI2013-10-07T19:32:03.323ZSQL 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.,9,,10,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.,3000,8,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.,,Implemented in-house
Professional services company,8,Self-taught,We had Microsoft SQL BI specialists on staff. We would advise to have training on the platform otherwise.,10,No,8,10,7,Ellucian Banner.
Workday HCM.
Workday Financials.
PeopleSoft Admissions.
Apply Yourself.
Sage Millennium.,We will continue to support systems that are key pillars to our business units.,Utilize Microsoft's Higher Education EES (Enrollment for Education Soulutions) licensing. This is a great value.Robert GoodmanMicrosoft BI provides the best bang for your buck, now and into the future.2014-06-07T17:26:51.760ZNeudesic is a Microsoft Gold-Certified partner. One of our practices is Business Productivity, which includes SharePoint and SQL BI. The Microsoft Business Intelligence "stack" includes SQL Server for data management, including ETL (Integration Services), storage (SQL Server RDBMS engine) and a business semantic model (Analysis Services)Office 2013 and higher, specifically Excel 2013, for data presentation, management and analyticsPowerBI Developer for data presentationPowerBI for Office 365 provides a nice open security repository for Excel and Power BI data views.SharePoint 2013, as a shared portal platform, using included Reporting and Analytics site templates.SharePoint includes PerformancePoint, which is a very useful data analysis tool for Analysis Services cubes.,One Stop Shopping: Single solution provider provides tight integration between data storage, data manipulation, data processing and presentation. Instead of buying an RDBMS from one provider, data processing tools from another vendor, and presentation tools from yet another, the entire application stack is provided by Microsoft.
Value: Compared to other RDBMS vendors, Microsoft BI tools are more cost-effective because all the tools needed are included in the purchase of Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint and Office. SQL Server even has a Business Intelligence Edition!
Performance: The SQL Server RDBMS is a top-tier data management solution. Ancillary tools like Integration Services (SSIS), Analysis Services (SSAS), Reporting Services (SSRS), PerformancePoint are mature, full featured and include lots of performance monitoring and high availability options. The newer Power BI tools have made tremendous strides in stability and usability since their introduction last year.
HDInsight and Azure BLOB storage offer a new paradigm for storing and querying data sets of all sizes. Flat files are stored in inexpensive storage, and HDInsight Hive allows "schema over file" table structures and near-ANSI SQL queries. This provides an inexpensive, very fast way to process data from web logs, large call center logs, and other large data volume data sets without importing into a database. Once the processing is complete, the HDInsight cluster (up to 64 nodes) is dropped, leaving the data intact.
Azure Hybrid Scenarios: Microsoft is rapidly migrating their business offerings to Azure. Business Intelligence is no exception.
Many new features in SQL Server 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014 are designed to allow seamless management of both on-premise and cloud-based data,From Infrastructure As a Service (IaaS) options like virtual servers for development and test to Power BI for Office 365 sites that revolutionize how data is shared and accessed, Microsoft is making significant investments in the next generation of cloud-based solutions.,Power BI maturity: Power BI is a combination of add-ons for Microsoft Excel and a special Office365 hosting site. However, the primary presentation tool, Power View, has a long way to go to catch up with such competitors as Tableau and even Microsoft's current analytics platform, PerformancePoint. To address these concerns, Power BI releases are being scheduled out-of-band from normal version upgrades in order to address requirements of the user community.
Office 365: There are currently size limitations, like a 250GB max for PowerPivot worksheets, which might cause issues with organizations who want to utilize very large data sets with Power BI.
Messaging: Some of the marketing and best practices around the new cloud-based solutions are unclear, making it difficult for someone who doesn't work in the BI world to understand the benefits and the architecture for such solutions.
Multiple data manipulation languages: Currently there are four or five distinct query languages in the Microsoft BI stack: T-SQL for SQL Server, MDX and DAX for Analysis Services, and the Power Query Formula Language for Power Query. In Integration Services, there is yet another language used in some of the tasks. That seems to be a lot to keep abreast of!,10,,10Chris Utter"MS BI" = $$$2014-05-30T14:12:49.083ZMicrosoft BI is used intensely by Engineering department. The whole product is built around with Microsoft BI stack. The database is built using SQL Server 2008 R2 and cubes built using SSAS. Delivers the SaaS model of the company.,Some of the rolling metrics calculations are performed using SSAS cubes. Eg: YoY, YTD, etc
Slicing and Dicing of reports becomes increasingly simple with the SSAS cubes.
ETL operations are made nimble with SQL server 2008 R2,Some of the newer aggregation functions that are used in advanced analytics are missing. Eg: lastNonEmpty ()
SSAS (from the BI Stack) adapters to interact with MPP are not entirely nimble,8,,4,Overall business went up with the analytics offered by MS BI but the licensing costs are a substantial number.Senthil VallinayagamWhy is Microsoft BI Right for Me?2014-09-11T18:44:41.245ZMicrosoft 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.,10,,10,I have implemented Microsoft BI in small departments with less than 10 people all the way up to full enterprise deployments with multiple IT groups and 1000's of users. The only difference will be what of the provided Microsoft BI tools will you use and how many servers will it all be installed on. Once it is setup it is very easy to keep up-to-date and even expand in the future. Some of the tools do need more IT involvement to get up and running, but once it is setup and working it can easily go into a hands-off setup and just works. I have been oncall support for an enterprise SSRS deployment that was on multiple servers across multiple data centers and only received calls of issues once or month or less and most of time those were cause by human error and not following the procedures that were established.,10,8,8,70Steve WakeMicrosoft BI -- Say GoodBI to the Competition for the Moment.2015-02-03T19:42:00.578ZNorthcraft Analytics use Microsoft BI for IT Performance Management analysis, along with other visualization and analysis technologies such as Tableau, Microstrategy and Qlikview (to a limited extent). Northcraft Analytics is a provider of BI platform independent applications, so we support our customers across a wide range of verticals leveraging Microsoft Analysis Services/XML/A as the core of our Hybrid Olap (HOLAP) architecture, along with the data warehouse. Some key use cases for analysis would include:- Incident Assignment Bottleneck Analysis- Service Level Agreement Breach Identification and Probabilistic Prediction- Configuration Management Analysis - Aging, Mean Time Between Incident and Adoption AnalysisNorthcraft Analytics helps our customer base leverage their existing technology investments to analyze and improve IT performance.,Connecting andJoining Multiple Data Sources Together - Multi-Dimensional SSAS
Usability in Report Creation for Business Analysts (Excel via Analysis Services specifically), Executives (Performance Point and Power BI) and Power Users (Report Builder)
Collaboration (via SharePoint only, before the release of Power BI Designer)
Speed of Analysis - Specifically when leveraging SSAS on databases up to 5 TB
Speed of ETL processing - Multiple Parallel Sequential Jobs with SSIS/DTS,Parallel Sequential job Processing within the SSIS GUI, not using DTS
More Options for non-SharePoint portal Integration
Reporting Services performance browser rendering time for reports,9,SAP Business Objects,Tableau Server,MicroStrategy Analytics,Oracle BI Foundation Suite,10,It's deployed in departmental and company-wide implementations through our customer base. In the global 2000, we typically find either Microsoft or SAP as the corporate standard. There is probably a bit more SAP than Microsoft out there, particularly for ROLAP implementations. When MOLAP is leveraged, there are more Microsoft customers.,10,9,9Lee CullomMicrosoft BI platform review2013-10-15T22:50:28.301ZEasy development tools with ability to support large data.,Features of the predictive analytics are not the best in the industry yet.,9,,10,Rapid report development, simple web-based reporting tools, easy support, common development techniques.,60,5,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.,,Implemented in-house,9,Self-taught,Yes, it was a simple deployment due to ease of the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) UI.,9,No,8,9,9,7,Microsoft SharePoint,Defined price versus value, and finalized support terms.Boris SkylarThoughts on MS BI2013-08-28T21:34:31.379ZOverall it is a robust BI platform that is not difficult for a technically-oriented person to learn and use.
I am a huge fan of Analysis Services and actively try to find ways to get data into cubes for reporting. While learning MDX may be one of the more difficult aspects of MS BI, it is powerful and anyone who has prior experience using T-SQL alone to build complex reports can appreciate its power.,I have been disappointed in how all the front-end delivery tools have been centered around Excel and SharePoint. I understand it from a business sense but I much preferred the ProClarity interface as a stand-alone ad-hoc reporting tool. Many end-users are intimidated by merely mentioning pivot tables and therefore do not even try to create their own queries.,9,10,8,7,We use Microsoft BI products to publish accounting reports and automatically generate general ledger journal entries to distribute departmental expenses.,Implemented in-house,7,In-person training
Self-taught,5,Yes, the product was fairly easy to learn without training. There are some professionals that could use this approach as well depending on their learning styles. With all the information available, I generally recommend this approach.,4Stephanie GriceMicrosoft Power BI - Excel Lovers Dream2014-08-28T16:00:13.733ZWe use Microsoft Power BI across all departments in our company. Power BI is used in reporting and data mining. This allows us to see trends and to identify areas of concern with in our hospital systems that we currently serve. The distribution through Microsoft SharePoint allows for a high adoption rate.,Ease of use: For end user Microsoft Power BI is incredibly easy to use. Excel is simple for most people. The presentation through SharePoint gives users with any medium the ability to instantly use the dashboards. End users are able to use mobile, local and just about anyway they would choose.
High Adoption Rate: We had a very high adoption rate causing many of our users to be incredibly engaged. The adoption of is due to many users already familiar with the tools they grew up on. If you grew up on Excel, then you will instantly feel at home in the tools. The new add ons are rarely a challenge even for novice users.
Mapping functions: The mapping functions are one of the cooler features. Power Maps automatically recognizes zip codes and other addresses much like other packages. The one item I really liked was the ability to create a movie file that would play over time showing the growth across a map through the different areas. Saved as a MP4 then blended with music made this function particularly delicious for many of our end users.
The Gateway: MS has provided a really cool little trick. The Gateway. I will explain this part later in my review.,On the occasion some of the plug ins run unusually slow. I don't know if it's because they run in Silver Light or what. :) The plug ins have locked up more than once (once a week). My installation got so slow that I had to actually reinstall a couple of times over the past year. Is this a show stopper? For me, it was not. There are other features that keep me glued in. The office repair utility makes the re install a snap and if you are a realistic Microsoft fan, then you almost come to expect it.
The natural Language selection: We are a MS SQL house and we love MS. We have the skills for high end SQL statements with a full development staff but we still wanted to try the natural language selection tool. To no avail. We tried redoing the data and that did not work either. I'd call this beta still.
I would like to see them improve their visualizations. They are Microsoft and can easily compete with some of the visualizations of Micro Strategy, Tableau and Domo. They simply choose not to.,9,,8,7,Mapping: Power Maps and Power Views displayed as Maps are awesome. The drill down ability into those is one of my favorites of showing.
The ability to add other plugins from the apps store can be very nice as well. There are several of those visualizations that are very nice.
Dashboards can be very easy to create but what is elegant? There is a Power BI app for Windows 8 that was compelling enough run VMWARE inside of a Mac. Very slick presentation of the same data as online but not as slick can be.,Understanding the license model. As an example we found it very hard figure out exactly what constitutes someone needing a license to even read file from SharePoint and not needing one. There were several occasions that we published what we thought was clean data and the end consumer would not need to have a license only to find out that the user would still be required to have a license. Sounds simple enough to understand but it was not.
There are a few features that should translate all the way through Power BI from Excel. As an example Power BI can recognize types of data like Zip codes but even dates in Power View, Power Pivot are not able to be 'Grouped by" by qtr or month. If you are going to group on those you have to add it to the dbase. Yet, Excel will easily group on those in a normal pivot table.
HTML5 versions of the presentation on the web have the jitters. very difficult to zoom in our out with any browser or versions of browsers. Stick with the regular version and wait for the HTML 5 version to be updated.,Yes,8Sean WarrenBest TCO of any comprehensive database and analytics platform2013-09-12T19:34:44.820ZThe Microsoft Business Intelligence stack has come a very long way since its inception. For value and TCO there's really no comparison. Where other vendors charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for database systems, ETL tools, MDM solutions, reporting portals, etc. Microsoft ties all this functionality and more together for the price of just one of those components. Developers that know the toolset well are readily available worldwide and at a lower cost than those with expertise in competing platforms. In partnership with both Dell and HP, Microsoft has recommended reference architectures running on commodity hardware to create highly performant, highly available warehousing and OLTP systems. The SharePoint layer adds a rich user interface and collaboration platform for analytics, data discovery, reporting (both ad-hoc and scheduled) and data driven subscriptions.,The Microsoft platform - today - comes up short in cross-platform delivery. While efforts are being made to port the Power BI tools to HTML5, so far these tools are only available with this rendering engine in the online (O365) version of the platform. Silverlight is a dying technology, and it can be frustrating to explain the design and interop limitations of the end user facing dashboard tools. For true styled enterprise dashboarding where the look and feel of the artifacts is important (external audiences), it's often necessary to turn to a Microsoft partner tool such as Dundas to augment the stack. These problems will resolve themselves over time, but right now Microsoft comes up short in this area.
The MDM solution in the Microsoft toolset, Master Data Services, is effectively a blank slate. This is both a strength and a weakness, in that you can model any data domain imaginable without being pushed in a particular direction but having some basic customer or other key domains available either via Codeplex or otherwise would be helpful. Additionally, record lineage isn't handled well OOTB in MDS and this key function shouldn't require a custom implementation.,10,,10,Traditional "canned" reporting.
Online transaction processing systems.
Data warehousing.
High availability.
Self-service analytics.
Collaborative decision making.,,Implemented in-house,9,Online training
In-person training
Self-taught,8,8,I'm always an advocate of self-learning. Training is an opportunity to catch things you missed and get answers to questions that have arisen through your use, not a primary vehicle for mastering a tool.,No,7Jacob SaundersMicrosoft - Your Old Trusted Friend?2014-09-25T20:56:04.547ZWe see Microsoft BI used at many organisations and it seems to be just another obvious answer when it comes to decisions about technology - Microsoft is very firmly embedded in many companies. Reminds me a bit of my parents who still think "Microsoft" is synonymous with "Computer". What I would really like to know is how much Microsoft BI as a set of tools is a conscious choice rather than historical decision or a habit?,Users might complain about products and technologies but somehow it seems Microsoft is an accepted standard. The brand is very strong, people just don't question it and forgive 'bugs' more readily than they might with other products.
It is an easy choice to buy a Microsoft product - people are less likely to challenge this decision. Again, simply due to strong brand recognition users often feel comfortable with the tools.,SQL Server Data Integration (also knows as SSIS) seems to provide most functionality you would expect from an ETL tool. However, when you start using it you quickly find out that most transformations perform slower than equivalent functionality when coded directly in SQL. So you go ahead with creating joins, using case statements and data type conversions directly in SQL input statements and potentially end up with a huge piece of code that performs nicely but is hardly maintainable in the future.
The development environment takes quite a while to get used to. Once you are all set up and doing your development work it is all fine but if you accidentally close some window or 'pane' just figuring out how to get it back can take quite some time.,1,Pentaho,5,High adoption rates is one of the points Microsoft itself is using to market their product. http://www.microsoft.com/education/en-au/solutions/Pages/business-intelligence.aspx,3,6,2Julia GusmanMicrosoft BI - A good all around suite of products for the traditional data environment2014-09-14T18:14:45.729ZThe reports I put together in SSRS were used by multiple departments totaling over 50 business users. SSIS was used by 3 individuals in the IT department including myself. I deployed reports to the SSRS Report Server which were viewed in a browser on the company's intranet. The reports could be viewed, downloaded in multiple formats (PDF, XLS, CSV, TIFF), subscribed to via email, scheduled to be received on a interval of the user's choosing.
The business problems that it addresses are:
1. How do our customers feel about us (based on customer satisfaction surveys)
2. How well are we managing our operations?
3. How well are we utilizing our resources?
4. How well are the salespeople doing (based on daily rankings)
5. How profitable were we last week, month, quarter, year...
The list goes on...,The interfaces of the products are familiar to most people that currently use Microsoft products so its comfortable in that respect
Creating a report is easy to do with drag/drop functionality. You also have alot of dropdowns. You can use formulas the same way you do in Excel. They have "expressions" which are like formulas with a mix of SQL.
Publishing a report to the server is simple as well. You go to the server and upload the file from your file directory.
Setting up subscriptions is simple as well. Anyone can do it with minimal knowledge. Its sort of like creating a recurring calendar event.
The hierarchy within SSRS is intuitive. A Project is the top level item. You can add as many reports as you want to a project. Similar to any other IDE where you keep all your files in one project (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSP, Servlet) except in the case of SSRS its all reports.
Whether you choose to use 2008 or 2012 the interface is layed pretty much the same. So if you start of in 2008 and then upgrade, you dont have to re-learn anything. Their are slight differences in the two versions but it wont hinder your ability to build a report.,Its not a web based application yet. So you have to install the client application on your local machine. In addition, you pretty much have to install a the full SSMS package. Its a heavy weighted suite of products
Compared to Tableau you are limited in your dashboard building ability. In SSRS you have to build a master report along with a subreport where these two items have to have a key that links them together. From there you can break up the screen into multiple quadratics with your visualization.
If someone wants to view the report on their iPad, you have to make sure that the subscription for their report is in PDF or CSV format. If its in Excel and they dont have Excel on their iPad, they cant view it. If its in CSV, I believe the report will open up in the iPads native spreadsheet app.
When you are stuck while building a report, the forums for Microsoft pretty much suck. Their technical articles suck also. Microsoft support is pretty much non-existent.,8,Tableau Desktop,Tableau Server,Crystal Reports,SAP Business Objects,8,It was the main reporting tool used by all the different departments. It was used by the Executive level, operations, marketing, sales. Number of users were probably around 50. Types of users: VP's, Directors, Managers, Analysts.,5,8,5Mashhood SyedWhy I Love Microsoft BI.2015-03-30T14:44:29.829ZMicrosoft BI is used in our organization for data analysis and reporting. It Is used in IT department that supports business. It is really a great tool for BI and makes complex analysis very easy.,User Friendly
Fast
Reliable,Improve Data Visualization,7,Pentaho,Crystal Reports,jasper,7,Number of users = 500. Company Wide.,7,7Asif ParachaMicrosoft BI entering 21st century for its analytical capabilities2014-11-06T20:54:35.711ZMicrosoft BI allows us to blend the data exactly the way we want. Using the various add-ins provided (PowerPivot, PowerQuery, PowerView), we can design clean and scalable reports to take actionable decisions. Business problems addressed? Represent into a single chart 6 different data sources!,Create relationships between data sources
Automatic updates when new data are fetched,Ease of use, especially for non-technical people like me.,10,Tableau Server,10,Not widely used. It's being deployed across the organization.,7,8,10Jerome Lambert, PhDTools and Integration2013-07-11T15:58:48.268ZETL and Cube reporting through Excel are the two main functions where Microsoft BI excels.,Without Sharepoint, web reporting is not very robust. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) provides limited functionality but, without Sharepoint integration, Microsoft BI doesn't match up well against other products.,8,,9,Financial month-end reporting.
HR Resource and Manager reporting
Ticket resolution and project management tracking. Data is pulled from 4 different systems and loaded into SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) for reporting.
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) - Used for data integration across multiple systems.,No,Vendor implemented
Implemented in-house,8,In-person training,8,Yes,9Shawn LeeMicrosoft BI2014-09-19T14:34:45.769ZMicrosoft BI is used by everyone in my organisation as a back-end solution. We use different tools which use SQL Server and SSIS as an ETL platform and SSAS only to store Cubes for further processing with Excel or any other tool supporting SSAS.,Quite nice ETL options in SSIS that enable a lot of flexibility.
Powerful user rights management.,Ease of use - this tool is difficult to use.
Native visualization tool - Excel is too unstable.,4,3,Everyone uses it around my company. Mostly as BI professionals that use it to create BI solutions.,2,3,3Michał BeckerUseful but reporting could be more sexy...2014-09-12T16:40:05.156ZMicrosoft BI is being used by 2 departments: Financial Controlling and Quality. It addresses financial reporting issues on a monthly basis and overall quality reporting in terms of SLA and customer answers.,Integration process in IT Architecture
Ability to adapt with process,Graphical standard reporting
Using on premise, could be great to use it in the cloud,6,,6,Poorly adopted by users. Mostly caused by project priorities focused on technical aspect and not on reports and dashboards for final users.,8,4,1Frederic Freyermuth ☁Microsoft BI and Parallel Data Warehouse in Ambulatory Healthcare2014-04-05T18:59:46.303ZWe are currently using Microsoft's Parallel Data Warehouse and BI solution across the whole organization. The Alliance hosts an EMR for a network of community health centers. Each health center's data is warehoused on the platform. We also exchange data with organizations outside our network. Like most data warehouse solutions, the problem it addresses is the aggregations and collection of data in a central location. Since the Alliance operates in the healthcare industry we use the tools for patient quality and performance improvement. We have a longer term goal of introducing healthcare analytics.,The parallel data warehouse is a massive storage appliance with exceptional speed.
The platform is all Microsoft and integrates well with all other Microsoft products and infrastructure.
Microsoft's support of the product has been outstanding.,Power View is a quick and easy tool to use for developing dynamic dashboards but lacks some very basic features. The color scheme and styles are applied across all views with no method for choosing which colors apply to certain objects. Users cannot rename visual components, you must make sure you cube field have the names you intend end users to see.
Report Builder allows for quite a bit of customization but we found it be missing some the features that make other application like Crystal Reports so easy to use. Simple features such as moving columns within a table can be a bit frustrating. Formatting text and writing formulas (expressions) is easier in Crystal Reports.
Parallel Data Warehouse is not a true SQL Server 2012 database and is missing much of the SQL Server 2012 feature set.,7,Cleaner, more accurate data returned to end users.
Better decision making.
Increased control over data.,Microsoft BI vs SAP Business Objects,9Nathan Patrick TaylorMicrosoft BI tool provides the visibility into the business that could make strategic decisions at a low cost with ease of implementation.2014-07-21T21:16:01.551ZMicrosoft BI is being utilized throughout the organization. Executive management and sales representatives are looking not only at sales but profitability all the way down to the transaction level. Product Management continues to look and analyze profitability at the product level as well. The company has been “healthier” since implementing Microsoft BI from a profitability and cash standpoint.,Easy to use and create KPI's with Dashboards for a wide user base
Pulling data from multiple sources via Excel
Easily supportive
Low cost to maintain,More end user friendly Dashboard designer.,10,Provided visibility at the Transactions level from a profitability standpoint
Sales reps are now using BI Dashboards to measure their success not just net sales
Company now measures customers from as well at a profitability standpoint,,10Scott LernerMicrosoft BI- Delivering Power2014-05-30T15:18:39.936ZWe use Microsoft BI to build out platforms that allow a wide range of users and audiences to interact with relevant data in near real time. This allows the users to make better business decisions enabling them to increase sales, manage expenses, and avoid risks.,Microsoft BI is very easy to use and provides a number of interfaces that allow developers to build out solutions in the manner that is easiest for them. Development can be done nearly entirely through GUI interfaces, or you can do advanced programming and application integration.
Microsoft BI provides enterprise class Business Intelligence for a fraction of the price of their competitors while at the same time making it far easier to manage the entire platform.
Microsoft BI is already integrated with your entire Office suite and easily integrates with SharePoint, SQL, all Microsoft Products, as well as any third party software or data you use.,The latest versions of Microsoft BI has addressed nearly all of my complaints. The only remaining item would be the ability to uniformly color coordinate metrics across the entire reporting platform. Example, automatically Profit should be Green while Loss should be Red in any chart. Or Wisconsin should be Green and Minnesota should be Purple. This is VERY minor to me, but to some customers this can be a bigger deal.,10,The main front end for Microsoft BI is now Excel. The number one spreadsheet tool used in business that everyone already knows how to use. Now it is just a matter of showing a few new features and some best practices. That's a huge ROI gain right there.,,10Christopher WagnerMicrosoft BI2013-10-20T12:31:20.835ZGreat BI solution that is low cost.
Integrates very well with other Microsoft Office tools such as Excel so end users do not need extensive training on a new reporting tool.,No end user controlled reporting. An analyst with SQL coding knowledge needs to program each report.,Ability to maintain and develop dashboards with KPI's for fast delivery to decision makers across the organization.
Insight into overall departmental performance. Allowance for departments to set their own metrics for success.
Data insights for marketing and sales campaigns allow decision makers to fine tune future campaigns.,7,7Bryan SimmonsBuild a highly automated and flexible BI solution for your organization!2013-09-06T14:37:05.180ZAnalysis Services by far outperforms in-memory ROLAP type systems - this allows for very fast ad-hoc drill-down and discovery of huge data sets. Don't believe otherwise - I can assure you it is true. Of course, you have to know what you are doing on the data modeling side in order to get there.
Analysis Services's ability to integrate with Reporting Services and Microsoft Excel is extremely attractive to business users, especially analysts who are very familiar with the powerful analysis tools already in Excel. The performance of reports built on Analysis Services is really a stand-out feature as well.
Integration Services is hands-down the most flexible and powerful ETL tool you have ever used. Just try it - there is no one else even close. You will be able to pull data from anywhere, push data to anywhere, and build just about any workflow you can think of around those processes. It is also an all-around great automation tool for your BI environment.
Reporting Services has both a feature-rich developer-oriented authoring environment (Visual Studio / BI Development Studio) as well as a simplified end-user authoring tool (Report Builder). It has an enormous collection of visualization components built in, as well as an even bigger set of 3rd party controls to allow you to create just about any report you can imagine. The ability to extend Reporting Services with .Net code (if you have the developers) expands your options even further.,The report authoring solutions in Reporting Services could be better, especially on the Report Builder (end-user oriented) side.,Greatly reduced reporting project development time (and associated costs).
Significantly larger pool of experts to assist on large / ad-hoc projects.
Faster availability of critical business data to our users (due to decreased development time as well as performance of overall system - we are able to keep the data very fresh).
Significantly increased ETL / data integration capabilities means that more legacy and external system data is making it into the data warehouse.,10,10,Forcasting
Asset Management
Pricing
Sales Reporting
Customer Satisfaction Reporting
Detailed Account-level Cost and Revenue Reporting,,,Implemented in-house,10,Online training
Self-taught,9,I have been working with this BI stack since before the 2000 version (even though it didn't really get pulled together until the 2000 version). Because of this, I have been steadily picking up more exposure to and experience with the parts of the stack as they were introduced and evolved; and, I was in a position to be able to build solutions with the stack all along the way. Since that may not be your background with this tool, I would highly recommend getting some training before diving into a big project built with Microsoft BI. You will want training in: (1) a data modeling methodology for multi-dimensional data (i.e. Kimball method) so you can use Analysis Services, (2) Analysis Services itself, and (3) Integration Services. SQL Server and Reporting Services are a little easier for the average developer to pick up (in my experience). But if you can, get the whole end-to-end integrated training from Pragmatic Works and you'll be building complete solutions much more quickly than you expected.,No,10Sean BradyMS BI - Good and getting better2013-10-08T22:26:48.675ZIntegration is straightforward to a variety of platforms using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).
SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is fast, flexible and extensive.
Native integration with Excel & Sharepoint provide a rich and familiar user interface for adoption.,SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is not as extensive as it should or could be.
PerformancePoint has some great features such as the decomposition tree (for root cause analysis), but it is way too hard to deploy.,Low-cost customer reporting automatically deployed monthly to add incremental benefit to our core products.
Integrated reporting packs provided to Customer Account Managers to enable them to identify revenue opportunities in consultation with our customers.
Deep dive analytics available from an industry perspective which allows us to provide widely read industry trends and position the Company as a respected and informed thought leader.,10,8Aidan HendersonReview by a Microsoft BI consultant2014-06-02T21:47:19.294ZI work for Mariner LLC and they are Microsoft gold certified partners specialized in implementing data warehouse solutions in South East United States. We work with lot of clients in manufacturing, health care, automobile, energy and retail, implementing data warehouse and Business Intelligence solutions in Microsoft tools.,Low cost and easy to learn and use
Microsoft user community is very wide and its easy to identify resources to implement the solution in Microsoft technology
With the introduction of Self service (in-memory) platform - Office 365 (Powerpivot, Power view, Power maps and Power query) helps end users do their own ad-hoc reports using these easy to learn and implement tools
Parallel data warehouse (with polybase connector to connect to hadoop) will be a suitable replacement for expensive enterprise database tools like Teradata and Oracle,Power Pivot is a very good tool to do self service BI but there is no direct way to implement row based security to the model. There has to be a mechanism where the owner of the book can lock the model within the book to be read only or hide the model so that other users will only see the reports and not the underlying data model
Many to many functionality is simple in multi dimensional cubes but there is no direct and efficient way available in SSAS Tabular model and Power Pivot
Even though Power Pivot is a easy to use and fast to implement BI solution, without proper training, end users can't utilize all the functionality of Power Pivot and common mistakes and misunderstandings will be expensive in long run,9,Business users easily learned self service BI with training and what to do and what not to do with self service BI
Learning curve for Powerpivot and other office 365 tools for IT team who already knew about data warehousing concepts is steep,,10,Professional services company,Yes,Change management was minimal,Transitioning to a new tool - From SSRS reports (with sql server tables as source) to power view and power maps (using SSAS cubes),10,7,SSAS 2012 tabular cube got corrupted due to a power outage. Microsoft quickly jumped in to fix the problem (power outage happened when the cube was processsing) and gave a solution why it has corrupted,Integrating various data sources in power pivot
Data cleansing and data mashups in Power query
Easy visualizations in Power view,From an end user perspective, writing complex measures and debugging the errors in power pivot data refresh when excel source(with vlookups) is used,Yes,9Verified UserBest TCO but many layers to the overall solution2013-09-16T20:03:06.108ZWe are using Power BI in our organization for dashboards, for exposing flaws in our data, and for telling presentation ready stories about our firm's sales and profitability.,Microsoft's BI stack is a set of widely implemented products used in various capacities including operational reporting, ETL, and self service BI. This product stack has been successfully implemented in a wide range of verticals including health care, insurance, and banking.
Power BI is an agile and low cost solution to an organization's analytics needs. Power BI is tightly coupled with other Microsoft products, enabling companies to have a single firm wide solution with a single vendor.,If you want a straight forward and simple BI solution, there are better products for this. To take full advantage of Microsoft BI, you also need SharePoint, SQL Server, and Microsoft Excel/Office. Other software vendors offer BI solutions that consist of only a single software product, but if you are looking only to create fancy dashboards, this is not for you. This is a longer term strategic solution. Features are a bit slim now in Power BI, but expect that to change in future releases.,10,Tableau Desktop,9,Microsoft offers a wide variety of editions, features, and licensing scenarios for any number of users in any size organization.,9,10,7,No,Price
Vendor Reputation
Existing Relationship with the Vendor,Involving your CIO in the selection process is important.Verified UserMS BI Suite Review2013-10-24T17:18:43.576ZSQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is by far the best OLAP tool on the market today. It helps businesses to aggregate data and analyze historical trends.,SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) has a relatively difficult deployment mechanism. More mature ETL systems like Informatica have a right-click and deploy packages feature. SSIS does not have that out-of-the-box unless you install some 3rd party tools. Also the whole Deployment Manifest thing is a real pain…,Microsoft BI tools come free with SQL Server license. If you have SQL Server license you get the SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) tools for free.,9,9Verified User
Unspecified
Microsoft BI
677 Ratings
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