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Microsoft BI (MSBI)

Microsoft BI (MSBI)

Overview

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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Recent Reviews

Casual User’s POC

8 out of 10
February 08, 2020
Incentivized
Microsoft BI is being used for report generation to monitor ongoing technology projects and business initiatives. We have two users who …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 30 features
  • Report sharing and collaboration (49)
    8.9
    89%
  • Report Formatting Templates (47)
    8.9
    89%
  • Formatting capabilities (49)
    8.0
    80%
  • Customizable dashboards (49)
    8.0
    80%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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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
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

8.6
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8.7
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.9
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

8.9
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

8.9
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

8.5
Avg 8.0

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding

APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another

8.8
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

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.

Microsoft BI (MSBI) Competitors

Microsoft BI (MSBI) Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(937)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-2 of 2)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Jacob Saunders | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • The 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.
n.a.
I've been implementing Microsoft, and other, BI tools for many years and will continue to drive adoption of this platform in my client base as it matures. My firm also uses the platform internally for all our operational and analytical systems.
  • Traditional "canned" reporting.
  • Online transaction processing systems.
  • Data warehousing.
  • High availability.
  • Self-service analytics.
  • Collaborative decision making.
n.a.
  • Implemented in-house
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.
  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
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
Premium support is available to us at no cost.
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.
Sean Brady | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Analysis 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.
It is the best fit BI solution for a Microsoft shop - nobody else is even close on integration capabilities, feature set, and price at this point.
Although it is technically a different product, you can build a really nice self-service intranet reporting solution by integrating Reporting Services into Microsoft SharePoint (Enterprise). I would highly recommend going in that direction if you are looking to deploy this stack.
Also, remember that Excel is your friend! No, it should never be used to store data, but it is an amazingly flexible and powerful analysis and reporting tool - especially when combined with Power Pivot and SharePoint.
  • Forcasting
  • Asset Management
  • Pricing
  • Sales Reporting
  • Customer Satisfaction Reporting
  • Detailed Account-level Cost and Revenue Reporting
We were using a custom, in-house developed (ASP.Net) portal and reporting system, with a little bit of Crystal Reports and Microstrategy in there.
Microstrategy - I went with Microsoft BI because of features, usability, integration capabilities, performance, availability of talent, cost, and end-user (self-service) capabilities.
  • Implemented in-house
N/A
You need to have (1) a very solid SQL Server DBA and (2) a Windows Server administrator with domain administrator rights to get the BI stack set up correctly. As most Windows systems people will tell you, a lot of good comes out of doing some security planning on the domain side (users, groups, roles, etc.) before you start the implementation. This is a big integrated system, and getting it set up right is half the battle.
On the development side, you will want to have a full time data architect making sure that the model you are developing holds together and supports the reporting requirements of the business. You will also want a technical lead who has rich experience with the stack - that person will be able to shepherd the rest of the development team and help them come up to speed with the tools.
  • Online training
  • Self-taught
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.
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
I have not needed to reach out to Microsoft for support on the BI stack; the community expertise is very deep and readily available.
I am basing this rating not on Microsoft's paid premium support, but rather on the resources available (both from Microsoft and 3rd parties) to BI consumers. There is such a huge community working with and building solutions with the Microsoft BI stack (SQL Server) that I have always been able to find a solution (or at least a workaround) to any problems that have come up.
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