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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

View all 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
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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 7.9

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

(51-64 of 64)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Chris Utter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

Neudesic 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

  1. SQL Server for data management, including ETL (Integration Services), storage (SQL Server RDBMS engine) and a business semantic model (Analysis Services)
  2. Office 2013 and higher, specifically Excel 2013, for data presentation, management and analytics
  3. PowerBI Developer for data presentation
  4. PowerBI for Office 365 provides a nice open security repository for Excel and Power BI data views.
  5. SharePoint 2013, as a shared portal platform, using included Reporting and Analytics site templates.
  6. SharePoint includes PerformancePoint, which is a very useful data analysis tool for Analysis Services cubes.
Steve Wake | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Lee Cullom | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Northcraft 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 Analysis

Northcraft Analytics helps our customer base leverage their existing technology investments to analyze and improve IT performance.

Jerome Lambert, PhD | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Microsoft 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!
Sean Warren | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We 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.
Julia Gusman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We 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?
September 19, 2014

Microsoft BI

Michał Becker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Microsoft 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.
Mashhood Syed | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
The 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...
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Microsoft 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.
Scott Lerner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Microsoft 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I 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.
Christopher Wagner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
We 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.
Nathan Patrick Taylor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We 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.
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