Review by a Microsoft BI consultant
June 02, 2014
Review by a Microsoft BI consultant
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft BI
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.
- 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
- 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
Microsoft BI Implementation
- Professional services company
Mariner LLC
Yes - There are 2 phases implemented
Its based on subject area and the requirement of the business users
Its based on subject area and the requirement of the business users
Change management was minimal - The Organization had an agreement for a common vision to implement Business Intelligence to have more insights to data. Leadership team is in favor of the change and they are very much interested in implementing Business Intelligence
- Transitioning to a new tool - From SSRS reports (with sql server tables as source) to power view and power maps (using SSAS cubes)
Microsoft BI Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
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
Using Microsoft BI
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- 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 - Sharepoint 2013 (PPS, SSRS from 2012 onwards - integrated mode, excel services) works very good