Microsoft BI - Good choice for departmental deployments and limited budget
April 09, 2018

Microsoft BI - Good choice for departmental deployments and limited budget

Gonzalo Angeleri | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft BI

Microsoft BI is being used as part of a departmental implementation, especially for self-service capabilities. We build our solutions using different Microsoft BI components or tools such as Reporting Services, Integration Services, and Power BI Report Server.
  • Self Service Capabilities
  • Easy to use
  • Integration with MS Office
  • Data Quality Capabilities
  • Performance issues in Power BI with some source systems
  • Data Governance features
Microsoft BI is mainly based on Microsoft SQL Server, so it is perfectly integrated. Many of the Microsoft BI components require using SQL Server as the database engine. Generally, the functionalities that are achieved when using SQL Server as a database engine are greater than when using any other engine.
Well suited for:
- Customers with a Microsoft landscape who use MS Office or Office 365, SQL Server and Active Directory a lot.
- Departmental deployments.
- Self-Service Capabilities
- Small Budgets
- Mobile Capabilities

Some issues with:
- non-Microsoft environments
- Complex data sources like SAP.
- Complex calculations in Power BI

Microsoft BI (MSBI) Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
7
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
7
Drill-down analysis
7
Formatting capabilities
7
Integration with R or other statistical packages
7
Report sharing and collaboration
7
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
Not Rated
Delivery to Remote Servers
Not Rated
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
8
Predictive Analytics
7
Multi-User Support (named login)
7
Role-Based Security Model
7
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
Not Rated
Single Sign-On (SSO)
8
Responsive Design for Web Access
8
Mobile Application
8
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
7
REST API
Not Rated
Javascript API
Not Rated
iFrames
Not Rated
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated